Collaboration and Support for Student Success

This article discusses issues that impact student success in the United States. Increasing the number of college graduates could bring greater economic equity and help the nation remain competitive. However, the rates of student success in community colleges and universities are considered low with necessary gains requiring a broad base of collaboration. Toward this goal, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices developed Common College Completion Metrics that enable states to monitor achievement and progress at each of their higher education institutions. In addition, the government and private foundations are supporting initiatives designed to increase student retention. Interviews with dropouts have identified their reasons for withdrawal and the conditions that would have allowed them to stay in school. Some other fundamental changes for consideration to improve graduation rates involve adoption of better study habits by students, willingness of faculty to discontinue the general studies requirement, a well-defined support role for families, and public approval of an education entitlement that provides high school graduates free access to further schooling needed for employment.     

Examining public acquisition of science knowledge from social media in Singapore: an extension of the cognitive mediation model

This study extends the cognitive mediation model (CMM) by examining the role of social media in cultivating public science knowledge. A sample of 901 Singaporeans was collected through an online survey panel. The results showed that the CMM could be applied to a social media context with a focus on science literacy. Specifically, the findings indicated that people with higher levels of surveillance gratification and social utility motivations tended to pay more attention and to elaborate more about science news that they encounter on social media. Likewise, people with greater social utility motivation tended to engage in greater interpersonal discussions on social media. Notably, attention to news on social media had an indirect association with science knowledge through news elaboration and interpersonal discussion on social media. Implications for theory and practice for science communication were discussed.     

Preadolescents'' Social-Emotional Adjustment and Selective Attrition in Family Research

Researchers often ask subjects to commit considerable time and effort to completing tasks that are not especially enjoyable. In a multistage investigation of sixth-grade boys and their families, we hypothesized that boys who were prone to high levels of distress (i.e., anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and low well-being) but only low or moderate levels of self-restraint (i.e., consideration of others, impulse control, suppression of aggression, and responsibility) would be particularly unlikely to agree to participate. Consistent with this hypothesis, boys from 33 classrooms who were nominated by their peers as high in distress and moderate or low in self-restraint were significantly less likely than other boys to take part in an in-class survey. In addition, the families of boys who scored high in distress and moderate or low in self-restraint on the Weinberger Adjustment Inventory (WAI) were less likely than other families to agree to an observation session in their homes and to a series of telephone interviews about daily events in the boys' lives. Across the 3 phases of the research, the cumulative attrition rate of these at-risk boys was approximately 80%, compared to only 50% for those low in distress and/or high in self-restraint. These results suggest that the children of greatest interest in studies of social competence and family interaction may often be among those least adequately represented.