Effects of extracurricular activities on postsecondary completion for students with disabilities

The authors focused on participation in extracurricular activities as a way of improving the educational outcomes of children with disabilities. Regarding students in the general population, adolescent involvement in extracurricular activities has been shown to have a positive association with school involvement and adolescent self-esteem, academic achievement, and adolescent development. Using the Educational Longitudinal Study dataset, the authors conducted logistic regression analyses to examine the relationship between participation in high school–sponsored extracurricular activities and postsecondary degree completion for students with disabilities. Findings show a statistically significant association between postsecondary degree completion for students with disabilities and extracurricular activity participation, including extent and type of extracurricular activity. Students with disabilities who participate in high school extracurricular activities may have increased likelihood of completing a postsecondary degree. Implications for policy, practice, and future research are discussed.     

Associations of Home and Classroom Environments with Head Start Children's Code-Related and Oral Language Skills

This study used data from the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) 2009 4-year-old cohort to examine associations among family characteristics, home and classroom environments, and the emergent literacy skills of Head Start children. Results from hierarchical linear models suggest that both family and classroom contexts play a unique and interactive role in supporting Head Start children's development of different sets of emergent literacy skills. Parental warmth was positively related to children's oral language skills (i.e., receptive and expressive vocabulary knowledge), and teachers' educational level and the quality of instructional support in the classroom were significantly associated with children's code-related skills (i.e., letter-name and letter-sound knowledge). Further, high-quality instructional support in the classroom buffered the negative influence of low maternal education on children's oral language skills. Interventions focusing on enhancing the quality of parent-child interactions, in addition to professional development for teachers designed to improve the quality of instructional support, may contribute to promoting the development of emergent literacy skills of young children from low-income families.     

Introduction to the Special Issue on Perspectivesand Experiences on Mentoring Undergraduate Students in Research: Part II

Abstract

This issue is the second of a special PRIMUS two-part issue collecting articles on undergraduate research from experienced faculty mentors. We offer it as a valuable resource for faculty leading undergraduate research programs. This issue presents a collection of papers offering advice on a variety of specific topics important for leaders of undergraduate research programs. Issues of finding and designing appropriate and accessible research projects, assessing undergraduate research, and publicizing it in the media are addressed.     

Battle-outcome-prediction conditions for variable-coefficient Lanchester-type equations for area fire2

New important battle-outcome-prediction conditions are developed for combat between two homogeneous military forces modelled by variable-coefficient Lanchester-type equations for area fire. Such conditions are very significant in modern operations research for developing important insights into the dynamics of combat. However, similar differential-equation models do arise in other fields of science and technology such as mathematical ecology and epidemiology, and consequently our new mathematical results may also find application there. These new important “simple approximate” battle-outcome-prediction conditions depend on not only the combat-attrition model but also the battle-termination model, and they are developed for two different types of battle-termination conditions (fixed-force-level-breakpoint battles and fixed-force-ratio-breakpoint battles). They are sufficient (but not necessary) to determine the outcome of battle without having to explicitly compute the force-level trajectories, and a generalization of Lanchester’s famous linear law to variable-coefficient combat is involved in their development. Certain integrability properties of the Lanchester attrition-rate coefficients figure prominently in these results, and an important physical interpretation (relating to logistics considerations) is given for these properties.     

Nature, not books: scientists and the origins of the nature-study movement in the 1890s

Scientists played a key role in the first systematic introduction of nature study into North American public schools in the late nineteenth century. The initiatives of Wilbur Jackman and John Merle Coulter, affiliated with the young University of Chicago, and Liberty Hyde Bailey and Anna Botsford Comstock, at Cornell University, coincided with the "new education" reform movement that found object lessons and experience-based education superior to textbook teaching. Educational psychologists and philosophers of the 1890s, including G. Stanley Hall, related curriculum methods to perceived developmental stages in children, with a focus on immediate experience. Putting these pedagogical ideas--gained in summer institutes, normal schools, and programs at Chicago and Cornell--into practice were administrators and classroom teachers in both urban and rural classrooms. By 1900, a consensus about the value of nature study among scientists, community leaders, and teachers established it as the recognized general method of studying the natural world in public schools across much of the United States.     

Changing leadership: Teachers lead the way for schools that learn

This paper presents findings from a three-year, qualitative study of teachers enrolled in a Masters of Teacher Leadership program. Researchers sought to understand the ways teachers’ beliefs about and understandings of teacher leadership were affected by their participation in a formal teacher leadership program, as well as the kinds of actions they took up as a result of this participation. Data indicate three significant ways participants’ work as teacher leaders was developed and enhanced, including: (a) identifying and amplifying their professional voice, (b) deepening and extending their voice as they plan, and (c) reframing their work/shift responsibility through constructing widening circles of influence and impact. Authors identify implications of their research for growing teacher leaders, school improvement and change, changing school culture, enhancing student engagement, and building new structures.     

Advancing Diversity in STEM

Although progress has been made, greater efforts are needed to promote faculty diversity at the college and university levels, especially in STEM fields. Thus, it is important to elucidate best practices both for increasing awareness of diversity issues pertaining to higher education and for implementing change. This article focuses on the outcomes of a diversity workshop for college and university faculty hosted by the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission, Division of Science and Research. More specifically, it elucidates how participation in the workshop translated into practice at the faculty participants’ home institutions.     

‘Hope in failure’: A Level students,discursive agency,post-feminism and feminism

This article begins with Pollock’s comment that Judith Butler ‘finds hope in failure’ and its aim is to explore what ‘hope in failure’ means in relation to A Level students’ engagements with post-feminism and feminism. The article grounds its argument in an exploration of how post-feminism and feminism intersect with sixth form students’ subjectivities through the educational practices of their second-year A Level subject-based research. The article analyses empirical instances of students’ discursive agency through Butler’s notions of performativity, citationality, excessive signification and resignification to consider the complex, multiple and creative ways in which sixth form students produce themselves as viable gendered subjects in relation to post-feminist and feminist discourses. The analysis considers both how discourse regulates and conditions students’ relations with post-feminism and feminism and how discourse contains the possibilities for the subject to refuse the refusal of feminism in popular culture. Through its analysis of how students use their discursive agency to claim a feminist identity, and how these uses constitute transgressive practices, the article explores the political significance of identifications with feminism in doing gender differently. It ends with an argument for the re-consideration of the apparently assured popular cultural ‘failure’ of feminism in post-feminist neoliberal times.