bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
After the Bell Rings: Student Perceptions of After-School
Authors: Litke Erica
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Research on after-school programs has traditionally focused on those programs serving students in younger grades but found positive correlations between student participation in enriching after-school activities and school engagement. For older students, particularly teenagers, there tends to be lower participation. Research has also shown that students learn at different rates and need different amounts of time with the same material. School-based after-school programs have been one policy intervention to address this need.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

This study sought to understand better why students in one New York City high school attended after-school sessions and what kept them coming. Who does not attend, and why not? Finally, was the time after school being used in a way that most benefited students? How might the insights of those students who did attend push educators to improve after-school programming, both in terms of the teaching and in terms of how we structure these sessions?

Setting

This study took place in a small public New York City high school with almost all students participating in the federal free and reduced lunch program.

Research Design

In this action research study conducted with her own students in her own classroom, the author sought to use student perceptions to make programmatic changes that ultimately benefited the students attending the program. Through surveys, exit slips, interviews, and journal entries, the author collected student opinions and perceptions of the school's after-school program and changed the structure of her after-school sessions to maximize both attendance and student outcomes.

Data Collection and Analysis

The data suggest that a loosely structured and flexible program with varied types of help and, most important, individual attention is an after-school model that appears to appeal to high school students, particularly in the upper grades. Teenagers need to feel that they get something out of attending. It is critical to have the support of school administrators who understand that attendance figures alone do not reflect “success.” Students reported frustration when they were unable to get help after school because the teacher or peer tutors were overextended. The author recommends that policy makers focus on the quality of service, instead of the quantity served, to create and maintain successful interventions for all students.
Making Retention Count: The Power of Becoming a Peer Tutor
Authors: Mesler Leigh
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

A review of the literature demonstrates that grade retention often fails to improve the academic and socioemotional outcomes of retained students. Although little empirical work on peer tutoring has focused specifically on retained students, the literature suggests that those students who act as peer tutors often experience improved school performance and self-concepts.

Purpose of Study

This work developed out of a concern that elementary school students being held back to repeat a grade, or retained, were not benefiting academically from non-promotion. The purpose of this action research study was to identify and implement an intervention that would improve the academic and socioemotional outcomes of a twice-retained third-grade student.

Setting

This study took place in a New York City public elementary school.

Intervention

The intervention involved implementing a 12-week peer tutoring program in which a retained third-grade student tutored a struggling classmate in mathematics.

Research Design

This is an action research study in which the author conducted research and implemented an intervention in her own classroom.

Results

After serving as a peer tutor, this student experienced increased math achievement, an improved self-concept, and better classroom behavior. These results suggest that having struggling students serve as peer tutors may be effective in improving both their academic achievement and socioemotional outcomes.
Trouble in Paradise: A Study of who is Included in an Inclusion Classroom
Authors: Zindler Rachel
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

This study is based on prior research regarding the need for explicit social instruction for children with special needs, cooperative educational models, and the goals and relative successes of inclusive educational practices. The author refers to several studies on these subjects, including those by Kavale and Forness; Salend; and Sapon-Shevin, Dobbelaere, and Corrigan.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

This teacher analyzes how truly “inclusive” her class was during 1 year of collaborative team teaching in a second-grade inclusion classroom. Employing research-based methods of cooperative education, she considered how successful she was in facilitating meaningful relationships between special education students from all backgrounds, and their peers. She also examined whether it was possible, despite differences in academic and social skills, to fully incorporate those children with special needs into a classroom so that their general education peers would value and include them in their activities and social life.

Population/Participants/Subjects/Setting

In this study, a second-grade teacher took on a new position as the general education teacher in a New York City school's inclusion team. Seven of the 24 students in the new class were special education students. These children struggled with a variety of developmental delays, such as expressive and/or receptive language processing disorders, physical disabilities, and social/emotional issues. Five of these children were bused from less affluent neighborhoods near the school to attend the program. Whereas the general population at the school consisted of upper-middle-class White and Asian families, these 5 children were from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and were either African American or of Latin American descent.

