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...     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Do zoo visitors come to learn? An internationally comparative,mixed-methods study

Zoo visitors go to see animals, but are they there to learn? This mixed-methods study examines visitor learning from both zoos’ and visitors’ perspectives using qualitative and quantitative data. Five hundred and forty zoo visitor interviews from nine case studies provide insight into visitor intentions, which indicate that the majority of visitors (72%) arrive at zoos with a learning agenda. Over 170 zoos across 48 countries also report, via an online questionnaire, that the majority of their visitors come to learn. In contrast, however, 28 face-to-face zoo education staff interviewed at the nine case study sites suggests a different conclusion. The study also indicates that zoos appear to determine visitors’ intentions through a number of methods, but are most heavily reliant on informal measures with only 15% of zoos using both formal and informal processes. Juxtaposing these findings suggests that zoos’ reliance on informal measures of visitor intentions appears to provide them with a less than accurate picture of their visitors’ learning agendas.     

English Language Proficiency and Early School Attainment Among Children Learning English as an Additional Language

Children learning English as an additional language (EAL) often experience lower academic attainment than monolingual peers. In this study, teachers provided ratings of English language proficiency and social, emotional, and behavioral functioning for 782 children with EAL and 6,485 monolingual children in reception year (ages 4–5). Academic attainment was assessed in reception and Year 2 (ages 6–7). Relative to monolingual peers with comparable English language proficiency, children with EAL displayed fewer social, emotional, and behavioral difficulties in reception, were equally likely to meet curriculum targets in reception, and were more likely to meet targets in Year 2. Academic attainment and social, emotional, and behavioral functioning in children with EAL are associated with English language proficiency at school entry.     

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.     

Dis-placing place-making: how African-American and immigrant youth realize their rights to the city

ABSTRACT

Notions of place-making assume that individuals and groups of people have legitimate ‘rights to the city.’ This paper unsettles these notions to incorporate the politically and legally tenuous relationships African-American and Immigrant youth have to their cities. We describe a community-based digital STEAM curriculum called Mobile City Science that invited youth to engage in place-making efforts using mobile and location-aware technologies. The design study relied on a contradiction that is fundamental to youth place-making in an era of white nationalism: for African-American and Immigrant youth to engage power structures in community development processes, they had to engage in a series of dis-placements that removed them from embodied experiences and in-location perceptions of their communities. Self-censoring, witnessing, historicizing, and re-veiwing were all examples of dis-placements youth enacted to speak truth to power with digital and mobile tools.