bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Staying on or Dropping Out? The Role of Intergroup Friendship and Perceived Teacher Support in Minority and Nonminority School Careers
Authors: Baysu GÜlselİ , Phalet Karen
Published: November 2021

Background

Bridging educational and social psychology, we examine the impact of positive intergroup relations in schools on minority and nonminority school careers.

Purpose of Study

The study aims to estimate and explain the attainment gap between Turkish Belgian minority and Belgian nonminority students at four stages of their school careers, controlling for family background and prior attainment. Intergroup friendship and perceived teacher support were expected to reduce the attainment gap.

Research Design

Randomly sampled Turkish Belgian students and students in a nonminority comparison sample (N = 661) answered retrospective questions on their school careers and early schooling experiences. By way of separate multinomial logistic regressions, we estimated the attainment gap as the odds of leaving school or staying in vocational (vs. academic) education at four stages: lower, middle, upper secondary, and tertiary levels. Next, we tested the effects of intergroup friendship and teacher support on track placement and dropout at each level.

Results

As expected, our findings indicated a persistent and widening attainment gap between minority and nonminority school careers in the hierarchical structure of the Belgian school system. Minority students who had started in academic tracks were less likely to continue in academic and higher education and more likely to leave school at each stage than similar nonminority students. Intergroup friendship (for minority students) and perceived support from teachers (for all) significantly increased staying-on rates and reduced the attainment gap.

Conclusion

Our findings demonstrate the key role of positive intergroup relations with peers and teachers in enabling students, especially minority students, to stay on in school.
Where a is Ordinary: The Evolution of American College and University Grading, 1940-2009
Authors: Rojstaczer Stuart , Healy Christopher
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

College grades can influence a student's graduation prospects, academic motivation, postgraduate job choice, professional and graduate school selection, and access to loans and scholarships. Despite the importance of grades, national trends in grading practices have not been examined in over a decade, and there has been a limited effort to examine the historical evolution of college grading.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

Here we look at the evolution of grading over time and space at American colleges and universities over the last 70 years. Our data provide a means to examine how instructors’ assessments of excellence, mediocrity, and failure have changed in higher education.

Data Collection and Analysis

We have collected historical and contemporary data on A–F letter grades awarded from over 200 four-year colleges and universities. Our contemporary data on grades come from 135 schools, with a total enrollment of 1.5 million students.

Research Design

Through the use of averages over time and space as well as regression models, we examine how grading has changed temporally and how grading is a function of school selectivity, school type, and geographic region.

Findings/Results

Contemporary data indicate that, on average across a wide range of schools, A's represent 43% of all letter grades, an increase of 28 percentage points since 1960 and 12 percentage points since 1988. D's and F's total typically less than 10% of all letter grades. Private colleges and universities give, on average, significantly more A's and B's combined than public institutions with equal student selectivity. Southern schools grade more harshly than those in other regions, and science and engineering-focused schools grade more stringently than those emphasizing the liberal arts. At schools with modest selectivity, grading is as generous as it was in the mid-1980s at highly selective schools. These prestigious schools have, in turn, continued to ramp up their grades. It is likely that at many selective and highly selective schools, undergraduate GPAs are now so saturated at the high end that they have little use as a motivator of students and as an evaluation tool for graduate and professional schools and employers.

Conclusions/Recommendations

As a result of instructors gradually lowering their standards, A has become the most common grade on American college campuses. Without regulation, or at least strong grading guidelines, grades at American institutions of higher learning likely will continue to have less and less meaning.
Moving Beyond Sinking or Swimming: Reconceptualizing the Needs of Beginning Mathematics Teachers
Authors: Wood Marcy B. , Jilk Lisa M. , Paine Lynn W.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

New teacher induction programs frequently focus on the struggles of teachers who are, metaphorically speaking, sinking rather than swimming in the challenging waters of actual classroom teaching. Also, research on induction and induction programs doesn't typically address the subject-specific needs of new teachers. Yet new teachers are not in generic environments in which content plays a minor role: They are negotiating the enormously complex context of teaching particular content to particular students in a particular moment.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

Our goal is to add to and challenge the conversations about what learning to teach mathematics requires and how its complexity makes content-specific induction and rich opportunities to learn not only desirable but also essential. We use a framing of teaching as a practice that is fundamentally about connection of students and content.