Research Design

This action research was conducted by a practicing teacher who collected data through interviews, sociograms, observations, and other anecdotal means.
Pedagogical Possibilities: Engaging Cultural Rules of Emotion
Authors: Knight-Diop Michelle G. , Oesterreich Heather A.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Teaching, leading, and learning are inextricably connected to emotions. Yet, the significance of emotions is rarely addressed in educational settings, and when it is, the relationship between emotions and curricula is most often framed by of an overly individualistic behavior model that focuses on the management and regulation of emotions. This model obscures, if not denies, the structural-collective aspects of students’ and teachers’ emotions and thereby fails to recognize that emotions are culturally based, with patterns of selectivity deeply embedded in social and cultural structures. These patterns of selectivity operate to influence decisions that can lead to educational and social (in)equities. This article focuses on an imperative to understand how emotions function as sites of knowledge to create cultural rules of interactions that promote and/or hinder the preparation of teachers to act as agents of change.

Focus of Study

In seeking to better understand both individualistic behavior models and structural-collective aspects of teachers and students’ emotions as sites of knowledge within the classroom, the authors focus on the role of emotions in preparing preservice and in-service teachers to confront educational and societal inequities.

Research Design

The authors conducted a retrospective qualitative case study of 14 graduate students—reflecting a diversity including age, gender, and race—enrolled in a course on urban education. Using multicultural feminist theories, they analyze students’ understandings of a critical incident in the course about gender inequities through individual semistructured interviews, focus group interviews, and document analysis.

Conclusions

Students enter classrooms with “pretexts” of how teachers and students will interact in the classroom. These pretexts are integrally related to the negotiation of power in the intersections of race, gender, and class and underlie emotional selectivity. In these pretexts, a pedagogy of discomfort and a pedagogy of challenge simultaneously exist. The blurring and blending of these two pedagogies create a unique third space in which emotions serve as sites of struggle and contestation, and possibilities for changing the status quo of inequities. Four prevalent patterns of emotional selectivity emerged within the specific context of gender inequity in educational contexts: (1) denial of emotions, (2) mere existence of emotions, (3) simultaneous acceptance and denial of emotions, and (4) emotions-reason informing knowledge, identities, and actions. The fourth of these patterns offers pedagogical possibilities for challenging personal, educational, and societal inequities as it situates the focus of teachers’ roles as active agents of change.
Hope in the Unexpected: How Can Teachers Still Make a Difference in the World?
Authors: Edgoose Julian
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

The central role of hope in teaching has long been acknowledged by authors such as Sonia Nieto and Larry Cuban, but hope has received little focused attention from scholars. This article seeks to compare multiple understandings of hope to examine how teachers can find hope in times of global crises that challenge the promise of a better future that is implicit in modern schooling.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

How can teachers find hope in hard times, when the usual promise of schools for a better future seems difficult to sustain?

Research Design

This article is an analytic essay.

Conclusions/Recommendations

This article concludes that while the long-dominant understandings of hope are inadequate for many teachers at times like these, Arendt's view of the hope that emerges in the unexpected occurrences of classroom life resonates strongly with the most rewarding and hopeful experiences of many teachers. Yet Arendt explains how the hope that teachers experience from these unpredictable and unexpected occurrences is not just a source of immediate reward, but rather contributes to political and social change. The article concludes with an account of Arendt's critique of historians’ narratives of social change and an affirmation of the impact that teachers can have as agents of change.
Race and Academic Achievement in Racially Diverse High Schools: Opportunity and Stratification
Authors: Muller Chandra , Riegle-Crumb Catherine , Schiller Kathryn S. , Wilkinson Lindsey , Frank Kenneth A.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Brown v Board of Education fundamentally changed our nation's schools, yet we know surprisingly little about how and whether they provide equality of educational opportunity. Although substantial evidence suggests that African American and Latino students who attend these schools face fewer learning opportunities than their White counterparts, until now, it has been impossible to examine this using a representative sample because of lack of data.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

This study uses newly available data to investigate whether racially diverse high schools offer equality of educational opportunity to students from different racial and ethnic groups. This is examined by measuring the relative representation of minority students in advanced math classes at the beginning of high school and estimating whether and how this opportunity structure limits the level of achievement attained by African American and Latino students by the end of high school.

Setting

This study uses data from the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement Study (AHAA) and its partner study, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a stratified, nationally representative study of students in U.S. high schools first surveyed in 1994–1995.

Population/Participants/Subjects

Two samples of racially diverse high schools were used in the analysis: one with African Americans, Whites, and Asians (26 schools with 3,149 students), and the other with Latinos, Whites, and Asians (22 schools with 2,775 students).

