From Opposition to Engagement: Lessons from High Achieving African American Students

Influential research on African American students has examined their school failure in terms of students’ opposition to school achievement. Only a few studies have explored school engagement and success among these students, and even fewer have examined the experiences of high achieving black students. This study illustrates the school context and school processes that high achieving African American students identify as contributing to their academic success. The findings reveal three main school effects impacting the students’ performance: 1) teacher practices, engaging pedagogy versus disengaging pedagogy; 2) participation in extracurricular activities and; 3) the state scholarship as performance incentive. According to the students, teacher practices were the most instrumental school effect benefiting their outcomes. Recognizing the processes that promote high achievement among African American students can help to improve our understanding of student performance, while promoting success among these students. The author wishes to thank Ron DePeter and Tekla Johnson for their comments on a previous draft of this article     

Journal Writing and Learning: Reading between the structural,holistic, and post-structural lines

This paper explores the use of journal writing for providing adults with the opportunity of reflecting on their learning. The article examines the author's own experiences teaching students on an undergraduate part-time degree evening course where journal writing was an important component. Three understandings of journal writing are compared using examples from students' journal entries. They are characterised as structural, holistic, and post-structural positions, respectively. Structural approaches to journal writing claim benefits in enabling the learner to manage her/his own subjectivity with a view to finding an “objective truth”. An holistic approach, while “useful”, attempts to synthesise multiple ways of knowing and presents a false sense of completion and inclusion. The post-structural view positions the learner intertextually in a processual learning context where the text the student writes is driven by other discourses. Here, the student/journal writer is constituted by discourse but not necessarily determined by it because the strategies of reflexivity and deconstruction are available. This last position draws on the sociology of interpretative biography and narrative theory. The implications for assessment and the ethical dimensions of privacy and disclosure of student journals are examined also.     

Measuring The Business Impact of E‐Learning: An Empirical Study

This study fills a gap in the current HRD literature of return on investment (ROI) analysis of technology‐based learning interventions. Using a Type IV control group method as defined by Wang (2002), the study empirically analyzed and measured the learning effectiveness and the business impact of an e‐learning system implemented in General Electric Company. The e‐learning system under study demonstrated significant economic returns in regard to reduced learning response time and reduced project cycle time. The study shows that e‐learning, as a means of technology‐based HRD intervention, can be highly effective as a performance support learning mechanism, although the results also suggest that e‐learning alone is not sufficient to replace the traditional face‐to‐face learning platforms.     

Control Group Methods for HPT Program Evaluation and Measurement

This research contributes to the methodologies in HPT program evaluation and measurement that are fairly lacking to date. First, a theoretical foundation for a control group is established based on a brief review of control group applications in various fields. Then, four types of control groups applicable to HPT program evaluation and measurement are defined and classified, and threats to internal and external validity in control group applications are explored. Lastly, four evaluation and measurement scenarios are presented for an E‐learning program to demonstrate the applicability of the control group methods for HPT program evaluation and ROI measurement.