Rate of "Disconnected Youth" Increased to 5.8 Million 16-to-24 Year-Olds

Three of the 16 indicators that make up the Opportunity Index relate to education, but the one indicator of those 16 that most closely correlates with a state's or community's overall Opportunity Index score is the one that measures the proportion of what the index calls "disconnected youth"—people ages 16 to 24 who are neither in school nor employed. For the 2013 index, the researchers found 5.8 million "disconnected" 16- to 24-year-olds, out of a total number of 39.7 million. That's 14.6 percent, a slight increase from the 14.5 percent reported in the 2011 index. In 10 of the country's 25 largest metropolitan areas, the proportion of young people considered "disconnected youth" exceeded the national average.

That measure "has a larger impact on a community's opportunity score than any other," says Mark Edwards, executive director of Opportunity Nation.  Reducing that proportion is "one of the biggest levers to increase opportunity," says Mr. Edwards.  Some of the disconnected youth have dropped out of high school, some are unemployed high-school graduates, and some are victims of a dysfunctional foster-care situation, says Mr. Edwards.

[Click here to read the rest of the story at the Chronicle of Higher Education website.]

Tactics That Engage Community-College Students Get Few Takers, Study Finds

"Most community colleges have begun using a suite of expert-approved strategies to get more students to graduation. But those programs are often just window dressing, as relatively few students participate in them.  Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/17/community-college-completion-strategies-lack-scale-report-finds#ixzz2hzE3Mnqe  at Inside Higher Ed

That’s the central finding of a new report from the Center for Community College Student Engagement. And Kay McClenney, the center’s director, places blame for the shallow adoption of “high impact” completion practices squarely on colleges and their leaders, rather than on students.  “Requiring students to take part in activities likely to enhance their success is a step community colleges can readily take,” McClenney said in a written statement. “They just need to decide to do it.”  The study draws from three national surveys that seek to measure student engagement at community colleges that collectively account for 80 percent of the sector’s enrollment. One is the center’s flagship survey -- the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE)....The 13 strategies include the use of academic goal-setting, student orientation, tutoring, accelerated remedial education tracks and student success courses (see box for full list). While experts and faculty members might not agree on whether all of the practices work well, there is an emerging body of evidence that they help boost completion rates.

For example, 84 percent of two-year colleges offer student success courses, which are designed to help new students navigate college and get off to a good start. The courses are particularly helpful to large numbers of lower-income, first-generation college students who attend community college, and who rarely get the support of family members who know the skinny on how college works.  Yet only 20 percent of surveyed students took a success courses during their first term, according to the report.  The other 12 practices showed similar gaps between being offered and being used. Take tutoring, which has obvious benefits to struggling students. Fully 99 percent of the surveyed colleges offer some form of tutoring, but the report found that only 27 percent of students had taken advantage of it during the current academic year."

Asking students to volunteer for service will not work.  They don[t want to face stigma for doing so, they don[t have time for activities that conflict with their two or three part time jobs they have to pay for tuition, and for all the others commitments in their life.  The solution is Universal Design for Learning where essential services and support are built directly into classes and required for all students. 

CHANGING EQUATIONS: How Community Colleges Are Re-thinking College Readiness in Math

Complete Report available to download, http://www.learningworksca.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/LWBrief_ChangingEquations_WEB.pdf

From the Executive Summary:  Because of their high enrollment and generally low completion rates, community colleges have been identified as central to efforts to improve higher education outcomes. But that improvement won’t be realized unless more students succeed in math. Together, the high proportion of community college students requiring math remediation, and the relatively low proportion who succeed in required remedial sequences, make placement in developmental math one of the single greatest barriers to college completion. Only 20 percent of students who place into remedial (also known as developmental) math courses ultimately complete the remedial sequence and pass a college-level math course - such as college algebra or statistics - that is required to graduate or transfer.

An increasing number of colleges in California and nationally are involved in experiments aimed at improving, reforming, or even eliminating math remediation in community colleges. This includes a new movement to construct alternative pathways for the majority of community college students, those whose educational goals may not require a second year of algebra. Through LearningWorks’ efforts to strengthen student achievement in the California Community Colleges, it has become clear that practitioners involved in such experiments are eager to learn about parallel efforts, and those not yet involved are curious about the work underway, whether in California or elsewhere in the nation.

LearningWorks commissioned this report, Changing Equations, to address those needs.  Critics argue that intermediate algebra unnecessarily hinders some students pursuing degrees in fields such as English, history, art, and political science from ever graduating. The new pathways for non-STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) students are course sequences including both remedial-level courses as well as credit-bearing gatekeeper math courses. Many of these new sequences stress skills in statistics or quantitative reasoning, which proponents say serve most students better in their lives and careers than does high-level algebra. While the de-emphasis on intermediate algebra remains controversial, the math pathways movement resonates with other initiatives to focus community college students’ education around structured pathways leading toward careers.

These experiments are informed by findings emerging from both research and practice that are starting to shift the understanding of math readiness. At the heart of that evolution are four key insights:

1. Math is a hurdle for the majority of community college students. Roughly 60 percent of community college students are placed in developmental math courses.
2. Most students deemed “unready” in math will never graduate. Only 20 percent of students who place into developmental math complete a required gatekeeper course in math.
3. The tests used to determine readiness are not terribly accurate. Research has estimated that as many as a fifth of students placed into remedial math courses could have earned a B or better in a college-level course without first taking the remedial class.
4. The math sequence required by most colleges is irrelevant for many students’ career aspirations. According to research, about 70 percent or more of people with bachelor’s degrees do not require intermediate algebra in their careers.

