Teaching Diversity across Disciplines: Reflections from African-American Faculty in Four Different Academic Settings

The authors, male and female African-American faculty from different academic disciplines at predominantly white institutions, share personal reflections on their experiences teaching postsecondary graduate and professional courses that focus on diversity and multicultural themes. This article provides tools and strategies for improving the overall effectiveness for those who teach diversity courses from a framework the authors have codified as a “3-C” perspective: context, characters, and curriculum.     

Behaviour and adjustment problems of young developmentally delayed children

ABSTRACT

As part of an ongoing longitudinal study of developmental delay (DD), 35 six‐year‐old children with delays of unknown aetiology were assessed with measures of cognitive, language and educational competence. Their parents provided detailed information about their self‐help and personal‐social competencies, behaviour problems and temperament. As a group, the DD children evidenced high rates of behaviour problems, but there was considerable within‐group variability in intensity and pattern of problems. Low relationships were found between the intensity of behaviour problems and children's chronological age (CA), IQ, language level and self‐help competencies. The child variable most strongly associated with behaviour problems was temperament, or behavioural style.     

Loquacity and quantity of constructs as predictors of social perspective‐taking

Over the past decade, considerable attention has been devoted to cognitive complexity in the human communication literature. However, the extent to which loquacity, or simple amount of verbal response to stimuli, rather than cognitive processes, has been measured by indices supposed to measure complexity is questionable. One issue that emerges from this controversy concerns whether partialing out the variance in variables, such as social perspective‐taking, due to loquacity would lead to a low amount of shared variance between complexity and such variables. In the present study, cognitive complexity scores based on the Role Category Questionnaire correlated significantly with social perspective‐taking scores. However, the results of a multiple regression analysis indicated that cognitive complexity scores did not contribute significantly to the prediction when loquacity was entered as the first variable in the equation.     

The affective orientation to communication: Conceptual and empirical distinctions

Affectively oriented (AO) individuals are people who are aware of their emotional states, value that information, and use it to guide social interaction. Although this concept sounds similar to others related to self‐awareness, emotionality, and patterns of information seeking, the process is both conceptually and empirically unique.

Study One compared individuals on AO and several measures which share underlying dimensions: affect intensity, self‐consciousness, extroversion, neuroticism, monitoring vs. blunting behavior style, and beliefs about romance. Affective orientation was moderately related to affect intensity and private self‐consciousness, and exhibited small correlations with monitoring of information‐seeking, extroversion, and idealism of romantic beliefs. Study Two assessed the stability of AO responses. Across a 4‐week time period AO remained highly consistent and thus did not appear to be a function of feelings at the time.     

From Parental Involvement to Children's Mathematical Performance: The Role of Mathematics Anxiety

This study examined whether children's mathematics anxiety serves as an underlying pathway between parental involvement and children's mathematics achievement. Participants included 78 low-income, ethnic minority parents and their children residing in a large urban center in the northeastern United States. Parents completed a short survey tapping several domains of parental involvement, and children were assessed on mathematics anxiety, whole number arithmetic, word problems, and algebraic reasoning. Research Findings: The results indicated that parents influence children's mathematics achievement by reducing mathematics anxiety, particularly for more difficult kinds of mathematics. Specifically, the mediation analyses demonstrated that parental home support and expectations influenced children's performance on word problems and algebraic reasoning by reducing children's mathematics anxiety. Mathematics anxiety did not mediate the relationship between home support and expectations and whole number arithmetic. Practice or Policy: Policies and programs targeting parental involvement in mathematics should focus on home-based practices that do not require technical mathematical skills. Parents should receive training, resources, and support on culturally appropriate ways to create home learning environments that foster high expectations for children's success in mathematics.     

Programming Pluralism: Using Learning Analytics to Detect Patterns in the Learning of Computer Programming

New high-frequency, automated data collection and analysis algorithms could offer new insights into complex learning processes, especially for tasks in which students have opportunities to generate unique open-ended artifacts such as computer programs. These approaches should be particularly useful because the need for scalable project-based and student-centered learning is growing considerably. In this article, we present studies focused on how students learn computer programming, based on data drawn from 154,000 code snapshots of computer programs under development by approximately 370 students enrolled in an introductory undergraduate programming course. We use methods from machine learning to discover patterns in the data and try to predict final exam grades. We begin with a set of exploratory experiments that use fully automated techniques to investigate how much students change their programming behavior throughout all assignments in the course. The results show that students’ change in programming patterns is only weakly predictive of course performance. We subsequently hone in on 1 single assignment, trying to map students’ learning process and trajectories and automatically identify productive and unproductive (sink) states within these trajectories. Results show that our process-based metric has better predictive power for final exams than the midterm grades. We conclude with recommendations about the use of such methods for assessment, real-time feedback, and course improvement.     

Part-time faculty status and student evaluation of teaching: An analysis of criminal justice classes

Although part-time (p/t) faculties constitute a growing proportion of college instructors, there is little work on their level of teaching effectiveness relative to full-time (f/t) faculty. Previous work on a key indicator of perceived teaching effectiveness, student evaluation of teaching (SET), and faculty status (p/t/ vs f/t) is marked by a series of shortcomings including lack of a systematic theoretical framework and lack of multivariate statistical analysis techniques to check for possible spuriousness. The present study corrects for these shortcomings. Data consist of SETs from 175 sections of criminal justice classes taught at a Midwestern urban university. Controls are introduced for variables drawn from the literature and include ascribed characteristics of the professor, grade distribution, and structural features of the course (e.g., level, size). The results of a multivariate regression analysis indicate that even after controlling for the other predictors of SETs, p/t faculty receive significantly higher student evaluation scores than f/t faculty. Further, faculty status was the most important predictor of SETs. The results present the first systematic evidence on faculty status and SETs.