Population/Participants/Subjects

We report on the cases of two well-started novice mathematics teachers. These cases come from a larger study of novice mathematics and science teachers in subject-specific induction programs across the United States.

Research Design

Exploratory case study based on interviews and observations.

Findings/Results

One new teacher made considerable progress in thinking about and using knowledge of students to enhance mathematical learning. However, there were still several areas in which the new teacher missed opportunities to probe student understanding and further connect students to mathematics. And yet, because of the teacher's competence relative to other new teachers, her support from her mentor was diminishing. This left her with few opportunities for support in reflecting on her practice. The second new teacher struggled to make sense of the role of the teacher. She was a strong beginning teacher in a context that provided support and encouragement for student-centered teaching. However, she struggled to envision and enact a teaching role that either allowed students to make their own connections to mathematics or enabled her to learn how to work toward that role.

Conclusions/Recommendations

Our two new teachers made considerable progress in their teaching. Although there was much to celebrate about their progress, there was still much about the complexity of teaching, specifically teaching math, that the new teachers had to learn. This study suggests that we need to go beyond evaluation of visible performance or attention to instructional strategies to help new teachers think about how to simultaneously manage the complex relationships with students, with mathematical content, and with the connection between students and mathematics in ways that help them to continually teach and learn from teaching.
Toward Scholarship in Practice
Authors: Singer-Gabella Marcy
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Over the past decade, scholars of teaching and teacher education have concluded that the field lacks a common conceptual vocabulary to undergird systematic investigation of practice. Absent a shared language, we can neither articulate common questions nor establish common tools—essential elements for building knowledge and advancing practice. Thus, despite the failure of earlier attempts, scholars agree that the quest for a shared language and “grammar of practice” must be taken up anew if the field is to move forward.

Objective

In this article, I argue that succeeding in this quest requires not only refocused lines of research but also the cultivation of scholarship that makes visible the interplay of reasoning and action underlying skilled work of professional preparation. Such scholarship should provide well-articulated and examined models and tools to support the development of prospective and practicing teachers—resources that can be evaluated and built upon. Products of this work may well diverge in form from other, more conventional scholarly products and so may demand new mechanisms for peer review and dissemination. The goal of this article is to establish a conceptual framework to support such a system.

Research Design

Drawing on philosophical and empirical inquiries into the nature of practice and practical reasoning, as well as the efforts to expand definitions of scholarship spearheaded by Boyer, Shulman, and others at the Carnegie Foundation, I conceptualize this distinct form of work as “scholarship in practice.” I then posit a set of criteria by which scholarship in practice might be assessed, illustrating these through two extended examples and considering implications for peer review.

Conclusions/Recommendations

Advancing scholarship that capitalizes on the expertise and talent of faculty who not only understand but also skillfully enact the work of preparing teachers is vital to the progress of the field. Moving forward with this agenda requires that faculty in schools of education take the time to establish shared understandings of the nature and possibilities of this kind of scholarship, clear expectations regarding quality, and infrastructure to support development, review, and feedback. The enactment of a fair and systematic review process demands thoughtful discussion grounded in specific examples, within and across institutions.
African American Mathematics Teachers as Agents in Their African American Students’ Mathematics Identity Formation
Authors: Clark Lawrence M. , Badertscher Eden M. , Napp Carolina
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Recent research in mathematics education has employed sociocultural and historical lenses to better understand how students experience school mathematics and come to see themselves as capable mathematics learners. This work has identified mathematics classrooms as places where power struggles related to students’ identities occur, struggles that often involve students’ affiliations with racial, ethnic, and gender categories and the mathematics teacher as a critical agent in students’ mathematics identity development. Frameworks for identifying resources that mathematics teachers draw on to teach are evolving, and emerging dimensions of teachers’ knowledge, namely knowledge of students’ lived experiences and histories, as well as teachers’ experiences and identities, are increasingly being considered alongside more traditional dimensions of the knowledge teachers draw on in their practice.

Purpose

The purpose of this article is to explore the perspectives and practices of two African American mathematics teachers, Madison Morgan and Floyd Lee, as they support their African American students’ mathematics identity formation and development.

Participants

At the time of the study, Morgan and Lee were high school mathematics teachers in a large urban school district. Both participants were selected for this analysis because of considerable differences in their life histories, pedagogical approaches, and perspectives.

