Students’ Perspectives on LGBTQ-Inclusive Curriculum

Implementing curriculum that is inclusive of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) people has the potential to create an equitable learning environment. In order to learn more about students’ experiences of LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum, 26 high school students with diverse racial/ethnic, sexual, and gender identities were recruited from the Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) Network in California. Students participated in focus groups conducted by telephone by GSA staff, sharing their experiences of LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum in school. Qualitative coding methods, including grounded theory, were used to identify themes and interpret students’ responses. Data revealed that LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum was most often taught in social sciences and humanities courses as stand-alone lessons. LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum rarely met standards of social justice education, though opportunities for critical conversations about systemic oppression regularly emerged. For instance, teachers often failed to intervene in LGBTQ bullying and missed teachable moments conducive to inclusive curriculum. Some students learned positive LGBTQ lessons and highlighted the ways such curriculum reflected their identities and created a supportive school climate. Implications for equitable education are discussed.     

Design-Based Research Within the Constraints of Practice: AlgebraByExample

Superintendents from districts in the Minority Student Achievement Network (MSAN) challenged the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP) to identify an approach to narrowing the minority student achievement gap in Algebra 1 without isolating minority students for intervention. SERP partnered with 8 MSAN districts and researchers from 3 universities to design and rigorously test AlgebraByExample, a set of 42 Algebra 1 assignments with interleaved worked examples that target common misconceptions and errors. In a year-long random-assignment study, students who received AlgebraByExample assignments had an average 7 percentage point boost on a posttest containing released items from state assessments, and students in the bottom half of the performance distribution where minority students are disproportionately concentrated had an average 10 percentage point boost on a researcher-designed assessment of conceptual understanding. AlgebraByExample is easily incorporated into any existing curriculum, and naturally serves as a launch point for mathematically rich discussion.     

Changing the English Classroom: When Large-scale ‘Common’ Testing Meets Secondary Curriculum and Instruction in the United States

This article explores the intersection of new, large-scale standards-based testing, teacher accountability policy, and secondary curriculum and instruction in the United States. Two federally funded consortia – the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium and the Partnership for Readiness of College and Careers – prove focal to this paper, as these two organisations are creating new tests that will assess 42–49% of the K–12 student population in the United States in 2014–2015. Because greater teacher accountability for student performance will be given for these tests, there is more reason to pay attention to what these tests measure and what they do not. Our analysis suggests that these new tests will hold secondary English teachers accountable for literacy and disciplinary knowledge outside the field of English and thus raise important questions about what English teachers should, can and will do, especially when their jobs are on the line.     

Individual Differences in Fifth Graders’ Literacy and Academic Language Predict Comprehension Monitoring Development: An Eye-Movement Study

In this study, we investigated fifth graders’ (n = 52) fall literacy, academic language, and motivation and how these skills predicted fall and spring comprehension monitoring on an eye movement task. Comprehension monitoring was defined as the identification and repair of misunderstandings when reading text. In the eye movement task, children read two sentences; the second included either a plausible or implausible word in the context of the first sentence. Stronger readers had shorter reading times overall suggesting faster processing of text. Generally fifth graders reacted to the implausible word (i.e., longer gaze duration on the implausible vs. the plausible word, which reflects lexical access). Students with stronger academic language, compared to those with weaker academic language, generally spent more time rereading the implausible target compared to the plausible target. This difference increased from fall to spring. Results support the centrality of academic language for meaning integration, setting standards of coherence, and utilizing comprehension repair strategies.     

The academic writing process in Spanish universities: perceptions of students and faculty / El proceso de escritura académica en la universidad española: percepciones de estudiantes y profesores

Abstract

This paper is intended as an exploration of university faculty and students’ perceptions of a number of dimensions involved in the written composition of academic texts. We analysed the responses to scale 3 in the European Writing Survey (EUWRIT) (in its Spanish version: Encuesta Europea sobre la Escritura Académica, EEEA) by a group of social science and humanities students (n = 1,030) and faculty (n = 230) from nine Spanish universities. We then examined the similarities and differences in their perceptions and established a factorial structure of the different dimensions underlying the writing process. The data indicate that both groups concur in the value assigned to both changing ideas in the course of the composition process (although this process seems to be understood differently by each group) and the revision and feedback processes. The students, however, claim to be involved in more planning and previous reading activities than the teachers perceive them to be. The significance of these results for a process-oriented perspective in academic writing is discussed.     

Building Inclusive Pedagogy: Recommendations From a National Study of Students of Color in Higher Education and Student Affairs Graduate Programs

In this study, we share the racialized experiences of 29 students of color in higher education and student affairs graduate programs, focusing specifically on their relationships with faculty, their experiences in classrooms, and the strategies they recommend for inclusion. Participants indicated that they are expected to serve as the racial expert in classrooms and that many faculty fail to effectively facilitate discussions related to race and racism and to intervene in instances of racial microaggressions. Participants convey effective strategies to build racially-inclusive classrooms which include authenticity, vulnerability, and validation.     

Use of sexuality-focused entertainment media in sex education

The literature on the impact of entertainment media on sex education is typically pathology-focused, unclear regarding the effects of such usage, and void of dialogue between those who actually work in the areas of sexuality education and entertainment. To address this gap, this paper is the product of joint authorship between media figures from varied sexually-focused programming fields and academics who teach and conduct research in the areas of sexuality and relational health. The authors focus on the role that various forms of entertainment media play in educating members of the public and college classrooms in the areas of sex and sexuality. Additionally, examples of the inclusion of entertainment media in educational contexts are discussed.     

Required Collaborative Work in Online Courses: A Predictive Modeling Approach

This article describes a predictive model that assesses whether a student will have greater perceived learning in group assignments or in individual work. The model produces correct classifications 87.5% of the time. The research is notable in that it is the first in the education literature to adopt a predictive modeling methodology using data collected via a designed experiment. All subjects experienced both a collaborative and an individual assignment, thus mitigating uncontrolled external factors in the measurement of differences in perceived learning. The exploratory nature of the work prompted the use of Partial Least Squares Regression for estimation. The work serves as an illustration of how predictive modeling might enlighten those in educational and academic settings.