Discerning contextual complexities in STEM career pathways: insights from successful Latinas

Cultural Studies of Science Education - This paper introduces the concept of contextual mitigating factors (CMFs) as a theoretical construct to help understand how Latinas who demonstrated success...     

Latinas’ heritage language as a source of resiliency: impact on academic achievement in STEM fields

Cultural Studies of Science Education - This article highlights how the preservation of heritage languages is essential in the construction of three Georgia Latina participants’ cultural...     

Making do with media: teachers,technology, and tactics of media use in American classrooms, 1919–1946

In the last century, teachers have come under pressure to incorporate new media technologies into their lessons. Comparing educational research, press coverage, and teachers' firsthand accounts of mediated instruction between 1919 and 1946, this article highlights a historic discrepancy between anticipated and actual uses of media in classrooms. Drawing on de Certeau's theory of “making do,” the author argues that teachers' efforts to balance high technologies with simpler, more do-it-yourself varieties of media in their lessons constituted critical forms of participation in educational media culture and small acts of resistance against industrial, top-down efforts to streamline, modernize, and technologize their work.     

Risk and protective factors associated with cyberbullying: Are relationships or rules more protective?

The aim of this paper is to investigate which adolescents are most and least at risk of experiencing online victimization. The results of logistic regression analyses using data on 2079 adolescents attending secondary school in Bermuda indicate that not all forms of media use place adolescents at risk of experiencing cyberbullying. Adolescents who spent more time using their cell phone were more likely to report having received an aggressive or threatening electronic communication and having had someone say nasty things about them online. There was no such relationship between time on the internet and either form of online victimization. The findings also suggest that strong parent relationships and positive experiences at school are generally more protective against cyberbullying than adults’ restrictions on adolescents’ media use. These findings contribute important insight into strategies that hold promise for decreasing cyberbullying among adolescents.     

Perceptions of quality in staff-student written feedback in higher education: a case study

This paper reports on the results of an embedded, multiple case study that investigated the views of both lecturers and students on written staff-student feedback in three postgraduate programmes at one UK university. The study sought to uncover how ‘quality written feedback’ is perceived in the higher education environment under investigation. It found that tutors and students were broadly aligned in the features that they identified as constituting quality, which could be categorised within three dimensions: the affective or interpersonal, the orientational and the transformational. The findings suggest that feedback needs to incorporate each of these dimensions if it is to be perceived as being of good quality.     

A progression in first-grade children’s thinking about variable and variable notation in functional relationships

Recent research suggests that children in elementary grades have some facility with variable and variable notation in ways that warrant closer attention. We report here on an empirically developed progression in first-grade children’s thinking about these concepts in functional relationships. Using learning trajectories research as a framework for the study, we developed and implemented an instructional sequence designed to foster children’s understanding of functional relationships. Findings suggest that young children can learn to think in sophisticated ways about variable quantities and variable notation. This challenges assumptions that young children are not “ready” for a study of such concepts and raises the question of whether difficulties adolescents exhibit might be ameliorated by an earlier introduction to these ideas.     

Promoting a Culture of Bullying: Understanding the Role of School Climate and School Sector

Bullying has received increased attention from academics, scholars, and the media over the past decade and a half. The effects of bullying can be devastating and long lasting for victims and bullies alike. Recent prevention efforts and research has focused on the school environment as a whole. As such, two areas of interest that could affect bullying are the roles of school climate and school sector. School sector is important to examine as private schools make up 25% of all schools in the United States and approximately 80% of private school students attended faith-based institutions (Broughman &; Swaim, 2013 Broughman, S. P., &; Swaim, N. L. (2013). Characteristics of private schools in the United States: Results from the 2011-12 private school universe survey (NCES 2013-316). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education. Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics. [Google Scholar]). This study utilized the School Crime Supplement to understand how school climate and school sector affect students’ experiences of bullying victimization. Using chi square analysis, propensity score analysis, and multiple regression models (of the total sample, public school sample, and private school sample), as well as Z-score coefficients, findings suggest that a positive school climate predicted less reporting of bullying incidents and that private school students in particular reported a more positive school climate and less bullying.