Research Design

Each teacher was observed approximately 25 times and interviewed 9–10 times. The primary data for this analysis consist of a subset of observations and interviews for the purposes of conducting a qualitative cross-case analysis that examines themes, similarities, and differences in Morgan's and Lee's approaches to supporting their students’ mathematics identity development.

Findings

Morgan's and Lee's experiences, perspectives, and practices characterize two very different perspectives of what constitutes a positive mathematics identity, while both maintain connections to race and racial identities. In both cases, there exists a subtle paradox in the underlying motivations that the teachers communicated in their interviews related to socializing their African American students and the practices they actually employ in their classrooms. Furthermore, both teachers made use of their capacity to serve as models and motivators for students’ current and future success in mathematics.

Conclusions/Recommendations

If equitable high-quality mathematics instruction is a sincere goal of the mathematics education community, we strongly recommend that researchers further explore the ways that teacher identity, including those dimensions associated with race, class, and gender, serves as an instructional and motivational resource as teachers work to create productive and meaningful learning environments for their students.
Learning to See Students: Opportunities to Develop Relational Practices of Teaching through Community-Based Placements in Teacher Education
Authors: Mcdonald Morva A. , Bowman Michael , Brayko Kate
Published: November 2021

Background

For decades, scholars have argued that teaching and learning depend fundamentally on the quality of relationships between teachers and students, yet there is little research about how teachers develop relationships with students or how teacher education prepares teachers to do this work. Arguably, articulating the relational practices of teaching is critical for those aiming to prepare teachers to reach across differences, educate from a social justice perspective, and teach an increasingly diverse population of students. Noting the emphasis on relationships in community-based organizations (CBOs), the authors investigated preservice field placements in CBOs as potentially strategic contexts for learning about relational aspects of teaching.

Objective

The authors engaged the questions: What do candidates learn in CBO field placements? What are sources of variation between candidates’ learning outcomes? What are individual and contextual factors that shaped candidates’ opportunities to learn in CBOs? Specifically, which factors influenced candidates’ inclination and capacity to enact relational teaching practices (e.g., the methods and skills associated with learning about and connecting with students, families, and communities)?

Research Design

This study was a 3-year longitudinal investigation. Authors followed two cohorts of candidates from their first quarter of preparation into their first year of teaching. Qualitative methods, such as interviews, observations, and document review were employed in this inquiry of 12 case study candidates. To examine questions of variation, authors also conducted an in-depth comparative case analysis of a subset of two candidates and their CBO placement contexts.

Findings

CBO placements facilitated opportunities for candidates to “see students”: candidates developed deeper understandings about children and more nuanced conceptions of diversity; experienced and examined school from an out-of-school perspective; and demonstrated greater attentiveness to the role of context in learning. The more detailed comparative analysis of two cases revealed variation in candidates’ experiences and their enactment of practices involved in building relationships with children and families. This analysis identified individual and situational factors (in coursework and CBOs) that facilitated and impeded candidate learning in CBOs.

Conclusions

Findings from this study highlight the types of learning outcomes that preser-vice community-based placements potentially afford, as well as factors that make some placements more educative than others. The authors offer a theoretical lens that attends to variation in learning, which could be leveraged in future empirical work. This research contributes to the field's developing efforts to identify key social justice teaching practices and to conceptualize pedagogies of enactment for such practices.
Opportunities and Challenges in Representing Narrative Inquiries Digitally
Authors: Craig Cheryl J.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Within the context of four locally funded research projects, the researcher was asked to disseminate the findings of her narrative inquiries not to the research community, which had previously been the case, but to the practice and philanthropic communities. This, in turn, created a representational crisis because practitioners and philanthropists typically do not read research reports.

Purposes/Objectives/Research Question/Focus of Study

In this paper, two sources previously cut off from one another—the narrative inquiry research method and the digital storytelling approach—were brought together to inform how the live research projects became represented.

Setting

The four research endeavors, all involving arts-based instruction and all funded by the same reform movement, were undertaken in four different school sites serving primarily underserved minority youth in the fourth largest city in the U.S.

Population/Participants/Subjects

The participants were mainly teachers, although some principals, students, and grandparents contributed to certain digital representations. Research assistants were also highly involved.

