Education for Interdisciplinary Community Collaboration and Development: The Components of a Core Curriculum by Community Practitioners

Social workers are actively engaging in the practice of interdisciplinary community collaboration (ICC) with the goal of bringing diverse groups together to improve the conditions of communities and enhance the quality of life of population groups. Yet, collaborations are challenging and require great skill and commitment. The pedagogy and the content of curricula have become a more prominent part of teaching to macro practice students and practitioners the art of effectively convening and moving collaborative efforts forward. This article adds to the literature on the content and methods of teaching students and novice practitioners the competencies embedded in ICC. It provides empirical data from six focus groups of experienced community practitioners (social workers and others) in New York City who identified components of a core curriculum for this work. Eight months later, these 33 community practitioners were asked to reprioritize the topics and concepts that they had collectively identified at the earlier time. Skills such as the ability to share power, manage differences, include the constituency and diplomacy are among those discussed. Core curriculum themes, the pedagogy and process, and the attributes and values necessary for training an ICC practitioner are presented.     

Behavioral and neurophysiological effects of morphological awareness training on spelling and reading

Behavioral and neurophysiological effects of a computer-aided morphological training protocol were examined in German-speaking children from Grades 3 to 9. Study 1 compared morphological awareness, reading, and spelling skills of 34 trained children with an untrained control group of 34 children matched for age, sex, and intelligence. All participants in the training group showed increases in morphological awareness, but only students from secondary school improved significantly in reading and spelling competences. In Study 2, a subsample of 8 trained children with poor spelling and reading abilities and 10 untrained children with higher language competencies underwent an electroencephalography testing involving three different language tasks. The training resulted in decreased theta-activity and increased activity in lower (7–10 Hz) and upper alpha (10–13 Hz). These findings reflect more effortful and attention-demanding processing after the training and suggest that children with poor spelling and reading abilities use the acquired morphological knowledge in terms of a compensatory strategy.     

The role of high school racial composition and opportunities to learn in students' STEM college participation

We analyze longitudinal data from students who spent their academic careers in North Carolina (NC) public secondary schools and attended NC public universities to investigate the importance of high school racial composition and opportunities to learn in secondary school for choosing a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) major. We consider school racial composition and opportunities to learn as contexts that shape students' decisions regarding college majors. Results of cross‐classified hierarchical logistic models indicate that attending schools with predominantly White students is negatively associated with declaring a STEM major and with graduating with a STEM major irrespective of students' own race. The finding suggests that for students in North Carolina, attending racially isolated White high schools is related to a decrease in adolescents' participation in STEM during college.     

A study of field independent biased mental ability tests in community college science classes

Many schools use mental ability test scores as a basis for grouping students and planning their educational needs. The widespread use of these test scores throughout public and private schools demands that test items be unbiased. One way in which tests could be biased, that has not been thoroughly investigated, is the inadvertent use of analytical skill items favoring one perceptual orientation over another. This study investigated analytical skill items on the Otis-Lennon Mental Ability Test for field independent bias. Using as analysis of variance and discriminant analysis, the results indicated that the Otis-Lennon Mental Ability Test was biased in favor of individuals with a field of independent perceptual orientation.     

Student Outcomes: The Impact of Varying Living-Learning Community Models

This study explores the effect of three distinct living-learning community models on a variety of student experience and academic performance outcomes. Central to the analysis is an investigation of whether there are differences in outcomes for learning communities with different missions and structures, all three of which fall into the Linked Course learning community design. Even in the least coordinated, most basic, learning community model, students show more positive outcomes (first semester GPA, retention, first-year experience) than nonlearning community students. The fact that simple structures that facilitate student interaction around academic work (even without coordinated faculty involvement) have a positive effect for students of all preparation levels provides encouragement to campus leaders with limited resources who are working to develop methods for improving the undergraduate educational experience on their campuses.