Drug usage in college students as a function of racial classification and minority group status

The reported drug usage of students attending a large southeastern statewide university system was investigated by use of a 112-item questionnaire and analyzed in terms of racial classification. Of the 24,475 student respondents, 84% reported their racial grouping and were included in this study. Many of the results were not congruent with findings of previously reported research. Black students reported significantly lower usage of alcohol, marihuana, stimulants, and hallucinogens when compared to white students, and furthermore, there were significant differences between most racial groups on five other drug usage levels.The group most often having contact with drugs was the American Indian, and the second highest level was reported by those responding Other to the racial classification item. The Oriental and white/Caucasian group reportedly used drugs to a much lesser degree. The reported usage levels of the black/Negro group was among the lowest of the five racial groups on most drugs. Blacks attending predominantly white institutions reported higher, albeit slightly, rates of drug usage than blacks attending predominantly black institutions.This research was supported in part by a grant from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, United States Department of Justice, under Discretionary Grant #72-DF-04-0037. The study was undertaken while the authors were affiliated with the University of Georgia at Athens.     

Rubric Rating with MFRM versus Randomly Distributed Comparative Judgment: A Comparison of Two Approaches to Second-Language Writing Assessment

The purpose of this study is to explore the reliability of a potentially more practical approach to direct writing assessment in the context of ESL writing. Traditional rubric rating (RR) is a common yet resource-intensive evaluation practice when performed reliably. This study compared the traditional rubric model of ESL writing assessment and many-facet Rasch modeling (MFRM) to comparative judgment (CJ), the new approach, which shows promising results in terms of reliability. We employed two groups of raters—novice and experienced—and used essays that had been previously double-rated, analyzed with MFRM, and selected with fit statistics. We compared the results of the novice and experienced groups against the initial ratings using raw scores, MFRM, and a modern form of CJ—randomly distributed comparative judgment (RDCJ). Results showed that the CJ approach, though not appropriate for all contexts, can be as reliable as RR while showing promise as a more practical approach. Additionally, CJ is easily transferable to novel assessment tasks while still providing context-specific scores. Results from this study will not only inform future studies but can help guide ESL programs in selecting a rating model best suited to their specific needs.     

Parental Plurilingual Capital in a Monolingual Context: Investigating Strengths to Support Young Children in Early Childhood Settings

Parents who are plurilingual have a portfolio of assets they can use to support the language development of their children. This portfolio of assets is positioned as a strength that parents bring into their partnership with early childhood educators. However, not all parents who are plurilingual have the same assets in their language portfolios. Our study, using case studies of parents who have multiple languages and a desire to raise their children with more than one language, demonstrates that previous parental experiences with multiple languages, and intra-familial support for multiple languages combine to impact on parental language strengths and the expectations parents have of early childhood professionals. To build effective partnerships with parents, early childhood professionals need to understand the assets in parental language portfolios.     

Comparing Teachers’ Job Satisfaction across Countries: A Multiple‐Pairwise Measurement Invariance Approach

There is much interest in comparing latent traits, such as teacher job satisfaction, in large international surveys. However, different countries respond to questionnaires in different languages and interpret the questions through different cultural lenses, raising doubts about the psychometric equivalence of the measurements. Making valid comparisons depends on the latent traits displaying scalar measurement invariance. Unfortunately, this condition is rarely met across many countries at once. Different approaches that maximize the utility of such surveys, but remain faithful to the principles of measurement invariance testing, are therefore needed. This article illustrates one such approach, involving multiple‐pairwise comparisons. This enables us to compare teacher job satisfaction in England to 17 of the countries that participated in TALIS 2013. Teacher job satisfaction in England was as low, or lower, than all of the 17 comparable countries.     

Connected and culturally embedded beliefs: Chinese and US teachers talk about how their students best learn mathematics

This study compares US and Chinese elementary mathematics teachers' beliefs about how students learn mathematics. Interviews with teachers in each country revealed that Chinese and US teachers have distinct ways of thinking about how mathematics should be taught and how students learn. Many Chinese teachers talked about developing students’ interest in mathematics and relating the content of mathematics lessons to real-life situations. The US teachers talked about students' learning styles and using hands-on approaches to learning mathematics. Furthermore, these beliefs may be widespread and persistent within each country because the set of ideas among teachers appear to be internally consistent. Implications for teacher change and the study of teachers' beliefs are discussed.