Embracing Urban Youth Culture in the Context of Education

The rise of post industrial urban centers and global communication technologies has created a distinctive Urban Youth Culture (UYC) with roots in Black history and social activism. In the discourse on education and Black youth, UYC is rarely seen as a positive force promoting academic achievement and self esteem. Drawing on the voices of Black urban youth in an all-male high school mentoring program, this article offers an affirming view on the significance and pragmatism of UYC to a group of young men at an East Coast high school. Findings reveal that the young men related to and relied on UYC to help them negotiate school and establish positive academic and social identities for themselves.     

Testing reading comprehension of theoretical discourse with cloze

The ability of cloze tests containing frequent, every n‐th word deletions to measure comprehension of macropropositions has been challenged on both theoretical and empirical grounds, calling into question the validity of such tests for assessing comprehension of much of the discourse encountered by university‐level students. To evaluate the comprehension of a writer’s reasoning, it is recommended that cloze tests position gaps so as to target recognition of cohesive devices and the ability to draw inferences from other sentences. To test the validity of such a design, a large sample of scores on discourse cloze tests administered in introductory college economics is compared to scores on true–false comprehension tests designed to target recognition of connective propositions. The two distributions of scores do not differ significantly in terms of mean value, dispersion or frequency distribution, suggesting that appropriately designed cloze tests can provide a valid assessment of the reader’s integration of theoretical text. In addition, the usefulness of readability formulas based on surface characteristics of text is challenged when readability is defined in terms of the difficulty of constructing a coherent representation of theoretical text.     

Measuring Cognitive Engagement With Self-Report Scales: Reflections From Over 20 Years of Research

Research spanning 20 years is reviewed as it relates to the measurement of cognitive engagement using self-report scales. The author's research program is at the forefront of the review, although the review is couched within the broader context of the research on motivation and cognitive engagement that began in the early 1990s. The theoretical origins of self-report instruments are examined, along with the early measurement findings and struggles. Research in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics contexts are highlighted. The author concludes that self-report data have made significant and important contributions to the understanding of motivation and cognitive engagement. However, the evidence also suggests a need to develop and use multiple approaches to measuring engagement in academic work rather than rely only on self-report instruments. Some alternatives to self-report measures are suggested here and throughout this issue.     

Investigating how college students’ task definitions and plans relate to self-regulated learning processing and understanding of a complex science topic

Winne and Hadwin (2008) identified four phases of self-regulated learning (SRL) including defining the task, setting goals and making plans, studying (i.e., learning), and adaptation. The vast majority of SRL research has focused on processing during the third phase, studying. In this study, we developed coding rubrics that allowed us to examine how the results of college students’ processing during phases one and two of Winne and Hadwin’s model, task definitions and plans, affected their SRL processing while learning with a hypermedia learning environment (HLE), and their subsequent academic performance. Our findings showed that, on average, participants gained both factual knowledge and integrated conceptual understanding over the course of learning with the HLE. The quality of participants’ task definitions and plans at pretest, as well as their SRL processing during learning, were related to learning outcomes. On average, participants’ task definitions improved from pretest to posttest. The findings from this study and the associated coding methodologies have implications for educational research and practice.     

A Complex quest: The development and research of underachievement interventions for gifted students

The seeming lack of motivation of many academically gifted students is an area of frustration and concern for many parents, teachers, and psychologists. This article explores two studies in which researchers designed interventions to improve academic achievement. Both interventions were created using the Achievement‐Orientation Model. The first study matched the intervention to the student and found that the students' grades increased over the intervention period, t(45) = 2.56, p = .014, d = .38. Students using treatments linked to goal valuation and environmental perceptions showed the greatest academic grade growth; the self‐efficacy and self‐regulation groups showed little or no grade improvement. Building on the finding that goal valuation was important, the second study used a mixed‐methods design to pilot an intervention focused on goal valuation and student autonomy. The results of this study were mixed, as the intervention appeared to help two of the three students. Although these studies offer further insight into possibilities for promoting academic achievement among gifted students, further research examining how to best support and foster academic achievement in underachieving gifted students is needed. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

THE CHALLENGE OF QUALITY PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

This paper argues that, notwithstanding a few major exceptions, the modern commitment to studying educational thinking and practice in premodern Jewish societies has not been particularly intense, despite widespread agreement as to the importance of education in premodern Jewish life. Some suggestions for this lacuna are discussed in this article. In particular, it is urged that a major part of the problem lies in the definition of Jewish education and that—were definitions of Jewish education altered—a much wider swath of research would be seen to involve important aspects of the premodern Jewish educational enterprise.