Using State Assessments for Predicting Student Success in Dual‐Enrollment College Classes

Scores on state standards‐based assessments are readily available and may be an appropriate alternative to traditional placement tests for assigning or accepting students into particular courses. Many community colleges do not require test scores for admissions purposes but do require some kind of placement scores for first‐year English and math courses. In this study, we examine the efficacy of using the reading and math portions of the Kansas State Assessment (KSA) for predicting the success of high school students taking College Algebra and College English I at a Kansas community college. Results showed that in this sample KSA scores predicted as well or better than more traditional placement tests and with no extra cost to the institution.     

Rethinking a Curricular Icon: The Institutional and Ideological Foundations of Walter Lippmann

This essay explores the use of Walter Lippmann’s ideas in three areas of mass communications research: message-driven media effects research and related studies of agenda setting, priming, and framing; social histories of U.S. journalism, advertising, and public relations; and interpretive accounts of the field’s genesis. It offers a new understanding of the role Lippmann played in yoking together a range of communication-related issues under a single problematic. In the process it exposes a critical lacunae stretching across (and beyond) scholarship in communications research: a lack of attention to the rhetorical deployment of Lippmann, characterized by an inclination to endow this figure’s political philosophy with the power to stand in for a range of developments occurring across an emerging communications field. This essay addresses the implications of being positioned to speak not only for a field of research but for history as well, being able to so perfectly mirror shifts in cultural attitudes and emerging institutional practices.     

Inclusive masculinities of university soccer players in the American Midwest

Male teamsport athletes have traditionally been described as some of the most homophobic and femphobic men in North American culture. However, in this ethnographic research of an education-based soccer team at a small Catholic university in a rural part of Middle America, I use inclusive masculinity theory to highlight that a softer version of masculinity is in operation. I use participant observation and 22 in-depth interviews to show that these men are gay friendly, that they avoid fights, and that they use reciprocal disclosure and homosocial tactility to emotionally bond. Although the type of masculinity the men on this team exhibit retains some orthodox behaviours, it is nonetheless far removed from the traditional model of hegemonic masculinity commonly attributed to teamsport athletes found in American institutes of sport and education.