Advice for Developing Scholars

This commentary offers advice for developing scholars culled from this volume’s contributors, research on talent development in educational psychology and other domains, and my own experiences as an educational psychologist and journal editor. The advice includes: a) follow your bliss, b) spend and create time, c) build collaborative relationships, d) hone technique, and e) frame failure.     

The photosynthetic membrane: prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells

Photosynthesis is one of the most important of all biochemical progresses, occuring not only in green plants but in certain algae and bacteria. This article reviews current ideas about the mechanisms of photosynthesis, with special reference to the role of photosynthetic membranes.     

The Digital Divide as a Complex and Dynamic Phenomenon

The purpose of this article is to propose a fruitful analytical framework for data supposedly related to the concept of the so-called "digital divide." The extent and the nature of this divide depend on the kind of access defined. Considering the possession of hardware, growing divides among different categories of income, employment, education, age, and ethnicity can be proved to have existed in the 1980s and 1990s according to official American and Dutch statistics. If only by effects of saturation, these gaps will more or less close. However, it is shown that differential access of skills and usage is likely to increase. The growth of a usage gap is projected. Multivariate analyses of Dutch official statistics reveal the striking effect of age and gender as compared to education. The usage gap is related to the evolution of the information and network society. Finally, policy perspectives are discussed.     

Connect-Text: Leveraging Text-Message Communication to Mitigate Chronic Absenteeism and Improve Parental Engagement in the Earliest Years of Schooling

ABSTRACT

Poor school attendance in the early grades is predictive of poor subsequent educational outcomes. We report on a pilot intervention aiming to reduce chronic absenteeism in kindergarten. We designed and implemented a two-way, text-based parent-school communication system to encourage daily attendance, provide parents with personalized feedback on their child's attendance, and provide support to mitigate challenges that threatened parents' ability to get their child to school regularly. The program was well received, with nearly all families registering for participation, and three-quarters of those receiving outreach responding and engaging with school personnel via text. The pilot school's kindergarten chronic absenteeism rate was substantially lower in the intervention year relative to prior trends. Further, in the intervention year, the pilot school's kindergarten chronic absenteeism rate (13%) was substantially lower than for that of a synthetically constructed comparison school (24%). We discuss implications for sustainability and scaling of an effort such as this.     

Prodigies of the Prairie: The Talent Development Stories of Four Elite Nebraska Youth Performers

This qualitative study addressed this primary question: How does talent develop among four Nebraska youth? Four highly talented Nebraska youth in the domains of baton twirling, swimming, rodeo, and both softball and music were interviewed along with their parents and coaches. Results revealed unique talent stories and commonalities among those stories. The stories described a twirling talent trilogy that involved coordinated efforts among student, parent, and coach; a swimmer with all hands on deck that involved supportive family, strong coaching, and center of excellence; a one-horse talent hotbed with a talent-equipped ranch and rodeo coaching parents; and a father-influenced music and softball double play where a father led the way to dual talents. The commonalities among stories included hard work, focus on fundamentals, prior family links to the talent domain, extraordinary parent involvement, and a parent-engineered environment for talent development. The limited roles schools play in fostering talent and parenting implications were also addressed.     

Multiple methodologies: using community-based participatory research and decolonizing methodologies in Kenya

In this project, we examined the development of a sustainable inclusive education system in western Kenya by combining community-based participatory research (CBPR) and decolonizing methodologies. Through three cycles of qualitative interviews with stakeholders in inclusive education, participants explained what they saw as foundational components of how to create more inclusive primary school classrooms utilizing existing school and community resources. The combination of CBPR and decolonizing methodologies, along with other project factors ultimately led to more inclusive placements for primary students with disabilities. We highlight this increase enrollment of students with disabilities in primary schools with excerpts from qualitative interviews with participants. In addition to the increase of the number of students with disabilities accessing schools for the first time, we found many methodological tensions inherent in this research. Such challenges included: researcher positionality, researcher outsider status, decolonizing approaches to language, and disseminating results in meaningful, ethical, and culturally appropriate ways.     

Research: Korean International Students' Expectations About Counseling

This study examined the counseling expectancies of Korean international students in the United States. The results indicated that Korean students expected to terminate counseling quickly if the process was viewed as unpleasant or did not seem to be immediately helpful. The Korean students expected to approach counseling as a classroom learning situation in which they could present problems, ask questions about the problems, and work on assignments to solve the problems. Implications for outreaching and counseling Korean international students are discussed.     

The structure and goals of a student teaching program and the character and quality of supervisory discourse

This study compares the form and substance of supervisory discourse between university supervisors and elementary student teachers during postobservation conferences in two teacher education programs with similar organizational structures but with very different ideological orientations. One program represents a traditional-craft orientation to teacher education while the other represents an inquiry-oriented approach. The findings indicate a great deal of similarity with regard to both the form and substance of supervisory discourse in the two programs and suggest the need for changes in the organizational context of student teaching if innovations in the curriculum of student teaching are to be realized.