1,720,970 research outputs found
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Measuring Students' Readiness for the College Application Process: A Survey Development and Validation Study
Full text linkMeasuring college knowledge and readiness; scale development; pilot study; guidance counselor
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Advancing and Sustaining the Oceanside Promise: A Collective Impact Initiative Anchored Within Oceanside Unified School District
No full textIn addition to preparing students academically, public schools are increasingly expected to address the complex social, emotional, and safety needs of students. Collective impact, first defined by Kania & Kramer (2011) as “a commitment of a group of important actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem” has emerged as a framework for bringing cross-sector partners together to share ownership of student success (p. 36). Its data-informed, continuous improvement orientation drives collective action to address root-cause issues and to achieve large-scale social impact.
This capstone documents the leadership and support I provided to Oceanside Unified School District (OUSD) and its community partners to advance and plan for the long-term sustainability of the Oceanside Promise (The Promise), a collective impact initiative anchored within OUSD. FSG’s Five Conditions of Collective Impact and StriveTogether’s Cradle to Career Theory of Action were used to assess the current state of the partnership, its backbone capacity, and the development of a multiyear strategic roadmap. My strategic project involved working with district leadership, the Oceanside Promise Foundation (The Foundation), and The Promise partners to clarify roles and direction, create coherence, and facilitate shared ownership of The Promise and its long-term sustainability. In addition to my professional and academic experience, literature regarding collective impact, critical leadership competencies, and organizational and community coherence informed the strategic project’s planning and execution.
This capstone also provides insight into the challenges and opportunities of a district-anchored collective impact initiative. Most notably, it explores how shared community ownership must be intentionally cultivated and how collective impact challenges the mindsets and competencies of educators and community members with a traditional view of how school districts and community partner. Thus, the implications for site and sector sections elevate the conditions that would better support the success of innovative school districts assuming the role of backbone support in collective impact initiatives.collective impact; coalitions; community-building; community collaborations; results-based accountability; education reform; district reform; collective actio
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The Complexity of Solving for Racial Inequalities in Advanced Courses: How Collective Processes Can Support the Quest for Equity
No full textCollege credit bearing coursework, such as Advanced Placement and dual enrollment in college classes, provides a variety of benefits to students who take and complete these courses. Students in advanced classes have access to teachers with more training, participate in class activities that demand higher levels of critical thinking skills, demonstrate improved test scores, and have an increased likelihood of enrolling in a four-year university. Unfortunately, racial inequities in advanced course student enrollment can be found in school districts across the country.
Located in the Austin, Texas area, the Round Rock Independent School District (RRISD) has identified racial discrepancies in advanced course enrollment. According to the district’s analysis of 11th graders, Black and Latinx students with academic potential were enrolled in advanced courses at lower rates than their White and Asian peers. Similar inequities can be found within other grade levels and various types of advanced classes. This capstone chronicles the collective process of educators across RRISD as they worked to understand and remedy these discrepancies in course enrollment. Documented through the see-engage-act cycle of the National Equity Project’s Leading for Equity Framework, I describe the complexity of addressing racial inequities in advanced coursework.
Through the use of a district-created design sprint model, I facilitated interactive sessions with a team of cross-role educators. I also incorporated student voice to help the data come to life. Based on the team’s work, several projects were designed and implemented to intentionally identify and enroll Black and Latinx students in advanced courses for the upcoming year. Subsequently, additional steps are in motion to create district-aligned systems to streamline equitable enrollment and provide student support in advanced classes.
My analysis within this capstone includes current successes while also identifying areas of further consideration as Round Rock ISD continues to address racial disparities in advanced course enrollment and completion. Sharing leadership, advancing from “more data” to action, and meaningfully integrating student and family perspectives are included as implications for this work. I also suggest this type of collective process can be used to address other educational inequities, both within and outside of RRISD
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An Exploration of How Low-Income Students Engage in Extracurricular and Co-Curricular Undergraduate Life
No full textThe below average graduation rates of low-income undergraduates (Nichols, 2015b) have created an urgent need to explore strategies to better support and retain this population. Participation in extracurricular and co-curricular activities is theorized to promote postsecondary retention by engaging students in campus communities, yet low-income students fail to participate in these activities at the same rate as their more affluent peers (Kezar, Walpole, & Perna, 2015; Kuh, 2009). Although financial pressures may be one limiting factor in low-income students’ participation (Walpole, 2003), research suggests that psychological barriers such as low feelings of belonging (Rubin, 2012) may also play a role in shaping students’ undergraduate engagement decisions. This research suggests the importance of studying the resources and relationships that low-income students draw on to successfully engage in extracurricular and co-curricular activities.