Conclusion

This meta-level “inquiry into inquiry” traversed all four narrative inquiries and the digital exemplars produced for each to show how digital narrative inquiries (narrative inquiries represented through digital story) attend to eight considerations: relationship, perspective, authorial voice, cultural/contextual considerations, relevance, negotiation, audience and technology were learned. While this “inquiry into inquiry” addresses definitional and others queries at the intersection where narrative inquiry and digital stor y meet, other questions remain to be addressed that will necessitate future research.
The Effects of Student Demographics and School Resources on California School Performance Gain: A Fixed Effects Panel Model
Authors: Wu Mei-Jiun
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Recently emerged with the implementation of the California's Public Schools Accountability Act of 1999 and the NCLB Act of 2001 is an increase in the number of education production function studies estimating the relationship between educational inputs and APIs. While the majority of past research on California school performance focuses on the impacts of different demographic measures and school resources on API scores at interschool level, few are done to study the effects of changes in similar factors on performance gain at intraschool level. Given that school performance is to be measured against oneself over time under California's current accountability system, the need is great to understand how school performance gain is affected by changes in student demographics and school characteristics within the school.

Objective Of Study

The primary objective of this study is to investigate how APIs change with student demographics and school resources within individual schools. It is hypothesized that changes in factors contributing to interschool variations in API may also affect school API gains. In addition, the impacts of these variables on API gains of individual schools are then compared with results from prior cross-sectional studies to see if their effects on school performance differ between and within the schools.

Research Design

Using the fixed effects regression a hypothetical causal relationship proposed between API gains and changes in nine student demographic variables, including seven racial/ethnic, free and reduced price meal and English language learning subgroups, plus seven school resource variables was estimated.

Findings

School API gains appeared very sensitive to changes in all 16 variables. A 1% change in student demographics at school level was significant enough to change API by an average of -5.0077 to 1.2372 points, while changes in school resources by 1 unit was found to affect school API in the range of -0.0212 to 2.5013.

Conclusions

While California places great responsibility on individual schools for student growth, little policy consideration is given to the likely effects of demographic and resource changes on school performance within the school. Moreover, this study's confirmation of the positive impact of teachers’ advanced degree and full teaching credential on performance gains suggests that teacher qualifications may hold the key to improving student achievement.
Exploring Differences in the Distribution of Teacher Qualifications Across Mexico and South Korea: Evidence from the Teaching and Learning International Survey
Authors: Luschei Thomas F. , Chudgar Amita , Rew W. Joshua
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Although substantial evidence from the United States indicates that more qualified teachers are disproportionately concentrated among academically and economically advantaged children, little cross-national research has examined the distribution of teacher qualifications across schools and students. As a result, we know little about how different institutional contexts, policies, and priorities influence children's access to qualified teachers.

Research Question

Our research questions are: (1) Are the qualifications of lower-secondary teachers within and across Mexico and South Korea distributed uniformly across schools? (2) If not, does the distribution of teacher qualifications in each country favor less or more advantaged children? (3) How can dissimilarities in teacher-related policies and educational priorities help to explain differences in the distribution of teacher qualifications across Mexico and South Korea?

Research Design

We employ secondary analysis of data from the Teaching and Learning International Survey, which was conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in 2007/2008. We use these data to describe the distribution of various teacher qualifications across communities of different sizes and across schools with varying levels of parental education. We also explore cross-national differences in institutional priorities and teacher-related policies. We compare Mexico and South Korea because while these two countries are similar in the level of teacher hiring and assignment, they are quite different in terms of their general commitment to educational equity.

Findings/Results

We find that the distribution of qualified teachers in South Korea is skewed toward disadvantaged children, while Mexican teachers tend to be distributed in a way that favors more advantaged students. Specifically, in South Korea students living in rural areas and those in schools with lower average parental education have greater access to better educated and more experienced teachers. The opposite occurs in Mexico.

Conclusions/Recommendations

We argue that these differences are due to both explicit policies and a greater commitment to educational equity in South Korea, relative to Mexico. Moreover, these differences are likely to be related to large cross-national differences in educational performance and equity.
Reading in the Crawl Space: A Study of an Urban School's Literacy-Focused Community of Practice
Authors: Francois Chantal
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

The pressure to understand “what works” to advance adolescents’ reading development has increased as the Common Core State Standards’ call for youth to grapple with a range of complex texts. While we have learned more about promising reading programs and interventions for adolescent students in schools, few programs have had a demonstrable impact on middle and high school students’ reading achievement. As a result, categorical reading underperformance among youth persists in schools nationwide and is worse in urban schools. Instead of examining the effects of a reading program in isolation, we may need to turn our attention to understand how those programs are lived and enacted within the contexts of their school cultures.