Research Design

Quantitative analyses first assess how high schools vary in the extent to which minority students are underrepresented in advanced sophomore math classes. Hierarchical multilevel modeling is then used to estimate whether racial-ethnic differences in representation in advanced math have an impact on African American and Latino students’ achievement by the end of high school, relative to the Whites and Asians in the school. Specifically, we estimate the effects of Whites’ and Asians’ overrepresentation in sophomore-year math (or Latino or African American underrepresentation) within the school on students’ senior-year grades and their postsecondary enrollment.

Findings/Results

Findings show that schools vary in the extent to which African American and Latino students are underrepresented in advanced sophomore math classes. This pattern of racial inequality in schools is associated with lower minority senior-year grades and enrollment in 4-year postsecondary institutions, net of students’ own background.

Conclusions/Recommendations

Evidence consistently suggests that schools can play an active role in the provision of opportunities for social mobility or in the exacerbation of social inequality, depending on how they are structured. It is important to consider racial stratification within schools as a mechanism of inequality of educational opportunity.
Schools and Inequality: A Multilevel Analysis of Coleman's Equality of Educational Opportunity Data
Authors: Borman Geoffrey D. , Dowling Maritza
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

The Equality of Educational Opportunity study is widely recognized as one of the most important studies on schooling ever performed. The findings from the report have shaped the field of education, national education policies, and wider public and scholarly opinion regarding the contributions of schools and schooling to equality and productivity in the United States. Despite past reanalyses of the data and decades of research on the effects of schools as organizations, the report's fundamental finding—that a student's family background is far more important than school social composition and school resources for understanding student outcomes—still retains much of its currency. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: Using the original Equality of Educational Opportunity data, this study replicated Coleman's statistical models but also applied a two-level hierarchical linear model (HLM) to measure the effects of school-level social composition, resources, teacher characteristics, and peer characteristics on ninth-grade students’ verbal achievement.

Research Design

HLM allows researchers to disentangle how schools and students’ family backgrounds contribute to learning outcomes. The methodology offers a clearer interpretation of the relative effects of school characteristics, including racial/ethnic composition, and family background, including race/ethnicity and social class, on students’ academic outcomes.

Findings/Results

Our results suggest that schools do indeed matter, in that when one examines the outcomes across the national sample of schools, fully 40% of the differences in achievement can be found between schools. Even after statistically taking into account students’ family background, a large proportion of the variation among true school means is related to differences explained by school characteristics. Within-school inequalities in the achievement outcomes for African American and White students and students from families of higher and lower social class are explained in part by teachers’ biases favoring middle-class students and by schools’ greater reliance on curriculum differentiation through the use of academic and nonacademic tracking.

Conclusions/Recommendations

Formal decomposition of the variance attributable to individual background and the social composition of the schools suggests that going to a high-poverty school or a highly segregated African American school has a profound effect on a student's achievement outcomes, above and beyond the effect of individual poverty or minority status. Specifically, both the racial/ethnic and social class composition of a student's school are 1 3/4 times more important than a student's individual race/ethnicity or social class for understanding educational outcomes.
The Flynn Effect and the Demography of Schooling
Authors: McDonald Geraldine
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Although the Flynn effect has been recognized for 60 years and a wide range of factors has been suggested, there is still no agreement on cause. The effect is generally interpreted as a phenomenon involving changes in mental functioning as a consequence of various forms of environmental influence.

Purpose

The purpose of the account is to argue that at least part of the change in intergen-erational IQ scores is an artifact of the age-based scoring system of IQ tests, together with historical changes in age-grade patterns in school systems.

Research Design

This is a logical argument using secondary analysis to illustrate historical change in the demographic patterns at the level of the classroom, together with a survey of psychometric documents and accounts of constructing Otis-type tests to explain the role of age in calculating an IQ. A review of research focuses on whether the IQ measures age or grade and whether age change in a school population can account for an IQ change.

Conclusions/Recommendations

It is concluded that because the age-based scoring systems of IQ tests interact with generational changes of age by grade, a Flynn effect should not be interpreted as a massive intergenerational rise in mental functioning unless the two generations match age in grade in the case of school populations, and highest grades achieved in the case of adults.
Elite Visions: Privileged Perceptions of Self and Others
Authors: Howard Adam
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

To date, there has been little attention given to how privilege is produced and enacted. Privilege has been mainly conceptualized as the advantages that one group has over another.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

In this article, the author seeks to move beyond current conceptions of privilege to explore the relationship between advantages and identity formation and to examine the ways in which students with schooling and life advantages actively construct privilege as a dimension or aspect of their identity.

