A tale of two students: Building a culture of engagement in the community college

Enrolling in a community college may be as intimidating for those students who eventually succeed as it is for those who don't. Why, then, do some persevere while others leave before they meet their goals? Institutional practice can tip the balance.     

Children in carts: digital rhetorics of Christian commission and capital

Compassion International is a prominent Christian humanitarian organization. Working primarily via a digital platform, Compassion International aims to connect financially stable sponsors with impoverished global children. This essay deals with Compassion International’s online sponsorship platform as an illustrative case study of a neoliberal media ecology and the digital, humanitarian, visual, and Christian rhetorics therein. Compassion International’s sponsorship platform presents a triad of appeals that (re)imagine would-be sponsors as digital missionaries fulfilling God’s commission, as stand-in family members, and, ultimately, as consumers. Compassion International’s sponsorship model is digitally rendered via a marketplace platform in which children are placed into virtual shopping carts. Both children and Christian users are, this essay concludes, coopted by a digital rhetoric of capital.     

The Family Environment of “Quick-Witted” Persons: Birth Order,Family Communication Patterns,and Creative Facility

“Creative facility” refers to the ease, rapidity, or fluency with which people are able to formulate and produce novel, appropriate messages. Previous research indicates that people differ in this regard and that the phenomenon is linked to various personality and cognitive-style variables. This study aims to investigate whether aspects of family structure (i.e., birth order) and family processes (i.e., family communication patterns) are related to creative facility. Results indicated a significant interaction between birth order and family conversation orientation such that, for first-borns, higher levels of conversation orientation were associated with slower message production. No effects were observed for family conformity orientation. Among the implications of the findings is the need to assess birth order in studies of family communication patterns.     

Multiple dimensions of teacher identity development from pre-service to early years of teaching: a longitudinal study

Based on dialogical self theory framework that highlights three dimensions of identity construction (multiplicity vs. unity; social vs. individual; discontinuity vs. continuity), this study explored multiple aspects of teacher identity development over time, in relation to the unity of self, the way the social environment is negotiated, and the shifting or continuing pattern over time. The study employed a qualitative, longitudinal study design that followed five pre-service teachers for four years, including three waves of interviews. Variations of each participant’s journey to develop their teacher identity over time are described. Implications relevant to researchers, teacher educators, and pre-service and beginning teachers are discussed.     

The impact of high-stakes testing on student proficiency in low-stakes subjects: Evidence from Florida's elementary science exam

An important criticism of high-stakes testing policies – policies that reward or sanction schools based on their students’ performance on standardized tests – is that they provide schools with an incentive to focus on those subjects that play a role in the accountability system while decreasing attention to those subjects that are not part of the program. This paper utilizes a regression discontinuity design to evaluate the impact of Florida's high-stakes testing policy on student proficiency in the low-stakes subject of science. We confirm prior results that students in schools facing more immediate sanctions under the policy made substantial gains in the high-stakes subjects of math and reading. Contrary to the crowding-out hypothesis, we find that students in these schools made substantial achievement gains in the low-stakes subject of science as well.