This study adds to the existing body of postsecondary engagement literature by exploring the psychological and social factors that inform how successful low-income students experience engaging activities on campus. To do this, the following dissertation study employs in-depth qualitative phenomenological interviewing to investigate how nine successful low-income juniors and seniors chose to engage in university extracurricular and co-curricular activities. Research participants were drawn from a sample of low-income students who participated in a co-curricular federal TRIO program housed within a public university with a large population of successful low-income graduates. This study suggests ways in which administrators can design more effective co-curricular and extracurricular programs and related policies to meet the needs of low-income undergraduates. Findings suggest that providing for basic financial needs, clearly demonstrating the link between engagement and future career goals and emphasizing the opportunity to serve the collective may be important tools that student support services practitioners can use to encourage low-income college student engagement in extracurricular and co-curricular activities.Culture, Communities, and Educatio
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Invisible Forces: Portraits of Instructional Approaches to Mindset Development in Secondary and Postsecondary Writing Classes
No full textSynthesizing a broad swath of motivational and psychosocial literature, the Consortium on Chicago School Research identifies four “academic mindsets” ("I belong in this academic community"; "My ability and competence grow with my effort"; "I can succeed at this"; and "This work has value for me") that predict positive academic and social outcomes for students. These mindsets and their analogous constructs increasingly appear in college readiness and success frameworks as critical factors for college attainment, academic performance, persistence, and completion. Yet student mindsets are particularly vulnerable at school transitions, and despite frequent calls for the expansive field of motivational research to be “translated” into practice, an understanding of how to foster and maintain students’ positive mindsets across the college transition remains surprisingly elusive. Specifically, inadequate attention has been paid to how secondary and postsecondary educators understand student mindsets and seek to influence them through intentional instructional design and pedagogical practices.
To address this gap in the literature, I conducted a multi-case portraiture study of 12th-grade English teachers and instructors of first-year college writing (N=4). Through interviews, classroom observations, and document analysis, I explored these educators’ understandings of academic mindsets and their pedagogical enactment of those understandings. I find that the educators’ understandings and enactments of positive mindset development often converged with extant theory but were complex and sometimes contradictory, manifesting in pedagogical tensions and tradeoffs. I identify two main instructional growth edges for supporting student mindset development in secondary and postsecondary classrooms: greater transparency about instructional intent and more comprehensive metacognitive scaffolding to assist students with motivational meaning-making. Additionally, I discuss the emergence of parallel mindset processes in the focal classrooms: the educators’ approaches to promoting student mindsets often illuminated characteristics of their own mindsets toward teaching, particularly their growth and efficacy mindsets. I therefore conclude with recommendations for how institutional actors and researchers can support educators’ teaching mindsets and mastery of motivating instructional strategies, paralleling the supports we want educators to provide to students across the critical college transition.Human Development and Educatio
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Understanding Latina/o Undocumented Parents’ Engagement in Students’ College Readiness: A Literature Review
No full textFamily engagement; undocumented status; college readiness; Latina/o
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Speaking of Service: A Phenomenological Study of How Low-Income College Students Discuss Service-Learning Participation
No full textService-learning; Low-income; Student Development; Higher Educatio
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Apoyo Sacrificial, Sacrificing Support: Understanding Undocumented Latina/o Parents’ Engagement in Students’ Post-Secondary Planning and Success
No full textEducational research has highlighted the importance of parental engagement in Latina/o students’ post-secondary planning and success; when parents develop their children’s college-going identities early, students are more likely to attend a 4-year institution (Tierney & Auerbach, 2005; Zarate, Saenz, & Oseguera, 2011). Little is known, however, about how Latina/o parents’ immigration status influences their engagement. Existing scholarship has demonstrated that an undocumented status, or parents’ “illegality,” not only limits access to resources, but also adds a layer of distrust, discomfort, and fear of social institutions (De Genova, 2002; Dreby, 2015; Enriquez, 2015; Gonzales 2010, 2011; Yoshikawa, 2011).
This phenomenological qualitative study explores the engagement of 15 undocumented Latina/o parents whose children were successfully admitted and matriculated to Coast University (pseudonym), a prestigious public institution in California. Using in-depth qualitative interview data, this dissertation explores the different stages of parents’ role in their children’s’ post-secondary planning and success and the ways their “illegality” and other factors (i.e. access to resources, connections to social networks, relationships with schools) shape these.
