Increasing Educational Attainment and Aspiration in an Underserved Community: The Perspective of Urban-Community Leaders

Latino students are significantly underrepresented in higher education. As the largest and fastest growing racial/ethnic population in the US, this is cause for national concern. Additionally, this rapid population growth is a call for community and school leaders from underserved communities to assess their service areas and focus on interventions to increase the college-going rates of youth. Maywood is a city located in Southeast Los Angeles. Like many other urban areas, Maywood’s largely Latino population is underrepresented in higher education. This research focused on interviewing Maywood’s community and school leaders (n = 24) to gain insight into their perceptions of their role and responsibility to address issues surrounding their community’s low levels of educational attainment. A key theme emerged revealing that leaders understand their community’s educational issues but do not see their role as leaders to directly address this issue to build a college-going culture. Implications for practice in strengthening community partnerships and developing a college-going culture are provided and a series of recommendations for the creation of a college-going culture are discussed.     

Assessment and teaching of science skills: whole of programme perceptions of graduating students

This study reports on science student perceptions of their skills (scientific knowledge, oral communication, scientific writing, quantitative skills, teamwork and ethical thinking) as they approach graduation. The focus is on which teaching activities and assessment tasks over the whole programme of study students thought utilised each of the six nominated skills. In this quantitative study involving two Australian research-intensive universities, the teaching activities identified by students as developing the broadest number of skills were laboratory classes and tutorials. Lectures were only effective for developing scientific knowledge and, to a limited extent, ethical thinking. Assessment tasks that students perceived to utilise the broadest range of skills were assignments and oral presentations. The findings of this study document the students’ perspective about their gains in skill sets, and the teaching activities and assessment tasks that require them to use and thus develop these skills. The findings provide an opportunity to evaluate the constructive alignment of skills development, teaching activities and assessment tasks from a student’s perspective. Further research is required to actually measure the skills that students gain over their whole programme of study.     

Comparing Lectures: Effects of the Technological Context of the Studio

This presentation compares how lectures are being performed in different technological contexts: that of the studio, for taping of videotapes, or in front of a camera for the purpose of videoconferencing, or, for a live presentation. The different contexts will be described according to the communication theory of the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, and contrasted with findings from contemporary research on lecturing and teacher–student interaction. The comparison between the videotaped lecture and the live lecture reveals important differences as to style of communication. The taped lectures are more stringent and content-oriented, while the live-lectures are time-consuming and more focused on establishing dialogues with students. Videoconference-lecturing contains features that place it between the live- and videotaped lecture. This paper concludes that videoconferencing is problematic with serious problems to handle for students and teachers alike.     

Building Expertise: a process perspective on the development or change of teachers’ beliefs

Based on a process perspective of expertise development, eight experienced teachers were interviewed about their beliefs about student learning, i.e. the way they developed their beliefs, and to what extent they have changed and intend to further change these beliefs. Learning or expertise development by teachers appears to be highly personalised or subjective, and rarely based on enhanced reflection. Primarily, dissatisfaction about the actual situation and, subsequently, attempts to improve that situation encourage teachers to develop or change their beliefs. As is the case with most teachers the change which occurs is gradually based on cumulative experiences, although also a radical change of beliefs on the basis of key‐experiences may not be excluded. It is predominantly personal motives which seem to determine teacher learning. It is argued that collaborative learning by teachers should be promoted in schools, though individually initiated learning by teachers may also had to improvements that can be implemented by colleagues.     

Modeling and Measuring High School Students’ Computational Thinking Practices in Science

Journal of Science Education and Technology - Despite STEM education communities recognizing the importance of integrating computational thinking (CT) into high school curricula, computation still...     

Reading for meaning: the effects of Developmental Education on reading achievements of primary school students from low SES and ethnic minority families

The appropriateness of innovative educational concepts for students from a low socioeconomic status (SES) or ethnic minority background is sometimes called into question. Disadvantaged students are supposed to benefit more from traditional approaches with Programmatic Instruction (PI). We examined Developmental Education (DE), an innovative approach, inspired by Vygotskian theory, in which reading skills are developed through meaningful reading of texts corresponding to students’ self-generated problems. The effectiveness of DE is compared to PI in terms of reading comprehension, strategy knowledge, and reading motivation of 4th-grade students; 170 students from ethnic minority or low SES background participated in a pretest-posttest natural 2-group design. Outcomes were similar in both approaches, with one exception: Students with an ethnic minority background in DE performed better on strategy knowledge than similar students in PI. These results are discussed in relation to previous studies on the appropriateness of innovative curricula for disadvantaged students.     

Social interaction interventions in an inclusive era: Attitudes of teachers in early childhood self‐contained and inclusive settings

This study investigated the perceptions and attitudes of teachers in early childhood settings toward social interaction interventions appropriate for young children with disabilities. Participants were 137 teachers working in either self‐contained classroom settings (SC) or inclusive classroom settings (INC). Variables that might interfere with perceived acceptability, feasibility, and current use of interventions were explored. These included theoretical orientation, attitude toward inclusion, experience working with children with disabilities, and teacher efficacy. Results indicated that SC and INC teachers are strikingly similar in their perceptions of interventions despite literature‐based indications that philosophical and theoretical differences between the two groups might influence attitudes. Implications for consultation practices by school psychologists and related professionals are discussed. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Psychol Schs 42: 53–63, 2005.     

The Impact of First‐year Education Practicum and Study on Preservice Teachers: a West Australian perspective

The pressure to improve preparation programs for teachers increasingly is evident in Australia, UK and the US. At Curtin University, the Faculty of Education is interested in the way in which preservice students perceive the teaching role and how these perceptions alter during their undergraduate experiences. First year undergraduates in the Faculty of Education were asked early in the year to give short written comments, in an informal situation, to the question “What is teaching?” At the end of their first year the same students were then asked “How have your ideas about teaching changed, and what influenced those changes?” An analysis of students’ responses showed considerable changes in their views of the profession with the single most important factor in the change being the first practicum. Also many of the student teachers’ views were expressed in strongly emotional terms. This paper reports the findings of the first year of a three year project planned to continue mapping students’ conceptions of teaching.