The Changing Demographic Landscape of the Nation: Perspectives on College Opportunities for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders

Abstract

With the rapidly changing demography of the United States, there is a need for greater attention to expanding opportunities and reducing barriers to education for all. This article focuses on one of the nation's fastest-growing immigrant groups—Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs). A case study of a program at a community college shows the importance of developing educational practices and policies that support the unique needs and challenges of low-income AAPI students.     

Young people learning about health: the role of apps and wearable devices

ABSTRACT

Young people’s engagement with digital health technologies is dominated by risk narratives. Yet, there are very limited understandings, from the perspectives of young people, about the health-related issues and opportunities generated by digital health technologies. This article presents new evidence on the types of health-related apps and devices young people find, select and use, and the reasons for their choices. Data were generated from a participatory mixed method design with 245 young people (age 13–18). The data were analysed using a content-led pedagogical framework. The data illustrate, vividly, young people’s agency in digital health contexts and the complexity and fluidity of young people’s decision-making. Schools, PE lessons and sport, as well as family members and peers, were powerful influencers on young people’s digital health-related knowledge and behaviours. It is argued that better understanding young people’s agency in digital health contexts offers important insights into developing effective health-related pedagogies.     

Txting: the end of civilization (again)?

This paper begins with the author's recent participation in an Australian radio interview on the topic of SMS txting. It takes this as an entry point for an analysis and discussion of the discourses around txting to be found in a series of newspaper articles and taken up in the radio interview. Moving on from the initial analysis, the paper addresses some of the underlying tensions that come into play as new technologies and new literacies are taken up by young people and move with them into classrooms with existing institutional traditions around text and literacy.     

Time limits in testing: An analysis of eye movements and visual attention in spatial problem solving

Individuals with an aptitude for interpreting spatial information (high mental rotation ability: HMRA) typically master anatomy with more ease, and more quickly, than those with low mental rotation ability (LMRA). This article explores how visual attention differs with time limits on spatial reasoning tests. Participants were assorted to two groups based on their mental rotation ability scores and their eye movements were collected during these tests. Analysis of salience during testing revealed similarities between MRA groups in untimed conditions but significant differences between the groups in the timed one. Question‐by‐question analyses demonstrate that HMRA individuals were more consistent across the two timing conditions (κ = 0.25), than the LMRA (κ = 0.013). It is clear that the groups respond to time limits differently and their apprehension of images during spatial problem solving differs significantly. Without time restrictions, salience analysis suggests LMRA individuals attended to similar aspects of the images as HMRA and their test scores rose concomitantly. Under timed conditions however, LMRA diverge from HMRA attention patterns, adopting inflexible approaches to visual search and attaining lower test scores. With this in mind, anatomical educators may wish to revisit some evaluations and teaching approaches in their own practice. Although examinations need to evaluate understanding of anatomical relationships, the addition of time limits may induce an unforeseen interaction of spatial reasoning and anatomical knowledge. Anat Sci Educ 10: 528–537. © 2017 American Association of Anatomists.     

Dramatizing the Authentic Research of a Local Scientist to Urban Elementary Students Through Professional Theater

This article focuses on the impact of a professional play that we developed in order to introduce elementary learners of an urban school to the research of a scientist working at a local university. The play was written in a way that might increase student understandings of the nature of science, scientific inquiry, the identity of scientists, and the work that scientists do. We collected pre-and post-play questionnaire responses and drawings of scientists from third and fourth grade students who attended the play. We also interviewed five of the ten teachers whose students attended the play. Findings indicated that most of these teachers felt strongly that their students had learned about scientific inquiry, the identity of scientists, and the work that scientists do as a result of attending the play. However, less than half of the student questionnaires and drawings of scientists indicated such growth as a result of the play. That being said, numerous students were able to tell us what they learned from the play and many questionnaire responses and drawings indicated such learning. Implications for partnerships between schools and university faculty from various disciplines in order to develop potentially impactful plays that portray authentic scientific research are discussed.     

Infant pointing: communication to cooperate or communication to learn?

Tomasello, Carpenter, and Liszkowski (2007) present compelling data to support the view that infant pointing, from the outset, is communicative and deployed in many of the same situations in which adults would ordinarily point for one another, either to share their interest in something, or to informatively help the other person. This commentary concurs with the view that infant pointing is a communicative gesture, but challenges their interpretation of the motives behind pointing in 12-month-olds. An alternative account is proposed, according to which infant pointing is neither declarative nor imperative, but interrogative, and rather than being driven by the motive to share or help, it may serve a powerful cultural learning mechanism by which infants can obtain information from knowledgeable adults.     

Women's voices on recovery: a multi-method study of the complexity of recovery from child sexual abuse

OBJECTIVE: The current study was exploratory and used multiple methods to examine patterns of stability and change in resilient functioning across 7 years of early adulthood. Second, qualitative data were used to examine in greater detail survivors' own narratives about correlates of healing. METHOD: This study was longitudinal and used both structured and open-ended interviews. Eighty women with documented hospital records of child sexual abuse were interviewed at two time points 7 years apart in early adulthood. Structured interviews including investigator-based questions and standardized measures of trauma exposure and functioning were conducted. A subset of 21 survivors participated in in-depth, open-ended interviews about coping with sexual abuse. RESULTS: Quantitative findings showed patterns of both stability and change on an index of resilient functioning across multiple domains in the 7 years between interviews with 76% of participants showing less than a one standard deviation change in scores. Lower resilience was associated with exposure to additional trauma between the two interviews (r=-.44) while positive functioning was related to social role satisfaction and positive sense of community. Qualitative data permitted examination of the dynamic quality of recovery over time including the role of "turning points" across the lifespan. CONCLUSIONS: The findings extend previous studies of resilience in the examination of how it changes over the course of one segment of the life cycle. This study supports recent work that described resilience as a non-linear process and further highlights factors including the role of re-traumatization, social supports, and opportunities for making new choices that may be important correlates of recovery processes among sexual abuse survivors over time.     

Financing access and participation in primary education: Is there a ‘fast-track’ for fragile states?

Despite moves to ‘fast-track’ progress towards universal primary education, few fragile states have been able to access Fast Track Initiative (FTI) funding facilities. Weak systems and capacity have made these countries a high-risk proposition for donor investment. The absence of credible education sector plans has meant that the majority of fragile states are not eligible for endorsement to receive financial resources via the FTI. The analysis presented in this paper suggests that the FTI has struggled to identify suitable channels for resourcing education in these difficult development environments. Importantly, it finds that procedural and governance issues in particular have presented obstacles that have stymied the promotion of wider access to education in fragile states under the FTI umbrella.     

Spelling development: Fine-tuning strategy-use and capitalising on the connections between words

English spelling, as well as in many other languages, consists of three elements: morphology, etymology and phonology. Spelling instruction, however, focuses primarily on phonology and there is a dearth of intervention studies that examine the effect of explicitly teaching all three elements to children. We report two studies, which examined 5- to 11-year olds' spelling strategies and the effect of a spelling intervention. The intervention groups, in both studies, significantly outperformed control groups on all spelling measures. The benefits of teaching children about morphology and etymology are discussed.