Understanding what is possible across a career: professional identity development beyond transition to teaching

Professional identity surfaces repeatedly as an important underlying factor in teacher development. A sequential explanatory mixed methods design was used to investigate identity development in terms of teachers’ expected and feared possible selves. Teachers (n = 120) representing three career groups (prospect, new, and experienced) participated. The findings reveal differences in possible selves which are detectable based on career group. New teachers exhibited a greater focus on task self-concepts; prospective teachers expressed both task and quality possible selves; and experienced teachers expressed identities more concerned about the quality-focused ones. Our findings also reveal a potential transition path in professional identity development.     

A Bridge to Graduation for At-Risk Latino Males: A Case Study

Changing demographics, low Latino graduation rates, and changes to education funding—nationally and locally—challenge society to develop innovative strategies to navigate transformations affecting public education. This article presents findings from a collaborative community-engaged evaluation of a dropout prevention program for at-risk male Latino students. Our mixed-methods evaluation finds that the program has had a positive overall impact on its participants. In particular, program participation was associated with an overall rise in grade point averages, fewer failing grades, and a higher probability of graduation, compared to nonparticipants. With respect to behavioral changes, attendance was not improved over the period of program involvement; however, the number of behavioral referrals decreased dramatically. In addition, students and staff members reported that the program enhanced the students’ academic and career attitudes and aspirations. This work reveals the value of innovative programs and targeted interventions outside the classroom for at-risk students.     

The Challenges of Defining and Measuring Student Engagement in Science

Engagement is one of the hottest research topics in the field of educational psychology. Research shows that multifarious benefits occur when students are engaged in their own learning, including increased motivation and achievement. However, there is little agreement on a concrete definition and effective measurement of engagement. This special issue serves to discuss and work toward addressing conceptual and instrumentation issues related to engagement, with particular interest in engagement in the domain of science learning. We start by describing the dimensional perspective of engagement (behavioral, cognitive, emotional, agentic) and suggest a complementary approach that places engagement instrumentation on a continuum. Specifically, we recommend that instrumentation be considered on a “grain-size” continuum that ranges from a person-centered to a context-centered orientation to clarify measurement issues. We then provide a synopsis of the articles included in this special issue and conclude with suggestions for future research.     

Development and validation of a method to directly measure the cable force during the hammer throw

The development of cable force during hammer-throw turns is crucial to the throw distance. In this paper, we present a method that is capable of measuring cable force in real time and, as it does not interfere with technique, it is capable of providing immediate feedback to coaches and athletes during training. A strain gauge was mounted on the wires of three hammers to measure the tension in the wire and an elite male hammer thrower executed three throws with each hammer. The output from the gauges was recorded by a data logger positioned on the lower back of the thrower. The throws were captured by three high-speed video cameras and the three-dimensional position of the hammer's head was determined by digitizing the images manually. The five best throws were analysed. The force acting on the hammer's head was calculated from Newton's second law of motion and this was compared with the force measured via the strain gauge. Qualitatively the time dependence of the two forces was essentially the same, although the measured force showed more detail in the troughs of the force-time curves. Quantitatively the average difference between the measured and calculated forces over the five throws was 76 N, which corresponds to a difference of 3.8% for a cable force of 2000 N.     

Promoting attitude change and expressed willingness to take action toward climate change in college students

This study examined the relationship among cognitive and motivational variables impacting college students’ willingness to take mitigative action to reduce the impacts of human-induced climate change. One hundred and forty college students were asked to read a persuasive text about human-induced climate change and were pre and post tested on their attitudes about climate change and their willingness to take action to mitigate its effects. Students showed statistically significant changes in their attitudes about climate change and their willingness to commit to take action. A path model demonstrated that openness to change and a willingness to think deeply about issues predicted both change in attitudes and expressed willingness to take action. This research demonstrates that a persuasive text has the potential to promote change around complex socio-scientific issues.     

Make room for hip-hop: mass-print mediation of ‘baggy’ basketball shorts, 1990–1994

In the early 1990s, a fashion trend swept the American basketball sphere: long, looser-fitting, ‘baggy’ shorts replaced the tight uniform bottoms that had been normative throughout the game’s history. This article addresses cultural representation of the newly baggy shorts, with a focus on news media commentators’ discursive framing of the trend’s expression at the college and professional levels. When approached as a cultural text, these shorts are revealed to be a nexus at which discourses around race, class, gender and generation took place. Commentators largely avoided explicit references to race, instead organizing criticisms through a focus on the ‘style’ they deemed lacking in the disorder of bagginess. However, the introduction of this aesthetic by predominantly black players, combined with the roots of bagginess in hip-hop culture, indicate that such discourse carried regulatory ideologies on urban, working-class blackness and the implications of its mass cultural appropriation.     

Cooperative teaching project: a model for students at risk

This article describes an innovative teaching model designed to impact students at risk with the cooperative efforts of regular and special education in Grades K-3. Evaluation outcomes are presented that show the model has a positive effect on individual student performance, total building progress as measured by curriculum based measurement, special education referrals, and attitudes of participating teachers.