Purpose and Research Questions

This study depicts one urban school's efforts to support its middle and high school students in reading. Two research questions guided this study: 1. What are the current practices designed to provide a sociocultural context conducive to growth in reading skills at Grant Street Secondary School? 2. How do various organizational members (i.e., students and staff) perceive and experience these practices at Grant Street Secondary School? Though a range of factors influenced students’ reading at the school, this paper provides an in-depth portrayal of another instructional component — independent reading — that emerged in my analysis as vital to the way students and staff oriented themselves around literacy.

Research Design

Because the theoretical frame for this study assumes that literacy is social and situated, my research design reflected an effort to describe interactions related to reading, the domains where reading activity circulated, and perceptions of those interactions. As such, I drew upon three sources of qualitative data: interviews from staff and students, ethnographic observational data, and documents. These three sources of qualitative data enabled me to describe the literacy activities at the school and locate them in the larger school organizational and cultural processes.

Conclusions and Recommendations

This study suggests that students may benefit from daily, sustained time for independent reading time that is instructional. This study also suggests that coordinated efforts across school staff may ensure youth's positive interactions with texts. This study also holds implications for school-based research focused on disciplinary literacy. Ultimately, this research reconceptualizes our understanding of effective instructional practices for adolescents, emphasizing a multidimensional approach that highlights the role of reading as a social activity.
The Penetration of Technocratic Logic into the Educational Field: Rationalizing Schooling from the Progressives to the Present
Authors: Mehta Jal
Published: November 2021

Context

No Child Left Behind is only the most recent manifestation of a longstanding American impulse to reform schools through accountability systems created from afar. While research has explored the causes and consequences of No Child Left Behind, this study puts the modern accountability movement in longer historical perspective, seeking to identify broader underlying patterns that shape this approach to reform.

Purpose and Research Design

The study explores the question of the short and longer-term causes of the movement to “rationalize” schools by comparing three major movements demanding accountability in American education across the 20th century: the efficiency reforms of the Progressive Era; the now almost forgotten movement toward accountability in the late 1960s and early 1970s; and the modern standards and accountability movement, culminating in No Child Left Behind. This paper considers the three movements as cases of school “rationalization” in the Weberian sense, in that each sought to reduce variation and discretion across schools in favor of increasingly formal systems of standardized top-down control.

Findings

This impulse to rationalize schools cannot be explained by interest group or partisan explanations since the reformers defy easy ideological categorization.. Instead, the reforms can be understood as a penetration of “technocratic logic” into the educational sphere. In each movement, this process exhibited a similar pattern: (1) the identification of a crisis of quality which destabilized the existing educational status quo; (2) the elevation of a technocratic logic, backed by the knowledge base of a high-high status epistemic community; (3) the rallying of ideologically diverse powerful actors external to the schools behind a commensurating logic that promised control over and improvement of an unwieldy school system; and (4) the inability of education to resist this technocratic logic (and often to be co-opted by it) due to teaching's historical institutionalization as a feminized, weak, bureau-cratically-administered field lacking its own set of widely respected countervailing professional standards.

Conclusions/Implications

This history suggests that unless teachers are able to develop and organize a stronger field, they will remain at the whim of external actors. It also suggests that top-down accountability-centered approaches are limited if the goal is to consistently produce teaching that can help students engage in higher level academic work. Rather than continuing to pursue these rationalizing strategies, this analysis and emerging international evidence suggest that a more promising approach would be to work towards professionalizing the educational field.
Quantifying the Consequences of Missing School: Linking School Nurses to Student Absences to Standardized Achievement
Authors: Gottfried Michael A.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Parents, policymakers, and researchers uphold that missing school has negative implications on schooling success, particularly for students in urban schools. However, it has thus far been an empirical challenge within educational research to estimate the true effect that absences have on achievement outcomes. This study addresses this issue by applying multiple quasi-experimental methods and, subsequently, contributes a more accurate understanding of the pervasive, negative effects of missing school.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of the Study

The purpose of this study is to determine the effects of individual-level absences on individual-level standardized testing achievement (reading and math) in an urban school district.

