An Investigation of High-Achieving African-American Students Attending Community Colleges: A Mixed Methods Research Study

While much more research has been conducted about African-American college students in recent decades, there still exists a need for further explorations concerning factors related to student success and retention. For example, articles often explore the experiences of African-American students at four-year institutions and often use deficit frameworks instead of focusing on the experiences of successful students. To add to what is known, this article summarizes the findings of a multi-institutional mixed methods research study that explored the experiences of high-achieving African-American students attending community colleges. Specifically, the researchers explored noncognitive factors that influenced high academic achievement—defined as grade point average (GPA) higher than 3.00, why students considered leaving an institution, and why students decided to remain enrolled. Findings suggested that studying alone promoted a high cumulative GPA and increased the likelihood students never seriously considered leaving their institution. Studying alone, family relationships, hours spent studying with family, engaged and supportive faculty, financial aid, and the strive to succeed also promoted persistence. Relating to sex differences, student organizational involvement appeared to be more important for male persistence than female persistence at a significant level. The article closes with implications for future research and practice.     

The Influence of Teacher Expectations about Twice-Exceptional Students on the Use of High Quality Gifted Curriculum: A Case Study Approach

Twice-exceptional students show evidence of high academic performance or potential and also have a disability that impedes their ability to learn. Twice-exceptional students remain under-represented in gifted programs, and some researchers attribute such under-representation to the negative beliefs and low expectations about twice-exceptional students held by teachers. While researchers have begun to investigate the curricular models and instructional strategies that are effective for twice-exceptional students, little research addresses how teacher beliefs and expectations about student ability are reflected in the ways teachers implement such models and strategies for twice-exceptional students in gifted classrooms. Even less research addresses gifted students with emotional and behavioral disabilities. We used a case study of a third-grade teacher using a structured, model-based language arts curriculum to better understand how her expectations about a gifted student with an emotional disability influenced her instructional choices. Using observational and interview data, the case study approach allowed the researchers to personalize the experiences of this teacher and provided a context in which to examine the subtleties of teacher expectations when teaching a gifted student with an emotional disability. Implications for educational practice, particularly the need for comprehensive school-based support systems for students with emotional disabilities, are discussed.     

Infants' Forgetting of Correlated Attributes and Object Recognition

Infants as young as 3 months of age can encode the relations among object features. Because object recognition depends critically upon a match between perceived feature configurations and representations of the object in long-term memory, the present experiments focused on infants' long-term memory for feature correlations. In 3 experiments with 72 3-month-olds, we documented the forgetting functions of different feature correlations, examined their relation to infants' memory for individual features, and replicated the findings with different stimuli. Infants were trained to activate a mobile composed of two kinds of blocks that differed in color, the figures displayed on them, and the figures' colors and were tested after different delays with recombinations of either the block colors, the figures, or the figure colors. Infants remembered some of the original feature combinations for up to 3 days but forgot all of them after 4 days. Even after 4 days, however, infants remembered the individual features that had entered into the original combinations. These results demonstrate that very young infants not only encode the relations among object features but also remember them for several days. Moreover, there is a dissociation in memory between features and feature relations: Feature relations are forgotten sooner than the individual features that comprise those relations.     

From Data Collectors to Data Producers: Shifting Students’ Relationship to Data

This paper contributes a theoretical framework informed by historical, philosophical and ethnographic studies of science practice to argue that data should be considered to be actively produced, rather than passively collected. We further argue that traditional school science laboratory investigations misconstrue the nature of data and overly constrain student agency in their production. We use our “Data Production” framework to analyze activity of and interviews with high school students who created data using sensors and software in a ninth-grade integrated science class. To understand the opportunities for students to develop act with and perceive agency in data production, we analyze in detail the case of one student as she came to use unfamiliar technologies to produce data for her own personally relevant purposes. We find that her purposes for producing data emerged as she worked, and that resistances to her purposes were opportunities to act with and perceive her own agency, and to see data in new ways. We discuss implications for designing science learning experiences in which students act as agents in producing and using data.     

Engaging young students in scientific investigations: prompting for meaningful reflection

This study examined the verbal prompts a tutor used to promote reflection and young students’ responses to these prompts. Seven children (ages 8–12) participated in 260 min of one-on-one tutoring to learn scientific concepts related to gear movement; the tutor spontaneously provided these students with 763 prompts for reflection. Prompts reliably induced reflection: Students responded verbally 87% of the time. Turn-by-turn discourse analysis revealed seven distinct types of prompts and 11 distinct types of verbal responses. High-level prompts were strongly associated with high-level responses. A log-multiplicative association model with two dimensions (temporality and certainty) represented the relationships between prompt and response types; from this model, odds ratios estimated the strength of association between specific pairs of prompt and response types. Findings are discussed in terms of the effects that reflection may have on students’ developing understanding of scientific concepts.     

Cultivating critical thinkers: Exploring transfer of learning from pre-service teacher training to classroom practice

This study explores the transfer of critical thinking skills and dispositions from pre-service teacher training to classroom practice and student achievement in the cases of two graduates from a course on critical thinking-integrated instruction. Two 7th and two 8th grade classes were randomly assigned as experimental (CT-integrated instruction), or comparison (traditional instruction) groups. Empirical results demonstrated that, in these two cases, the teachers successfully developed CT-integrated instruction for effectively fostering students' CT skills and dispositions, while improving student achievement. Future research should include larger and more representative samples to avoid bias and reliably evaluate CT-based teacher training initiatives.     

English phonological awareness in bilinguals: a cross‐linguistic study of Tamil,Malay and Chinese English‐language learners

To test the lexical restructuring hypothesis among bilingual English‐language learners, English phonological awareness (PA), English vocabulary and ethnic language vocabulary (Mandarin Chinese, Malay or Tamil) were assessed among 284 kindergarteners (168 Chinese, 71 Malays and 45 Tamils) in Singapore. A multi‐level regression analysis showed that English vocabulary, in interaction with mother's education, statistically significantly predicted Singaporean children's PA; ethnic language vocabulary did not. Thus, the present study supports the lexical restructuring hypothesis that growth in vocabulary changes how lexical items are stored, leading to the development of PA. Home language practices, as represented by mother's education, may also enhance children's PA after a threshold of English vocabulary is reached. In addition, specific ethnic language (Chinese, Malay or Tamil) was a statistically significant predictor of PA, suggesting that orthographic depth as well as syllabic complexity of a bilingual's other language may influence their development of English PA.