Research Design

To explore this connection between advantages and identity, the author examines the understandings of two affluent students attending an elite private high school about the differences in educational experiences between low-income and affluent students. These two students were part of a larger ethnographic study of the lessons that students at elite schools are taught about their place in the world, their relationships with others, and who they are.

Findings/Results

The students’ understandings reveal their use of particular ideological operations and modes to justify their own advantages in life and schooling, construct between-class divisions, establish within-class solidarity, and rationalize the disadvantages of Others. The author argues that these particular ideological operations and modes are not simply methods or competencies that affluent students know how to use but also formative elements of their respective identities.

Conclusions/Recommendations

This analysis illustrates the way that these students construct their own privilege not, fundamentally, as what they have, but rather, as who they are.
Media Arts: Arts Education for a Digital Age
Authors: Peppler Kylie A.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

New technologies have been largely absent in arts education curriculum even though they offer opportunities to address arts integration, equity, and the technological prerequisites of an increasingly digital age. This paper draws upon the emerging professional field of “media arts” and the ways in which youth use new technologies for communication to design a 21st-century K-12 arts education curriculum.

Description of prior research on the subject and/or its intellectual context and/or policy context

Building on sociocultural theories of constructionism as well as Dewey's theories of the arts and aesthetics as a democratic pedagogy, this study draws upon over three years of extensive field study at a digital design studio where underprivileged youth accessed programming environments emphasizing graphics, music, and video.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of the Study

This study documents what youth learn through media art making in informal settings, the strengths and limitations of capitalizing on youth culture in media art production, and the distinct contributions that media arts education can make to the classroom environment.

Research Design

A mixed-methods approach was utilized that analyzed data from participants and professional interviews, an archive of youths’ media art, and videotape documentation of youth at work on their projects.

Conclusions/Recommendations

Findings point to the ways in which youth engage with technology that encourages active learning and how new types of software can be used to illustrate and encourage this process.
Conceptualizing and Tracing Learning Pathways over Time and Setting
Authors: Barron Brigid
Published: November 2021

I have always have had friends who were pretty interested in computers. So, um they started doing some Web design in Geocities using HTML and then they told me it was really fun so I joined in and they sort of taught me what was going on, and so that is where I learned HTML. I started making my own Web pages then I started joining classes like Industrial Technology and Programming because it was like becoming an interest for me.

A 13-year-old girl attending a public school in Silicon Valley
The Impact of Immersive Virtual Reality on Educators’ Awareness of the Cognitive Experiences of Pupils with Dyslexia
Authors: Passig David
Published: November 2021

Background

In recent years, due to deliberate educational policy in various places around the world, children with dyslexia study in regular classes with non-dyslexic classmates. They do not appear handicapped, because their disabilities do not stem from physical deformities, and therefore, it is not easy to identify them in a group where the majority of the children are non-dyslexic. As a result, these children continually brave the hardships inherent to a human environment, while being largely unaware of their situation.

Purpose

The aim of this study was to test the effectiveness of VR technology in enhancing the teacher's knowledge and awareness of dyslexia, a phenomenon that is very difficult to explain. Not only it is a very difficult phenomenon to communicate, but also the research community still needs to suggest and accept a unified typology of the disorder.

Population and Setting

Eighty teachers of various subjects participated in this study. They were selected randomly from a variety of schools in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area. Each of the teachers in the experimental group (N = 40) experienced a virtual reality simulation that simulated 10 virtual worlds corresponding to the 10 types of dyslexia we found in the literature. The experience took 20 minutes to complete and was conducted in a VR laboratory in a clinical setting. The teachers, in the control group (N = 40) each separately watched a 20-minute film on the subject of dyslexia and reading disorders. All the subjects filled out questionnaires before and after the intervention.

Research Design

The teachers were divided into an experimental and a control group. In the experimental group, the teachers were exposed to ten 3D virtual worlds that simulated 10 cognitive experiences of dyslexic students. The teachers in the control group viewed a film that elaborated on similar experiences. All the subjects filled out questionnaires before and after the intervention. The questionnaires tested the teachers’ level of cognitive awareness of the dyslexic students’ experiences when encountering the written word. In addition, the subjects in the experimental group were interviewed before and after the intervention.