In sum, the reformers argue that, on the basis of a weakly predictive test, large numbers of students are being prevented from completing college unless they pass a challenging course that may be irrelevant to their futures. Nevertheless, until recently there have been very few experiments with alternatives, leaving intermediate algebra as an effective proxy for determining whether students are “college material.” Various national policy and disciplinary organizations, aware of the gravity of the remedial math dilemma, are urging colleges to re-think this approach and try out alternatives. These include the Developmental Math Committee of the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges, Complete College America, and the National Center on Education and the Economy.

Collaborating TRIO Student Support Services and Other College Support Programs

Hanover Research (2013) provides an overview of campus organizational models that are conducive to a holistic approach to success for all students. Then they present in depth profiles of five institutional approaches to collaboration between and/or integration of federally-funded TRIO Student Support Services with institutionally-funded tutoring, academic advising, and First Year Experience programming.[Click this link to download a copy of the report].

ECAR 2013 National Study of Student Technology Use

From the Chronicle of Higher Education by Jason Jones

The Educause Center for Analysis and Research (ECAR) has released the latest version of its annual report, ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2013.  First, students have lots of devices, but relatively little incentive or freedom to use them in class:

Students did seem to indicate an interest in having their phones and/or tablets be more directly incorporated into academics.

Second, two-thirds of students report that their faculty “use technology effectively”:

It’s a little unclear what the students’ judgment is based on here: stuff not crashing? Faculty finding their comfort zone and sticking with it? Regardless, it is useful to know that students respect the faculty’s technology use.

Third, the report asserts that “60% of students prefer to keep their academic and social lives separate,” although there wasn’t a lot of followup about student interest in social networking and academic work in general. (For example, since a lot of Twitter clients support multiple accounts, it’s not terribly difficult to keep one’s academic and social life separate.)

And finally, the report also says that students prefer that faculty themselves provide instruction in how to use technology, rather than rely on the help desk or online-only documentation, which suggests that for the foreseeable future, faculty who incorporate technology in interesting or significant ways will need to continue to budget class time to cover how to use the tech.

There are also interesting results about how students want to use LMSes, and more. As always, Educause interprets the data in light of its understanding of of the institional/corporate world of information technology, rather than a faculty-centered one. (As I’ve already joked on Twitter, no one but Educause would characterize the fact that “Students expressed only moderate interest in learner analytics” as a “surprising” finding, unless what was surprising was that their interest was as high as “moderate.”) Nevertheless, it is certainly helpful to understand how students talk about their use of information technology, especially as one considers incorporating social media, or thinking about an electronic device policy.

At the ECAR site, you can download the full report, an infographic drawn from it, and the survey instrument.

New Research Confirms Some TRiO Best Education Practices

Dr. Shawn Harper previews research findings he'll be releasing formally today about the black and Latino male students who succeed in New York City high schools (and he said there was no reason to believe similar qualities don't help similar students in other urban high schools). The study wasn't of elite charter schools or wealthier parts of the city, but of students who had achieved academic success in regular high schools. Harper found not only that such students exist (no surprise to him, but perhaps to those who lament the dearth of such students) but that many of them have no idea that they would be attractive candidates for admission to some of the most elite colleges in the United States.

Harper -- director of the Study of Race and Equity in Education at the University of Pennsylvania -- attracted considerable attention last year for a study in which he identified successful black male college students and examined the factors that led to their success. This new study is in a way the flip side of that research -- as his focus was on students in New York City high schools who could succeed in college (although he also included a group of New York City high school graduates who were in college for comparison purposes).

But what were the common characteristics that seemed to propel these students to succeed?

• Parental value of education. Many spoke of parents who related their own lack of education to their lack of money, and told their children they wanted better options for them.
• High expectations. The report says that "almost all" of the students in the study "remember being thought of as smart and capable when they were young boys."
• Learning to avoid neighborhood danger. Those who lived in unsafe neighborhoods reported parents who kept them inside whenever possible. Likewise, many of the students reported spending after-school hours in school buildings, in settings where they could study and also socialize in safer environments than were available to them near their homes.
• Avoiding gang recruitment. Many said that by becoming known as smart, and by having parents who didn't let them spend time outdoors, they weren't recruited into gangs.
• Teachers who cared and inspired. Harper asked the students to name and describe favorite high school teachers, and he noted that none of them had difficulty doing so, describing challenging teachers who knew and cared about them. He said that the teachers of these students are working in ways counter to the image of out-of-control urban schools.
• Reinforcement of college-going culture. One student noted that, at his high school, every day that a student was accepted at a college, the entire school was told about this over the public address system. While college-going might not be the norm for his socioeconomic group, he came to think of college-going as the norm from hearing these messages over and over again.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/09/30/new-study-explores-qualities-help-black-and-latino-males-succeed-high-school#ixzz2gOH4XCrF 
Inside Higher Ed 

Annotated Bibliography Science-Related Publicaitons Involving Supplemental Instruction

Greetings,

There was a recent discussion on the LRNASST email listserv about publications that described the results of using Supplemental Instruction in science-related courses. I maintain an annotated bibliography on postsecondary peer cooperative learning programs including SI. A sort of my database revealed about 200 entries. Click on this web link to download a copy of the annotated biblioraphy. It is about 40 pages and is in the Rich Texture Format. RTF can be openned by most word processors including Word. Enjoy.