Population/Participants/Subjects

The dataset compiled for this study is multilevel and longitudinal and is comprised of five elementary school cohorts within the School District of Philadelphia, for a total of N=20,932 student observations over three academic years. Individual student records were linked to teacher, classroom, and school administrative data as well as to census residential-block neighborhood information.

Research Design

This study combines secondary data analyses and quasi-experimental methods. This study begins with a baseline, linear model of achievement, where the dependent variables are Stanford Achievement Test Ninth Edition (SAT9) reading and math scores. To address issues pertaining to omitted variable bias, this study employs three methods: fixed effects, value-added, and instrumental variable models.

Findings

Consistently across all methods employed in this study, the results indicate a potentially causal, detrimental negative effect of absences on both reading and math standardized achievement. The effects remain significant even after accounting for additional student, neighborhood, teacher, classroom, and school factors.

Conclusions/Recommendations

This study demonstrates that after accounting for omitted variable bias in multiple capacities, the negative relationship between absences and achievement is even more detrimental than reported in previous research. With a more detailed and realistic prediction of the negative ramifications of missing school, it now becomes possible to develop data-driven educational policy.
Teaching to and Beyond the Test: The Influence of Mandated Accountability Testing in One Social Studies Teacher's Classroom
Authors: Neumann Jacob W.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

The nature of the impact of state-mandated accountability testing on teachers’ classroom practices remains contested. While many researchers argue that teachers change their teaching in response to mandated testing, others contend that the nature and degree of the impact of testing on teaching remains unclear. The research on the relationship between testing and teaching in social studies follows this pattern. For example, some researchers argue that mandated testing fosters a “just the facts, ma'am” approach to teaching social studies. Others, however, contend that factors such as teachers’ personal beliefs about social studies and about what learners need to know are equally, if not more, determinative influences on teaching as are testing pressures.

Focus of Study

This article presents an extended and fine-grained analysis of the influence of state-mandated accountability testing on one social studies teacher's classroom practice.

Research Design

Grounded in the narrative inquiry tradition, this case study spans approximately two and a half years of fieldwork, including approximately 110 days of observations of one eighth-grade U.S. history classroom.

Conclusions

The findings from this study shed light on the problems and frustrations that one teacher faces when confronted with a testing apparatus that limits her instructional time with students and an accountability exam that emphasizes a “bare bones” approach to content. While no generalizable conclusions are intended to be drawn from this study, the data presented in this article nonetheless add support to the viewpoint that while state-mandated accountability testing does influence classroom teaching, teachers’ beliefs about subject matter and their goals for students play an equal, if not larger, role in shaping their classroom practices.
How to Make Innovations Practical
Authors: Janssen Fred , Westbroek Hanna , Doyle Walter , Van Driel Jan
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

A fundamental tension has long existed between school reform proposals and actual teaching practice. Despite a large literature on teacher change, the discontinuity between innovation and practice continues and many attempts to reform teaching fail to be enacted in most classrooms.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

The purpose of this paper is to present a bridging methodology for connecting pedagogical innovations to the practical demands of teaching. The methodology is framed within practicality theory, which is an ecologically grounded analysis of the design issues and constraints that practitioners face in the everyday work of teaching. To conduct lessons, teachers must construct procedures (instrumentality) that fit circumstances (congruence) within available time and resources (cost). Underlying these practicality dimensions is a set of reasoning processes that can be understood from the perspective of three strands of research on bounded rationality—goal systems, heuristics, and evolutionary planning.

Intervention/Program/Practice

The analysis of teacher practical reasoning provides a design foundation for a bridging methodology consisting of (a) construction of a heuristic goal system (HGS) representation of the hierarchy of goals and heuristic means that underlie a teacher's planning decisions with respect to lesson segments used to carry out instruction; and (b) a teaching impact analysis (TIA) that connects an innovation's lesson structure to a teacher's heuristic goal system and shows how a teacher can adapt his/her current practice to achieve increased expected value (i.e., an improvement).

Research Design

This study was designed as an analytical essay that theorizes teaching practice, teacher reasoning, and a bridging methodology for connecting teaching practice with specific educational innovations. Cases of an experienced biology teacher and of 11 student teachers are presented that demonstrate the nature of this bridging methodology and variations in its use in particular circumstances.