Conclusions

The research results clearly suggested that experiencing a variety of simulated types of dyslexia via virtual reality can bring about a greater improvement in teacher awareness of the dyslexic pupil's cognitive experiences than is achieved by viewing a film about dyslexia.
Regulation of Motivation: Contextual and Social Aspects
Authors: Wolters Christopher A.
Published: November 2021

Background

Models of self-regulated learning have been used extensively as a way of understanding how students understand, monitor, and manage their own academic functioning. The regulation of motivation is a facet of self-regulated learning that describes students’ efforts to control their own motivation or motivational processing. The regulation of motivation includes students’ knowledge, monitoring, and active management of their motivation or motivational processing.

Purpose

The purpose of this article is threefold. One, a conceptual understanding of regulation of motivation highlighting three core facets is presented. These aspects are knowledge of motivation, monitoring of motivation, and use of strategies to regulate motivation. Two, prior empirical work documenting the regulation of motivation across contexts is reviewed. This work indicates that students at different developmental levels use motivational regulation strategies and that their use varies as a function of the academic task or context. Three, social influences on the development of regulation of motivation that include modeling, scaffolding, direct instruction, and sociocultural processes are discussed.

Research Design

This article is an analytic essay in which selected prior research is reviewed only briefly.

Conclusions/Recommendations

Overall, it is argued that motivational regulation is a critical aspect of self-regulated learning that must be studied more thoroughly. Specific avenues for future studies are noted and include work that examines students’ knowledge and monitoring of motivation, how regulation of motivation varies across contexts, and how instructional and social processes impact its development.
Teacher Effects in Early Grades: Evidence from a Randomized Study
Authors: Konstantopoulos Spyros
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

One important question to educational research is whether teachers can influence student achievement over time. This question is related to the durability of teacher effects on student achievement in successive grades. The research evidence about teacher effects on student achievement has been somewhat mixed. Some education production function studies seem to suggest that the effects of observed teacher characteristics on student achievement are negligible, while others suggest that they are considerable (Greenwald, Hedges, & Laine, 1996; Hanushek, 1986). Other studies have consistently documented that teachers differ substantially in their effectiveness measured as between-classroom variation in achievement adjusted by student background (Hanushek, 1986; Nye et al., 2004; Rivkin et al., 2005). Thus far, there is no evidence about the persistence of teacher effects in early grades using high quality data from a randomized experiment.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

This study examines the enduring benefits of teacher effects on student achievement in early elementary grades using high quality experimental data from Project STAR. I am interested in determining the persistence of teacher effects in early grades and whether teacher effects remain strong predictors of student achievement or fade over a four-year period for kindergarten through third grade.

Research Design

I computed teacher effects as classroom-specific random effects and then I used them as predictors of student achievement in subsequent years. I also examined whether teacher effects persisted through third grade. Multilevel models were used to conduct the analysis. The results suggest that overall teacher effects in early grades are evident through third grade in reading and mathematics achievement.

Findings/Results

The findings support the idea that teachers do matter and significantly affect reading and mathematics achievement not only in the current or the following year, but in subsequent years as well. However, the results also show that teacher effects estimates in previous grades are smaller than estimates in later grades. The teacher effects are more pronounced in reading.

Conclusions

Students who receive effective teachers at the 85th percentile of the teacher effectiveness distribution in three consecutive grades kindergarten through second grade would experience achievement increases of about one-third of a SD in reading in third grade. These effects are considerable and comparable to achievement increases caused by cumulative effects of small classes in early grades. Such effects in education are important and are nearly one-third of a year's growth in achievement (Hill, Bloom, Black, & Lipsey, 2008).
The Essay as a Pedagogical Form: Teacher Education and Stanley Cavell's Ordinary Language Philosophy
Authors: Kwak Duck-Joo
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

The view of philosophy of education as “practical philosophy” initiated by Wilfred Carr has been a focus of recent educational discourses. What “practical” means here is closely associated with the educative aspect of “philosophical practice” itself. This article attempts to explore another educative aspect of philosophical practice, as manifested in Stanley Cavell's ordinary language philosophy. This will enable us to refine the humanistic approach to teacher education proposed by David Hansen as a fruitful way of equipping would-be teachers with a humanistic sensibility. Such an approach is needed if teachers are to respond to the highly complex and unpredictable circumstances that they face in the rapidly changing educational environments of today's globalizing world.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

How can Stanley Cavell's practice of ordinary language philosophy, its underlying method and aspiration, be an exemplary case of “the essay form” of thinking and writing? “The essay form” here refers to a form of writing that Michael de Montaigne, the 16th-century Renaissance humanist, invented as a pedagogical practice for “trying oneself out” or “putting oneself to the test.”