Specifically, this study explores how undocumented Latina/o parents describe and make sense of their sacrificios (sacrifices) and apoyo (support), which I argue are essential components of their role in their children’s post-secondary planning and success. As such, this study shows how undocumented Latina/o parents’ engagement is apoyo sacrificial (sacrificing support), or an engagement that is shaped and bounded by the limitations of their “illegality.” Though bounded by the limitations of their immigration status, undocumented Latina/o parents are intentional about their parenting behaviors—they engage in parenting practices that support their children’s goals and aspirations despite the limitations they face.
This dissertation makes a unique contribution to education and family engagement literature, as it connects the important, underexplored, and under theorized experiences of Latina/o families and communities to conversations on higher education access and success. This study focuses not only on the political and educational barriers undocumented Latina/o parents face, but also examines the critical and intentional ways in which parents respond to these.Latina/o family engagement; post-secondary access; mixed-status families; higher education; undocumented parent
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Doing Together What We Cannot Do Alone: Designing a Network to Build a Field
No full textThe Pathways to Prosperity (PtoP) Network at JFF has a bold vision: to reimagine how young people are prepared for the future of work in the United States. Launched in 2012, the PtoP Network is leading a national effort to improve education, workforce, and economic outcomes by building career pathways systems that prepare all young people for economically sustainable futures. This capstone examines my work to design and implement a strategy to engage high-level leaders (“the leads”) from different sectors and roles across the PtoP Network in intentional and deliberate activities to increase their impact, build their affinity for and connection to the Network, and advance the career pathways field. I examine design considerations for leaders of networks and elevate tensions inherent in the complex work of cross-sector collaboration. My analysis focuses on themes of delivering value and navigating uncertainty in the network design process, with implications for my leadership in the midst of ambiguity, for the future of the PtoP Network, and for collaboration across the education sector. Overall, the findings offer insights into the promise of networks to support field-building through careful design.Doctor of Education Leadership (Ed.L.D.
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Who We Are Is How We Win: Ethnic-Racial Identity as a Universal Developmental Asset for the Culture, the Credits, & College Student Success
Full text linkCompleting college is an educational milestone that has meaningful longer-term implications for students in the U.S. (e.g., economic mobility) and their children (Chetty et al., 2017; Reeves & Krause, 2018). Despite the prevalence of ethnoracially minoritized students in the K-12 and overall U.S. populations, Black and Latine students complete college at lower rates than their peers (Department of Education, 2020; U.S. Census, 2020), thus making economic opportunity harder to attain. College completion and healthy progression into adulthood require similar developmental tasks, e.g., defining one’s career, academic goals, and personal identities (Carnevale et al., 2010, 2013; Chickering & Reisser, 1997; Magolda, 2007). Thus, it is possible that a richer, more complex understanding of personal identity development as it relates to college success, career development, and race/ethnicity (i.e., ethnic-racial identity; Umaña-Taylor et al., 2014) would help close college success gaps. Ethnic-racial identity processes are linked with myriad positive developmental outcomes (e.g., Umaña-Taylor, 2023) and have been leveraged, along with concepts such as campus racial climate (e.g., Hurtado & Carter, 1997; Paris & Alim, 2014), to ground various K-12 reform efforts, collegiate cultural/affinity supports, and culturally relevant/sustaining educator programs. However, less work has explored systematically incorporating ethnic-racial identity, with its multi-dimensional, psychological construction, into models or the practice of college student success. I address this gap in my dissertation by first reviewing leading models for young adult development and college success and presenting a new model of postsecondary success that incorporates ethnic-racial identity. Then, I explored preliminary evidence of the model’s theoretical notions using a nationwide survey of 755 U.S. undergraduate college students—a convenience sample recruited online from multiple U.S. regions. Finally, I assessed the feasibility of bringing an ethnic-racial identity curriculum (i.e., The Identity Project) to college campuses using qualitative interview and survey data gathered during a campus-based pilot study with 48 undergraduate students enrolled at one private college. In doing so, I illuminate possible ways for colleges to leverage student ethnic-racial identity—the fuller, contextualized psychological understanding of race/ethnicity—as an asset on campus and, in turn, increase the probability of all college students attaining educational success and economic opportunity.Educatio
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