Walking the Path Together from High School to STEM Majors and Careers: Utilizing Community Engagement and a Focus on Teaching to Increase Opportunities for URM Students

Despite decades of efforts to increase the participation of women and people from underrepresented minority groups (URM) in science and math majors and careers, and despite the increasing diversification of the US population as a whole (Planty et al in National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, Washington, DC, 2008), participation in STEM majors and STEM careers (including STEM teaching) remains stubbornly male and white (Landivar in American Community Survey Reports, ACS-24, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC, 2013; National Science Foundation and National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics in Special Report NSF 15-311, Arlington, VA, 2015). This paper describes a project with two central goals: (1) to provide opportunities for URM high school students to engage in authentic science and math inquiry with the support of skilled college undergraduate mentors in the hope that these experiences will encourage these high school students to choose and persist in pursuing careers in STEM fields and, even if they do not choose those careers, to feel confident making complex, science or math-based decisions in their everyday lives and (2) to help the mentors (young people, mostly STEM majors) see teaching as a vital, intellectually challenging career that can provide them the opportunity to work for social justice in their communities. While it is unlikely that any one experience will help young people overcome the long odds that face them as they consider either path, our analysis suggests that projects of this kind can make a meaningful contribution to the effort.     

Randomized Trial of Web-Based Stress Management Interventions for Community College Students

Community college students may experience more severe psychological concerns than traditional university students and have fewer institutional mental health resources available. This replication study examined the efficacy of three versions of a brief, structured web-based stress management program with community college students. The program focuses on improving perceptions of control over stressors, based on research suggesting that focusing on what you can control in the present (i.e., present control) is associated with less distress and better adjustment. Participants (N = 213 community college students) were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: present control intervention (PCI), PCI with enhanced stress logs (E-PCI) or PCI with mindfulness training (PCI + MF). They completed web-based, self-report measures at pre-intervention, post-intervention, and 3-week follow-up. Participants in all three intervention conditions demonstrated reductions in perceived stress and distress symptoms from pre-intervention to post-intervention and 3-week follow-up. In the PC+ MF group, the mean-within group effect size was d = ?0.46, which was slightly larger than the PCI group (d = ?0.36) and E-PCI group (d = ?0.41). This study replicated that present control interventions are effective in a community college sample. Community college students may benefit from web-based interventions designed to increase present control.     

Evaluation of the initial effects and implementation of Success For All in England

Success For All is a comprehensive programme for restructuring primary schools where students are ‘at risk’ of not developing functional literacy by the end of Key Stage 1 (age 7 years). The programme was developed at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA, and uses research-based approaches to curriculum, instruction, assessment and classroom management, with one-to-one tutoring being provided for those students falling behind in their reading. This paper reports on the initial implementation (September 1997 – March 1998) of the Success For All (SFA) reading/school improvement programme in a family of inner city primary schools in Nottingham, England. The purpose of the research was to provide empirical evidence on the process of implementation of SFA in England, and to assess how such an innovative programme could contribute to the British government’s National Literacy Strategy (DfEE, 1998). The main findings suggest that as a result of initial involvement in the SFA programme, students appear to have made as much progress in one term in reading as they would normally have been expected to make in one year, their motivation, behaviour, attitude to and skills in learning have also increased. Furthermore, teachers claim to have learned a great deal from SFA, particularly about the effective teaching of reading, co-operative teaching strategies and their own professional development.     

Exploding the myths of school reform

The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive, accessible and strategic overview of what is currently known about school and system reform in the early twenty-first century. It reflects on the knowledge that has been acquired from research, policy and practice over the past three decades and presents it in a way that provides frameworks for action and practical strategies that educators can use to improve the learning and achievement of the students they serve. The use of the ‘myth’ as a narrative artifice provides a structure around which the argument of the paper is developed. The key point being that in education too many myths abound that are based on prejudice or tradition rather than evidence. It is this that primarily explains the failure of so many reform efforts. Identifying the 10 myths in the paper and then exploding them enables a realistic and increasingly precise and aligned approach to school reform to be presented.     