Research Design

This article is an analytic essay that develops an argument based on textual evidence from relevant philosophical literature.

Conclusion

Cavell's practice of ordinary language philosophy can be described as a nonauthoritative pedagogical practice that pursues the transformation of one's sensibility by cultivating the first-person voice of self-knowledge. Thus, this can be a good source for our formulation of a humanistic approach to teacher education. But a more specific articulation of the constitutive structure of the essay form of writing needs to be made in order to have “philosophical reflection as the essay form” more adoptable by our educational program in teacher education and education in general.
Change(d) Agents: School Contexts and the Cultural/Professional Roles of New Teachers of Mexican Descent
Authors: Achinstein Betty , Ogawa Rodney T.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Educators and policymakers call for recruiting quality teachers of color in urban schools to promote educational opportunities for students of color by accessing cultural/linguistic resources. Yet little research has examined conditions that support or challenge Latina/o new teachers from performing as role models, culturally and linguistically responsive teachers, and agents of change.

Purpose/Research Questions

To examine conditions that support/challenge Latina/o teachers’ efforts to perform cultural/professional roles, we asked the following: (a) How and to what extent are the personal and professional backgrounds of Latina/o teachers associated with their performance as role models, culturally/linguistically responsive teachers, and agents of change? (b) How and to what extent are conditions in schools associated with the performance of Latina/o teachers as role models, culturally/linguistically responsive teachers, and agents of change?

Participants

Participants were drawn from a broader study about the socialization of 21 new teachers of color. The participants in the study reported here were 2 of the 11 teachers who identify as being of Mexican descent who work in urban, middle and high schools with high proportions of Latina/o student populations in California.

Research Design/Data/Analysis

This 4-year qualitative case study included teacher and administrator interviews, videotaped classroom observations, and focus groups. Analysis involved summarizing segments of data that referenced teacher background, school context, and teacher cultural/professional beliefs and practices; generating pattern codes; and conducting cross-case analysis.

Findings

Findings reveal the following: 1. Shaped by early schooling experiences and influenced by teacher preparation programs, these teachers are committed to increasing learning opportunities for Latina/o students by performing cultural/professional roles. 2. The teachers’ ability to perform these roles is shaped by the capital and power relations present in the schools where they work. We identify parallels between experiences of Latina/o youth, who are divested of cultural resources by “subtractive schooling” (Valenzuela, 1999) and experiences of Latina new teachers, who confront schooling challenges when attempting to perform cultural/professional roles. 3. The intersection of the teachers’ personal/professional backgrounds and school contexts resulted in these new teachers of color being change(d) agents— both agents of change and subjected to change by the system in which the teachers work.

Conclusions

Conclusions highlight how further research is needed to document culturally additive school conditions that support teachers of color to advance opportunities for students of color. Further, educational leaders and policymakers will need to reconsider the organizational contexts in which new teachers of color are expected to redress inequitable learning opportunities for nondominant youth.
(Re)Constructing Home and School: Immigrant Parents, Agency, and the (Un)Desirability of Bridging Multiple Worlds
Authors: Doucet Fabienne
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

This study examines the tactics that Haitian immigrant parents used to negotiate the boundaries around home and school, presenting the possibility that families play an active and deliberate role in creating distance between the worlds of home and school.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

The following research questions were explored: (1) Why do Haitian immigrant parents resist bridges between the worlds of home and school? (2) How might this resistance be seen as a show of agency? (3) How do the resistance and agency of Haitian immigrants complicate the in-school/out-of-school dichotomy and push theories that too easily bring in-school and out-of-school worlds together?

Setting

Greater Boston, Massachusetts.

Population/Participants/Subjects

Participants were 54 parents of Haiti-born (1.5 generation) and U.S.-born (second generation) Haitian American adolescents.

