Student Team Reading and Writing: A Cooperative Learning Approach to Middle School Literacy Instruction

The goal of this project was to create a middle school literacy program that was more responsive to the needs and abilities of early adolescents in urban middle schools. The program components included: (a) cooperative learning classroom processes; (b) a literature anthology for high interest reading material; (c) explicit instruction in reading comprehension; (e) integrated reading, writing, and language arts instruction; and (f) a writing process approach to language arts. The study was conducted in 5 schools in a large urban school district, 2 implementing Student Team Reading and Writing (STRW) and 3 comparison schools. The results indicated that the students in STRW had significantly higher achievement in reading vocabulary, reading comprehension, and language expression. The results suggest that a multifaceted approach to restructuring can effectively improve the achievement of students in urban middle schools.     

School ethnic composition and aspirations of immigrant students in Belgium

This article examines the association between school ethnic composition and immigrant students’ intentions to finish high school and to move on to higher education. We used data from 1324 immigrant and 10,546 native students gathered in the school year 2004–2005 in a sample of 85 Flemish (Belgian) secondary schools. Logistic multilevel analyses (HLM6) show that students attending schools with a majority of native students (enrolling less than 20% immigrant students) were twice as likely to plan to finish high school and to plan for higher education than those attending high concentration schools (more than 50% immigrant students). These associations were due to students’ socio‐economic status (SES) and there was no difference in aspirations between high and low concentration schools after controlling for students’ SES and the SES context of the school. All else being equal, immigrant students in high concentration schools tended to aspire to finish high school and move on to higher education slightly more than those attending medium concentration schools (20–50% immigrant students). The analyses further show that these differences between high and medium concentration schools can be explained by the more optimistic culture in high concentration schools. The main conclusion is that high concentration schools are not necessarily detrimental for students’ educational aspirations.     

Identity for Sale: The Limits of Racial Reform in Urban Schools

The Urban Review - When multicultural education emerges in urban schools, it usually addresses educational inequality by focusing on cultural histories, principles, and pedagogies. The fundamental...     

Distributive Justice in Higher Education: Perceptions of Administrators

For the study we report here we used the theoretical framework of organizational justice to examine academic administrator’s perceptions of resource distribution decisions. We asked deans, school directors, and department chairs in one midwestern state about their perceptions of the fairness and likelihood of use of various distribution principles in scenarios involving distributions of compensation to faculty and resources to schools/departments. Differences based on Carnegie classification and current position were examined. Overall, we found that participants perceived compensating faculty members and allocating resources to departments based on the quality of teaching and impact on students was most fair, but they believed factors such as research productivity and funding secured were more likely to be used. While there were no differences based on current position, there were differences based on Carnegie classification with the research universities indicating greater preference for and likelihood of using research principles and non-research institutions indicating greater likelihood of using equality.     

Text-Comprehension Strategies Based on Outlines

Prior to studying an instructional text, college students were given either a topically relevant outline or a topically irrelevant (control) outline and asked to generate propositions about the topics by drawing upon their existing knowledge. The results indicate that comprehension was highest among those students who activated relevant prior knowledge before text study, and who were again provided with an outline of that knowledge during testing. The measure of comprehension used here was total meaningful recall: It included text propositions plus valid elaborations based on the interaction of text information and students’ existing knowledge. The results of conceptual clustering analyses suggest that organization was one of the mechanisms by which topical outlines increased meaningful recall. Additional analyses conducted only on the elaborations indicate that students produced more of them during long-term (six week) recall than during immediate recall.