ASSESSMENT OF ENTERING STUDENT WRITING SKILL IN THE COMMUNITY COLLEGE

This article describes an assessment of writing skills (writing sample, objective test, and self‐assessment) made by one community college. Information was gathered to design an entry‐level assessment procedure for placement in English composition and developmental writing courses. Comparing the three approaches, each of which measured different aspects of writing ability, showed that the best predictor of grade in an English composition course was the objective test. However, the statistical results of the study form only one component of an entry‐level assessment program. It may be that a writing sample is needed as part of entry‐level assessment because it points out the value of writing skill in attempting college‐credit courses.     

A High Impact Practice that Works: Connecting Mentors From the Professional Community to Teacher Education Students

A high impact mentoring program at a community college connected professionals from the special education and early intervention fields with small groups of teacher education students. Two federal grants from U.S. Department of Education funded tuition scholarships and mentoring for 76 Special Education students and 78 Early Childhood Education/Early Intervention students in associate degree programs. The mentor programs consisted of individual monitoring by project staff, consistent contact with a mentor from the professional community and with other students in mentor groups, and structured monthly dinner meetings. Students who participated in the mentoring programs showed increased persistence and higher grade point average when compared with the general population of similar majors. Within each grant-funded population, students who showed low participation in the mentor programming presented lower retention rates and lower GPA than grant-funded students who took full advantage of the mentoring program.     

Counteracting Summer Slide: Social Capital Resources Within Socioeconomically Disadvantaged Families

Research on summer learning has shown that children from a higher socioeconomic status (SES) continue to learn during the summer months of elementary school, but lower-SES students tend to stagnate or lose ground. However, not all low-SES students experience summer learning loss. Drawing on the Beginning School Study (BSS), a longitudinal study of a random sample of Baltimore public school students who began first grade in 1982, this article identifies a small sample of low-SES students who gained as much as their higher-SES peers in reading or math during at least three of the four summers of elementary school. Drawing on Coleman and Hoffer's (1987 Coleman , J. S. , & Hoffer , T. ( 1987 ). Public and private high schools: The impact of communities . New York : Basic Books . [Google Scholar]) theory of within-family social capital, we identify parental characteristics and practices that set these low-SES exceptional summer learners (ESLs) apart from their low-SES peers, who evidence the more typical pattern of summer slide.     

Reading Comprehension Tests Vary in the Skills They Assess: Differential Dependence on Decoding and Oral Comprehension

Comprehension tests are often used interchangeably, suggesting an implicit assumption that they are all measuring the same thing. We examine the validity of this assumption by comparing some of the most popular reading comprehension measures used in research and clinical practice in the United States: the Gray Oral Reading Test (GORT), the two assessments (retellings and comprehension questions) from the Qualitative Reading Inventory (QRI), the Woodcock–Johnson Passage Comprehension subtest (WJPC), and the Reading Comprehension test from the Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT). Modest intercorrelations among the tests suggested that they were measuring different skills. Regression analyses showed that decoding, not listening comprehension, accounts for most of the variance in both the PIAT and the WJPC; the reverse holds for the GORT and both QRI measures. Large developmental differences in what the tests measure were found for the PIAT and the WJPC, but not the other tests, both when development was measured by chronological age and by word reading ability. We discuss the serious implications for research and clinical practice of having different comprehension tests measure different skills and of having the same test assess different skills depending on developmental level.     

Learning Partnerships in Practice: Orientation,Leadership, and Residence Life

Committed to improving how their various programs serve student learning, Taran Cardone, Elizabeth Stoll Turton, Gerald Olson, and Marcia Baxter Magolda describe how their participation in Miami University's Community of Practice on Engaged Learning (COPEL) helped them create developmentally appropriate, learning‐centered approaches that support the complex task of student self‐authorship.     

Supporting Professionalism,Diversity, and Context Within a Collaborative Approach to Gifted Education

Educators concerned about gifted learners are moving toward an evidence-based perspective focusing on children with exceptionally advanced learning needs who require flexibly responsive educational attention. This article describes two system-wide implementation experiences, one in a mixed urban/rural public school board and the other in an urban board of affiliated parochial schools, designed to meet the educational needs of diversely competent students. The authors discuss the intersecting roles of consultants, teachers, administrators, and parents, and some creative applications they have implemented that illustrate a respect for (a) teachers' professionalism, (b) individual developmental diversity, and (c) context-specific opportunities and constraints. The authors discuss ways that this flexible collaborative approach to integrating consultative processes into board-wide practices addresses the diverse educational needs of gifted learners, and also encourages high-level outcomes in learners not formally identified as gifted.     

Indigenization and University Governance: Reflections from the Transition to Yukon University

Tertiary Education and Management - While literature on university governance in Canada has identified key challenges that need to be addressed, it largely overlooks calls for change towards...     

Ideas: A system for international data exchange and access for science

An operational prototype inhomogeneous distributed database system has been built to provide homogeneous access for researchers and managers of science policy to data on research projects held in three countries. The architecture is sufficiently general not only to accommodate additional countries and databases on research projects, but also to provide a general framework for other international collaborative projects aimed at the provision of information. The design exhibits an optimal compromise between sufficient data to satisfy a retrieval request and the minimal data for transmission to maintain the database.