Towards a Methodology for Teacher‐Based Classroom Research

Educational research and evaluation for the purpose of improving practice is becoming increasingly common. The teacher‐researcher movement, LEA sponsored self‐evaluation schemes, for example, both involve teachers in reviewing their own practice or the practices of the school as an organization, with the express purpose of utilizing the review data for professional or school improvement. Unfortunately, the methodology for research and evaluation in schools is problematic; one reason for this is the difficulty in deriving valid inferences from data that are often qualitative in kind and subjective in manner. Although there is a body of literature that describes ways of collecting data on the functioning of schools and classrooms, there is little guidance as to how to analyse it. This presents particular difficulties for the teacher or school staff who, for example, are trying to make sense out of a mass of data accumulated from a self‐evaluation exercise. The following paper is an attempt to provide support for teachers and schools in such a predicament: it suggests a method for analysing qualitative data emerging from school‐based research efforts that draws on the traditions of sociological and anthropological field work.     

Moving on and Moving up: Confronting the Complexities of School Improvement in the Improving Schools Project

Despite recent advances, the research literature on school effectiveness, school improvement and educational change has relatively little to say about how schools become effective over time, and what strategies or combination of strategies work best to improve schools at different levels of effectiveness. A recent British research study – ‘The Improving Schools’ project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council – has been designed to explore these (and other) issues. This article describes the rationale for the fieldwork aspect of the project, which includes 13 secondary schools from 3 English local education authorities and presents 4 themes that have emerged from the first phase of the research that cast some light on the phenomena of the ‘improving school’. These themes – multiple starting points, the complex interactive and intuitive nature of school improvement strategies, the missing instructional level, and the importance of context – are described. The article concludes that given the non-linear and unpredictable nature of improvement seen in the case studies, schools need to become more skilled in ‘change agentry’ in order to continue to improve.     

Using Actor Network Theory to Trace and Improve Multimodal Communication Design

During the aftermath of recent disasters (both natural and human made), people have communicated by cobbling together available social software resources—relying on the capabilities of Internet tools such as blogs, news sites, and Flickr. Examining the use of social software taking place after the London bombings of July 7, 2005, I propose a method by which we can study users' literate appropriations to shape the development of more accommodating communication systems.     

Progression and variability of competitive performance of Olympic swimmers

Estimates of progression and variability of athletic performance in competitions are useful for researchers and practitioners interested in factors that affect performance. We used repeated-measures mixed modelling to analyse 676 official race times of 26 US and 25 Australian Olympic swimmers in the 12-month period leading up to the 2000 Olympic Games. Progression was expressed as percent changes in mean performance; variability was expressed as the coefficient of variation in performance of an individual swimmer between races. Within competitions, both nations showed similar improvements in mean time from heats through finals (overall 1.2%; 95% confidence limits 1.1 to 1.3%). Mean competition time also improved over 12 months by a similar amount in both nations (0.9%; 95% confidence limits 0.6 to 1.2%). The US swimmers showed a greater improvement between the finals (a difference of 0.5%; 95% confidence limits ?0.2 to 1.1%), which paralleled changes in the medal haul of the two nations. The coefficient of variation in performance time for a swimmer between races was 0.60% (95% confidence limits 0.56 to 0.65%) within a competition and 0.80% (95% confidence limits 0.73 to 0.86%) between competitions. Our results show that: (a) to stay in contention for a medal, an Olympic swimmer should improve his or her performance by ～1% within a competition and by ～1% within the year leading up to the Olympics; (b) an additional enhancement of ～0.4% (one-half the between-competition variability) would substantially increase the swimmer's chances of a medal.     

Factor Analysis of Selected Basketball Skill Tests

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the factor structure of the sports skill domain of basketball and to identify test items to measure in this skill domain. A theoretical model of the hypothesized dimensions of basketball playing ability was developed based on a review of literature concerning basketball skill testing from 1906 to the present day. These dimensions were: (a) shooting, (b) passing, (c) jumping, (d) movement without the ball and (e) movement with the ball. Twenty-one items, including the nine items in the AAHPER basketball skill test for boys, were selected to sample these hypothesized dimensions. The tests were administered to 70 male junior high and high school students enrolled in the University of Minnesota, Duluth basketball camp during the summer of 1975. The hypothesized dimensions were analyzed by use of the following: (a) alpha factor analysis; (b) canonical factor analysis; (c) image analysis; and (d) principal components analysis. Both oblique and orthogonal rotations were performed with each of the four analyses. The hypothesized model was partially substantiated in that the results confirmed three of the factors: (a) shooting, (b) passing and (c) jumping with the only difference being that the factors of movement with the ball and movement without the ball combined into one. Since the following test items best represented the dimensions, it appeared that a battery comprised of these items would provide a quick and objective measure of basketball skill: (a) jump and reach, (b) dribble, (c) speed pass, and (d) front shot.