Research Design

The study draws from a subset of data collected with Haitian families in a large longitudinal study of newly arrived immigrants from five different countries and from data collected in a supplemental study of second-generation Haitian families. Data sources include structured interviews and field notes.

Data Collection and Analysis

Data were collected by bilingual, bicultural research assistants. Interviews were recorded whenever possible, transcribed, and, if necessary, translated to English. Data were analyzed for this article using classic qualitative thematic analysis techniques.

Findings/Results

The findings suggest that parents actively constructed and reconstructed distinct boundaries for home and school rather than being passive victims of these boundaries. Three metathemes and seven related themes emerged related to the research questions: protecting the home terrain (displayed as a concern with family privacy; parental strictness; and discouraging friendships); equating schools with Americanization (shown through criticisms of U.S. schools/schooling; and parents’ limited contact with school), and negotiating a seat at the table (through parental advocacy; and reciprocal partnership-seeking)

Conclusions/Recommendations

These findings question the pervasive notion in educational literature and practice that close links between home and school should be the goal of both teachers and families.
Cultural Dialogue as Identity-Work
Authors: McLean Cheryl A.
Published: November 2021

I don't want to feel out of place (pauses, searching for the “right” words). I don't want to have my difference hinder me. But, help me if anything. So, I want to express myself so they can understand me—so, that I can communicate.

But, in Jamaica, when I was a little kid, you always heard crazy little things when you're a kid (laughs). And, you're like: “Oh, they act like this, and they do this. They're so silly: They spell color without the u.” And they didn't necessarily seem to make it a bad thing to be that way, but it was understood that we were different. And, I liked being different. I liked being Jamaican.

And, so I got here and um… It's like it didn't seem that weird. And, then I was worried that it doesn't seem that weird because I'm LIKE THEM! So, when I lost my accent, I was worried that I would lose being Jamaican. I was afraid that I'd lose my identity. (LeeAnn [pseudonym])
Professional Development Schools and Student Learning and Achievement
Authors: Wong Pia Lindquist , Glass Ronald David
Published: November 2021

It's a bright and sunny day at this particular elementary school, and a quick peek into classrooms reveals students busily at work, mindful of the teachers leading the day's instruction. But the typical picture conjured by this description gets disrupted with a more attentive look. These rooms are packed with people of various ages in clusters, all with their heads close together and intently working on something of interest. In some clusters, pupils and student teachers engage one another in sharply focused dialogues. In other clusters, teachers guide pupils through a series of scaffolding questions for the day's topic while the student teachers observe, in order to later discuss the lesson with the teacher and the university professor who collaboratively developed it. In yet other clusters, student teachers and pupils are paired off and are examining the pupils’ work to identify patterns of error and work on skill development.
Self-Assessment, Program Evaluation, and Renewal
Authors: Badiali Bernard
Published: November 2021

Critical inquiry is dialectical, dialogical, and deliberate. It is not something that happens serendipitously or casually. It has to be worked with rigor and continuity. By its very nature, it is not something that comes to an end; rather it is a way of professional life. (Sirotnik & Oakes, 1986, p. 175)
“Citizenship for the College Girl”: Challenges and Opportunities in Higher Education for Women in the United States in the 1930s
Authors: Nash Margaret A. , Romero Lisa S.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Little research has been done on higher education for women during the 1930s, even though scholars have pointed to this period as a turning point because the proportion of female students declined during this decade. The decline was only relative, however, as men's enrollments skyrocketed while women's increased more slowly. This article seeks to understand women's continually increasing numbers, rather than the relative decline in enrollment.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question

During a time of economic hardship, what justifications were used to encourage women to attend college? What purposes or rationales were part of the national discourse that made it possible for ever-increasing numbers of young women to attend and graduate from college?

Research Design

Our research consists of historical analysis of printed archival material from 1929-1940. Primary material was drawn from original print editions of the Readers’ Guide to Periodic Literature and the electronic version of Reader's Guide Retro. We divided journals into popular magazines and academic journals, and coded all articles indexed under the terms “College, students, women,” “Education of women,” and “College women.” We analyzed 128 articles from popular magazines and 85 articles from academic journals. This provided a rich source of magazine and journal articles considered significant during the period studied. After coding and choosing the themes for our focus, we looked for related articles from newspapers; we used electronically archived materials from the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. To avoid an east/west coast urban bias, and in an effort to include an African-American perspective, we supplemented this with material from smaller Midwestern and African-American presses including the Daily Illini, The Chicago Defender, Columbia Missourian, Hannibal Courier, and the Urbana Daily Courier.

