There’s a creepy guy on the other end at Google!: engaging middle school students in a drawing activity to elicit their mental models of Google

Although youth are increasingly going online to fulfill their needs for information, many youth struggle with information and digital literacy skills, such as the abilities to conduct a search and assess the credibility of online information. Ideally, these skills encompass an accurate and comprehensive understanding of the ways in which a system, such as a Web search engine, functions. In order to investigate youths’ conceptions of the Google search engine, a drawing activity was conducted with 26 HackHealth after-school program participants to elicit their mental models of Google. The findings revealed that many participants personified Google and emphasized anthropomorphic elements, computing equipment, and/or connections (such as cables, satellites and antennas) in their drawings. Far fewer participants focused their drawings on the actual Google interface or on computer code. Overall, their drawings suggest a limited understanding of Google and the ways in which it actually works. However, an understanding of youths’ conceptions of Google can enable educators to better tailor their digital literacy instruction efforts and can inform search engine developers and search engine interface designers in making the inner workings of the engine more transparent and their output more trustworthy to young users. With a better understanding of how Google works, young users will be better able to construct effective queries, assess search results, and ultimately find relevant and trustworthy information that will be of use to them.     

Exploring indicators of engagement in online learning as applied to adolescent health prevention: a pilot study of REAL media

Educational technology research and development - Engagement is central to the effectiveness of online health messages and the related educational programs that aim to deliver these messages to the...     

The influence of mentoring on the academic trajectory of a 17-year-old Black male college sophomore from the United Kingdom: a single case study

There has been a national- and state-level call for colleges and universities to develop targeted mentoring programs for Black males. However, there is limited published scholarship that has investigated the experiences of non-U.S.-born Black males in these college mentoring programs generally, and at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) specifically. Thus, the purpose of this qualitative study is to examine the experiences of a 17-year-old Black male college sophomore from the United Kingdom who enrolled in a HBCU male-focused mentoring program. Findings reveal that he benefited from pre-college mentoring as he developed strategies to respond to racist encounters during his K–12 schooling in the United Kingdom. In the university mentoring program, he benefited most from one-on-one mentoring opportunities with university officials. Implications for universities and future research are discussed.     

Creating contextually authentic science in a “low‐performing” urban elementary school

This article reports on a 2½‐year collaborate project to reform the teaching and learning of science in the context of Mae Jemison Elementary, the lowest performing elementary school in the state of Louisiana. I outline a taxonomy of authentic science inquiry experiences and then use the resulting framework to focus on how project participants interpreted and enacted ideas about collaboration and authenticity. The resulting contextually authentic science inquiry model links the strengths of a canonically authentic model of science inquiry (grounded in the Western scientific canon) with the strengths of a youth‐centered model of authenticity (grounded in student‐generated inquiry), thus bringing together relevant content standards and topics with critical social relevance. I address the question of how such enactments may or may not promote doing science together and consider the implications of this model for urban science education. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 43: 695–721, 2006     

A developmental review of response time data that support a cognitive components model of reading

The present article provides a review of numerous studies that measured response times for cognitive tasks related to six components of the reading process. The component processes were single-letter recognition, multi-letter unit identification, word and pseudoword identification, semantic access/concept activation, phrase and sentence comprehension, and text comprehension. The response time data are presented in tables and summarized in the text. The data provide support for a componential view of reading.     

Youth Voice,Civic Engagement and Failure in Participatory Action Research

In this article, we tell the story of a changing urban landscape through the eyes of the youth we work with in an ongoing after-school program and community-based research project rooted in Photovoice methodology. In particular, we focus on the work that, over the 6 years of our time with youth, has “ended up on the cutting room floor” (Paris and Winn (eds) Humanizing research: decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, 2014, p. xix). This attention to the work that has fallen through the cracks is a move to engage the central tenets of Humanizing Research, but it’s also a call to think critically with and through the failures that emerge in work with youth. We attend specifically to an ongoing failure in our work as a way to think about the kinds of promises that are often made and broken in participatory action research. In doing so, we tease out the implications of our work with youth and the steps community-based researchers can take to navigate the challenges that can impede the goals of fostering meaningful change.     

An empirical analysis of teacher spillover effects in secondary school

This paper examines whether educational production in secondary school involves joint production among teachers across subjects. In doing so, it also provides insights into the reliability of value-added modeling. Teacher value-added to reading test scores is estimated for four different teacher types: English, math, science and social-studies. The initial results indicate that reading output is jointly produced by math and English teachers. However, while falsification tests confirm the English-teacher effects, they cast some doubt about whether the math-teacher effects are free from sorting bias. The results offer a mixed review of the value-added methodology, suggesting that it can be useful but should be implemented cautiously.     

Curriculum design for inquiry: Preservice elementary teachers' mobilization and adaptation of science curriculum materials

Curriculum materials are crucial tools with which teachers engage students in science as inquiry. In order to use curriculum materials effectively, however, teachers must develop a robust capacity for pedagogical design, or the ability to mobilize a variety of personal and curricular resources to promote student learning. The purpose of this study was to develop a better understanding of the ways in which preservice elementary teachers mobilize and adapt existing science curriculum materials to plan inquiry‐oriented science lessons. Using quantitative methods, we investigated preservice teachers' curriculum design decision‐making and how their decisions influenced the inquiry orientations of their planned science lessons. Findings indicate that preservice elementary teachers were able to accurately assess how inquiry‐based existing curriculum materials are and to adapt them to make them more inquiry‐based. However, the inquiry orientations of their planned lessons were in large part determined by how inquiry‐oriented curriculum materials they used to plan their lessons were to begin with. These findings have important implications for the design of teacher education experiences that foster preservice elementary teachers' pedagogical design capacities for inquiry, as well as the development of inquiry‐based science curriculum materials that support preservice and beginning elementary teachers to engage in effective science teaching practice. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47:820–839, 2010