The Role of Community College First-Year Experience Programs in Promoting Transfer Among Latino Male Students

ABSTRACT

A qualitative case study approach was used to examine Latino male students and First-Year Experience (FYE) programs aimed at promoting student transfer. Two FYE programs at two community colleges in California were studied: Bridgetown Community College and Portlake Community College (pseudonyms). Study participants included four groups: Latino male FYE students, Latino male FYE alumni, FYE counselors, and FYE coordinators. Data collection strategies included semi-structured interviews, site observations, and document analysis. Analysis of data involved both deductive and inductive approaches, and resulted in identification of four findings critical to the success of FYE programs and their work with Latino males: (a) the need to support help-seeking behaviors, (b) the need to address the “long journey” to transfer, (c) the need to support students’ work burden and financial constraints, and (d) the need to incorporate approachable and culturally responsive practices. Overall, the study offers insights into how community colleges might strengthen transfer support for Latino males through FYE programs.     

Implementation of best practices for online teaching and learning in an online institution

The article documents the creation of and rationale behind best practices to maintain high performance for teaching and learning at an online university. The grassroots involvement of faculty, building on best practice efforts that guided faculty in the past, the effort to engage the full faculty in the review of documents describing best practices that were generated by a team of faculty, and the support for implementation of best practices to maintain high performance for Capella University faculty are described.     

Between Scientific Ideas and Christian Religious Beliefs

Science & Education - Despite the importance of evolution to understand living phenomena, evolution teaching confronts several tensions, especially with respect to teachers’ and...     

Prosodic sensitivity and reading fluency of musicians and non-musicians

Reading and Writing - This study investigates the effects of prosodic sensitivity on reading. Highly capable adult musicians (i.e., persons with potentially excellent prosodic skills) and...     

Intergenerational activities

Early Childhood Education Journal - How can we prepare the young children of today for the future, when 20 percent of all Americans will be old? Education about the process of human aging can help...     

Environmental literacy of youth movement members – is environmentalism a component of their social activism?

Youth-movements in Israel are non-formal organizations that educate for social and political involvement and provide a broad platform for youth involvement in the community. This study explored the question: does the social activism of adolescents who both elect for membership in youth movements and a leadership role of instructing younger members also reflect itself in environmentalism? In a survey of 1496 young instructors drawn from 15 official youth movements, findings on environmental literacy variables show youth are only generally knowledgeable about environmental problems; express ‘technical-optimism’ which leads them to limited concern for the environment; show limited recognition of the importance of environmental education, and show limited acknowledgment of the necessity for changes in personal consumerism. Findings also show that environmental issues are not on their mind since they are not a conversation topic with peers or family. Nonetheless, these youth also demonstrate strong self-efficacy to effect change; view themselves as role models for younger members; and express willingness to include environmentally-supportive activities within regular youth movement activities. Their valuing of nature also provides a foundation for building other environmental values. Further analysis shows how these findings can contribute theoretical and practical tools for incorporating sustainability within the youth movement framework, and help realize their potential for promoting sustainability in society.     

The Development of Consciousness Through the Supervision Process

The process of supervision can be regarded as an integrative process that enables the development of consciousness, since it helps counselors become aware of problems and search for ways of solving them. In this article the processes of supervision that lead towards growth and development of the professional and personal selves of an individual are examined. The process of supervision is related to several theoretical concepts that explain development in adulthood. Special emphasis is given to wisdom as a potential, natural stage of adult development, to the systemic or ‘construct aware’ stage of reasoning and to an attitude of self-questioning.     

Validating a model of effective teaching behaviour and student engagement: perspectives from Spanish students

Research consistently shows that teaching behaviour is a highly-important indicator of learning environments. Based on a teacher effectiveness model with six observable teaching behaviour domains (safe learning climate, efficient classroom management, clarity of instruction, activating teaching, teaching–learning strategies, and differentiation), the present paper examines the psychometric quality of the My Teacher questionnaire for capturing student perceptions of teaching behaviour in the Spanish secondary-education context. Additionally, this study validated the model of teaching behaviour and student engagement and its relevance in Spain. 7114 students of 410 teachers attending 56 public and private Spanish schools constituted the sample. The six teaching behavioural dimensions model were confirmed in the Spanish context. Regarding student academic engagement, the presence of two domains (behavioural and emotional engagement) were confirmed. Furthermore, results of a multiple-group structural equation modeling path analysis, examining the relationship between teaching behaviour and student engagement across different teaching experiences, revealed differential effects of teaching behaviour influences on students’ engagement. The percentage of explained variance was larger for emotional engagement than for behavioural engagement. Furthermore, teachers’ teaching experience explained differences in the relationship between perceived teaching behaviour and engagement. Two domains (learning climate and activating teaching) appeared to be the two most-important teaching domains for students’ behavioural engagement while, for emotional engagement, the most important domains for student engagement were learning climate and teaching learning strategies.

     

Supporting learning with interactive multimedia through active integration of representations

When learners explore dynamic and interactive visualisations they are often not able to interact with them in a systematic and goal-oriented way. Frequently, even supporting learners in processes of discovery learning does not lead to better learning outcomes. This can be due to missing pre-requisite knowledge such as the coherent mental integration of the pictorial and symbolic sources of information. In order to support learners in this process, we encouraged them to interactively and externally relate different static sources of information to each other before exploring dynamic and interactive visualisations. We evaluated the benefit of this instructional support in two experimental studies concerning the domains of statistics and mechanics. It revealed that the active integration of static representations before processing dynamic visualisations resulted in better performance and can provide a basis for a more systematic and goal-oriented experimentation behaviour during simulation-based discovery learning.in final form: 16 November 2004