Conclusions

Two primary discourses were evident in newspapers, periodicals, and academic journals that encouraged women to attend college in the 1930s. The first was that of eugenics. Previous scholarship on eugenics tends to emphasize how eugenics was used to discourage women from advanced schooling, as postponing childbearing meant a reduction in the birthrate. We argue that while this argument was indeed present in national literature, eugenic arguments were used as well to encourage women's college attendance. In this view, educated women produced healthier future generations and therefore served eugenic interests. The second primary discourse was that of the need for education for citizenship. The periodical literature reveals an emphasis on colleges teaching women about the responsibilities of voting, volunteerism, and promoting peace and social unity.
Tensions in Teacher Development and Community: Variations on a Recurring School Reform Theme
Authors: Craig Cheryl J.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Conducted in the fourth-largest urban center in the United States, this research depicts how different reform initiatives were introduced to one middle school context over the decade from 1999 to 2009.

Purposes/Objectives/Research Question/Focus of Study

The study focuses on teachers’ experiences of three reform endeavors and how tensions in teacher knowledge and community developed as a consequence of each. The study's overall purpose is to contribute the often-overlooked teacher perspective to the curriculum, teaching, and school reform literatures.

Setting

The setting for the research is a middle school located in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the United States. The campus's social narrative history parallels the city's development. The school currently serves some of America's richest and poorest youth.

Population/Participants/Subjects

Nineteen educators, including several main teacher participants as well as some supporting teacher and administrator participants, contributed anonymously to the narrative account.

Research Design

Narrative inquiry is the research method used to excavate a story serial that emerged during the longitudinal research study. Four interpretive devices—broadening, burrowing, storying and restorying, and fictionalization—aided in the comparison and contrast of three eruptions in teacher community that occurred as a result of the different reform emphases. Presented in story serial form, these eruptions suggest a rhythm to school reform. The article ends with a discussion of the value of narrative inquiry in studying phenomena at the interstices of teacher knowledge, teacher community, school milieu, and organized school reform. Connections between fine- and coarse-grained inquiries are made, and the notion of stories traveling from one school site to another is also probed. Finally, the idea of a perennial educational problem being made public and visible through an innovative research approach is taken up, along with some suggestions concerning how school reform could more productively be lived.
Popular but Unstable: Explaining Why State Performance Funding Systems in the United States Often Do Not Persist
Authors: Dougherty Kevin J. , Natow Rebecca S. , Vega Blanca E.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Performance funding in higher education ties government funding to institutional performance on indicators such as retention, graduation, and job placement. Performance funding can also be found in state K-12 funding policies and higher education quality assurance programs abroad. One of the puzzles about higher education performance funding is that half of the states establishing it later abandoned it.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

This study examines the factors that have led many states to drop performance funding for higher education.

Research Design

This qualitative case study contrasts the experiences of three states that dropped performance funding in whole or in part (Missouri, Washington, and Florida) and a fourth (Tennessee) that has retained it more than 30 years.

Discussion

Our analysis is based on documentary records and extensive interviews with higher education officials, legislators and staff, governors and advisors, business leaders, minority group leaders, researchers, and outside consultants. Our findings concur with but also go beyond prior analyses of the demise of state performance funding systems. We concur that higher education opposition played a key role in this demise, stimulated by a perception of inadequate consultation with higher education institutions, use of performance indicators that institutions found invalid, high implementation costs to institutions, and erosion of campus autonomy. At the same time, our analysis turned up other causes of higher education opposition to performance funding that were not discovered by previous studies. A major cause of higher education opposition was the downturn in state finances in the early 2000s, which led institutions to focus on preserving their core state funding and giving up performance funding. Higher education opposition was also provoked if performance funding took the form not of adding to existing state funding but instead holding back a portion of the state appropriation and requiring institutions to earn it back through improved performance. These findings agree and disagree with theories and findings in the research literatures on policy termination and program sustainability.

Conclusions/Recommendations

If its advocates are to create a sustainable basis for state performance funding, they must find ways to insulate its funding from the ups and downs of the state revenue cycle, better secure the support of public institutions, and expand its breadth of political support by reaching out, for example, to business and to social groups driven primarily by the values of educational equality rather than educational efficiency.