Conclusions/Recommendations

The bridging framework provides a practical tool for identifying the action-guiding model of a teacher, the connection of this model to the precise components of an innovation, and the recombination or adaptations a teacher can make to achieve personal goals through an innovation. Although further studies are needed, this framework promises to furnish a powerful tool for making innovations practical. We cannot characterise behaviour independently of intentions, and we cannot characterise intentions independently of the settings which make those intentions intelligible both to agents themselves and to others (MacIntyre, 1981, p. 192).
Mandated Engagement: The Impact of Early College High Schools
Authors: Edmunds Julie A. , Willse John , Arshavsky Nina , Dallas Andrew
Published: November 2021

Background

Early college high schools, small schools that blur the line between high school and college, have been obtaining very strong results. This paper uses the frame of student engagement to posit an explanation for the success of these schools.

Purpose

This paper examines the impact of early college high schools on indicators and facilitators of engagement in the ninth-grade. The paper also looks at how early college students perceive these facilitators of engagement.

Participants

The main sample for this study includes students who applied to an early college high school and went through a lottery process. Student who were accepted through the lottery are the treatment students and those who were not accepted form the control group.

Intervention

Early colleges are small schools, often located on college campuses, that aim to provide a rigorous course of study with the goal of ensuring that all students graduate with a high school diploma and two years of university transfer credit or an associate's degree. Serving students in Grades 9-12 (or 13), the schools are targeted at students who typically are under-represented in college.

Data Collection and Analysis

The study uses administrative data submitted to the North Carolina Department of Instruction, including suspensions and attendance data. The study team also administered an original survey to treatment and control students that included scales on indicators and facilitators of engagement. Both the administrative and survey data were analyzed using multiple regression. Finally, the study team collected qualitative data from interviews with early college students.

Results

Early college students had better attendance, lower suspensions, and higher levels of engagement than control students. Compared to the control students, early college students also reported higher levels of all of the facilitators of engagement examined, including better relationships with teachers, more rigorous and relevant instruction, more academic and affective support, and higher expectations.

Conclusions

Students in early colleges experienced overall higher levels of engagement on a variety of dimensions. The qualitative data suggest that early colleges make concerted and purposeful efforts to engage students in school. These efforts seem to almost require that students are active participants in school; in other words, early colleges can be seen as essentially “mandating engagement.”
“Integration was a Solution, but Integration does not Address Quality Education”: A Conversation about School Desegregation with Dr. Michael A. Middleton
Authors: Diem Sarah , Brooks Jeffrey S.
Published: November 2021

Dr. Michael A. Middleton is Deputy Chancellor of the University of Missouri–Columbia. He is an expert in civil rights and employment discrimination and served as lead counsel for plaintiffs in the St. Louis metropolitan school desegregation litigation. Dr. Middleton previously served as director of the St. Louis District Office of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). He was also an associate general counsel at the EEOC in Washington, DC for three years. During this time, he managed the commission's national litigation program and supervised 250 attorneys at 22 district offices in federal court litigation activities. He has held several other high-level government positions, including deputy assistant secretary of education at the U.S. Department of Education; director of the Office of Systemic Programs at the EEOC; and assistant deputy director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. As deputy chief counsel and director of the Government Employment Project for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in the early 1970s, Middleton handled civil rights litigation focusing on voting rights and government employment throughout the South. He began his career as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, where he actively litigated several major employment discrimination cases in the federal courts across the country.

On February 15, 2013, we sat down with Dr. Middleton to discuss the history, current status, and future of school desegregation.
Non-Tenure-Track Faculty's Social Construction of a Supportive Work Environment
Authors: Kezar Adrianna
Published: November 2021

Background

The number of non-tenure-track faculty (NTTF), including both full-time (FT) and part-time (PT) positions, has risen to two-thirds of faculty positions across the academy. To date, most of the studies of NTTF have relied on secondary data or large-scale surveys. Few qualitative studies exist that examine the experience, working conditions, and worklife of NTTF. The study is framed by the theory advanced by Berger and Luckmann that reality is socially constructed and the broader sociological tradition of symbolic interactionism described by Blumer, Denzin, and Stryker.

Purpose

This study fills this gap in our current understanding by using qualitative methods to understand a fundamental issue that has not been examined and is critical to NTTF success and performance—how they perceive and experience support or lack of support within their work environments, particularly their departments.

Participants

I identified three four-year public institutions that are Master 1 according to the Carnegie Classification scheme. In total, I interviewed 107 NTTF, comprised of 58 PT and 49 FT, across the three institutions in 25 departments (14 unsupportive and 11 supportive).

Research Design

The study employed a multicase study approach using typical case sampling. The overall study examined departments that had made changes in policies and practices to support NTTF, compared to those that had not made changes, in order to investigate the impact on faculty performance and perspective. I conducted one-to-one interviews with NTTF as the main source of data collection.

Findings

The main findings of the study are that individual life conditions, such as career stage, and organizational features, such as the history of the department, shape the way NTTF construct support at any given time, and that this process of constructing support is dynamic and changing over a career.

Conclusions

The study suggests the importance of Shaker's hypothesized set of conditions that shape the perspective of NTTF. The study findings suggest that to understand the complex, multifaceted beliefs around support that are shaped by varying individual and institutional conditions, chairs might meet with the entire NTT faculty once a year in an open forum to discuss support or to anonymously survey all the faculty. NTTF leaders also need to be more aware of these differences in perceptions of support so they might better respond to needs.
Instruction Matters: Lessons from a Mixed-Method Evaluation of Out-Of-School Time Tutoring under No Child Left Behind
Authors: Good Annalee B. , Burch Patricia , Stewart Mary S. , Acosta Rudy , Heinrich Carolyn
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Under supplemental educational services (“supplemental services”), a parental choice provision of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), schools that have not made adequate yearly progress in increasing student achievement are required to offer low-income families free, afterschool tutoring. Existing research shows low attendance rates among eligible students and little to no aggregate effects on achievement for students who do attend.

Focus of study

We employ a framework grounded in examining the instructional setting, or “instructional core,” and we draw on the unique contributions of qualitative research to help explain the limited effects of supplemental services on student achievement. Specifically, we address the following research question: How can in-depth examination of the instructional core explain the impact of supplemental services on student learning?

Research Design

Our findings draw on data from an ongoing mixed-method and multisite study of the implementation and impact of supplemental educational services in five urban school districts located in four states. Although this paper includes quantitative data from this study, analysis focuses on qualitative data, including observations of tutoring sessions using a standardized observation instrument; semistructured interviews with district staff, provider administrators, and tutors; focus groups with parents of eligible students; and document analysis.

Findings

We identify two primary reasons for a lack of effects. First, there is a “treatment exposure” problem where most students receive far less than 40 hours of tutoring over the course of a school year, a critical threshold for seeing significant effects on achievement. In addition, there are discrepancies between an invoiced hour of tutoring and actual instructional time. Second, supplemental services has an instructional quality problem. Instruction lacks innovation; the curriculum typically does not align to that of the day school; programs do not meet all students’ instructional needs, especially students with disabilities and English language learners; and there can be considerable variation in quality within the same provider.

Conclusions

Our findings lay the foundations for being able to not only establish best practices for supplemental services, but to suggest policy changes to facilitate these best practices and offer insights to a host of other parental choice, out-of-school time (OST), and accountability-based reforms.
Less Socially Engaged? Participation in Friendship and Extracurricular Activities Among Racial/Ethnic Minority and Immigrant Adolescents
Authors: Cherng Hua-Yu Sebastian , Turney Kristin , Kao Grace
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Prior research has linked social engagement, such as peer interaction and participation in school activities, to a host of positive outcomes for youth and adolescents. However, little research considers patterns of social engagement among racial/ ethnic minority and immigrant adolescents, despite prior research suggesting distinct racial/ethnic and generational differences in social interactions among young people.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

This paper examines patterns of social engagement in friendships and extracurricular activities among racial/ethnic minorities and immigrant adolescents. We analyze five measures of social engagement: having any friends, socializing with friends, participating in school sports, participating in school clubs, and participating in activities outside of school.

Population/Participants/Subjects

This study utilizes the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002), a nationally representative sample of high school sophomores. Research Design: Our research design includes statistical analysis of secondary data. Findings/Results: Overall, results show that racial/ethnic minority adolescents, as well as first- and second-generation adolescents, are less engaged in friendships than their third-generation White counterparts. In contrast, there is no clear pattern of advantage or disadvantage in extracurricular activity participation.

Conclusions/Recommendations

These findings suggest that a disproportionate number of racial/ethnic minority and immigrant adolescents are less engaged in friendships than their peers, and that schools and adults play an important role in facilitating social interactions that may not occur within informal friendship networks.