Edges of Dreams for Marginalized, Urban, Latino Students: Building a Community School

This study examines the way an urban Hispanic school in New Mexico, ranked 50th academically in the United States, grapples with the issues of poverty, disconnection, race, conflicting visions, and hope. Investigating the school’s transition to a community school, a movement that is sweeping high-poverty areas, provides a more encompassing way to look at school reform.  In its one-year existence as a community school in Las Cruces, Lynn Middle School has engaged a vast number of stakeholders along with the School Board and City Council who have begun to work on turning this ‘ghetto’ school into a vibrant community school.  The paper answers the research question, ‘What are the process, procedures and challenges in starting a community school?’ and rather than simply continue to test students, thus providing data that reflect their failure, community schools collaboratively ameliorate the non-academic barriers to student success.  What then might be the anticipated benefits for students, families and neighborhoods? Keywords: poverty, community schools, Hispanics, urban schools, relationships

HELP, IS IT WORTH IT FOR ME(N)?: A STUDY OF FACTORS AFFECTING BLACK MEN\u27S PERCEPTION OF RESOURCE MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES IN COMMUNITY COLLEGE

Nationally, men of color are graduating college at the lowest rates of all race gender subgroups. Prior research suggests this population faces unique obstacles as it relates to race and gender and these challenges are often invisible and difficult to resolve. Academic supports can help students overcome these obstacles; however, it is not clear that they are influencing Black men’s academic help-seeking behavior and, thus, their educational outcomes. Using the Motivated Learning Strategies Questionnaire and data from Knight Community College, two multiple regressions and three t-test were used to explore the relationship between value, expectancy, program participation and resource management strategies for an English 101 course. This research may help understand perceptions of resource management and identify predictive relationships. Additionally, findings may provide new strategies and initiatives may be innovated

Partnering with local government: Accelerating the achievement of community foundation sustainability

Community foundations are one of the fastest growing forms of philanthropy worldwide, almost doubling in number in the last ten years. However, most community foundations do not achieve sustainability until after seven to ten years, and this is a major challenge for the movement. The aim of Mark Bentley's research is to identify and test a range of partnership opportunities with local government that might be successful in helping community foundations accelerate the journey to organizational and financial sustainability. The academic literature was reviewed for information on community foundation sustainability and the characteristics of successful and unsuccessful working relationships with local government. Partnership opportunities were identified and then tested in discussions with community foundation leaders worldwide. The results revealed a clear and consistent group of practical opportunities through which local government could support the start-up and survival of community foundations worldwide, as well as some opportunities that were more context-specific in nature. Whilst highlighting many of the challenges for a community foundation in working more closely with local government, the research proposed a range of strategies that would maximize the potential for successful partnership and mutual benefit

Head first: living labs for ad-hoc search evaluation

The information retrieval (IR) community strives to make evaluation more centered on real users and their needs. The living labs evaluation paradigm, i.e., observing users in their natural task environments, offers great promise in this regard. Yet, progress in an academic setting has been limited. This paper presents the first living labs for the IR community benchmarking campaign initiative, taking as test two use-cases: local domain search on a university website and product search on an e-commerce site. There are many challenges associated with this setting, including incorporating results from experimental search systems into live production systems, and obtaining sufficiently many impressions from relatively low traffic sites. We propose that head queries can be used to generate result lists offline, which are then interleaved with results of the production system for live evaluation. An API is developed to orchestrate the communication between commercial parties and benchmark participants. This campaign acts to progress the living labs for IR evaluation methodology, and offers important insight into the role of living labs in this space

Prog Community Health Partnersh

BackgroundCommunity engagement and rigorous science are necessary to address health issues. Increasingly, community health organizations are asked to partner in research. To strengthen such community organization\u2013academic partnerships, increase research capacity in community organizations, and facilitate equitable partnered research, the Partners in Education Evaluation and Research (PEER) program was developed. The program implements an 18-month structured research curriculum for one mid-level employee of a health-focused community-based organization with an organizational mentor and a Case Western Reserve University faculty member as partners.MethodsThe PEER program was developed and guided by a community\u2013academic advisory committee and was designed to impact the research capacity of organizations through didactic modules and partnered research in the experiential phase. Active participation of community organizations and faculty during all phases of the program provided for bidirectional learning and understanding of the challenges of community-engaged health research. The pilot program evaluation used qualitative and quantitative data collection techniques, including experiences of the participants assessed through surveys, formal group and individual interviews, phone calls, and discussions. Statistical analysis of the change in fellows\u2019 pre-test and post-test survey scores were conducted using paired sample t tests. The small sample size is recognized by the authors as a limitation of the evaluation methods and would potentially be resolved by including more cohort data as the program progresses. Qualitative data were reviewed by two program staff using content and narrative analysis to identify themes, describe and assess group phenomena and determine program improvements.ObjectivesThe objective of PEER is to create equitable partnerships between community organizations and academic partners to further research capacity in said organizations and develop mutually beneficial research partnerships between academia and community organizations.ConclusionPEER demonstrates a commitment to successfully developing sustainable research capacity growth in community organizations, and improved partnered research with academic institutions.20162017-08-28T00:00:00ZU48 DP005030/DP/NCCDPHP CDC HHS/United StatesUL1 TR000439/TR/NCATS NIH HHS/United States28230553PMC5573594689

Data Safe Havens and Trust: Toward a Common Understanding of Trusted Research Platforms for Governing Secure and Ethical Health Research

In parallel with the advances in big data-driven clinical research, the data safe haven concept has evolved over the last decade. It has led to the development of a framework to support the secure handling of health care information used for clinical research that balances compliance with legal and regulatory controls and ethical requirements while engaging with the public as a partner in its governance. We describe the evolution of 4 separately developed clinical research platforms into services throughout the United Kingdom-wide Farr Institute and their common deployment features in practice. The Farr Institute is a case study from which we propose a common definition of data safe havens as trusted platforms for clinical academic research. We use this common definition to discuss the challenges and dilemmas faced by the clinical academic research community, to help promote a consistent understanding of them and how they might best be handled in practice. We conclude by questioning whether the common definition represents a safe and trustworthy model for conducting clinical research that can stand the test of time and ongoing technical advances while paying heed to evolving public and professional concerns

Winning on the Field and Winning in the Classroom. High School Football in Rurual Kentucky: Does a School\u27s Winning Percentage in Football Affect Average ACT Scores?

Kentucky faces many challenges in educating its children at all levels. This study focuses on elements of academic achievement of high school students. Previous studies have examined the effects of teacher training, the effects of peer influence, sorting of students and teachers across school districts, various learning interventions that have targeted specific student populations and subject areas, each in an attempt to explain or improve upon school achievement and student academic success. Previous national studies have focused their attention on the effects of variables found within the classroom; most of these studies recognize that there are influences outside the classroom which can affect academic achievement. My research study focuses on the effect of these outside influences. Previous research on Kentucky suggests that students attending high schools in rural areas experience different opportunities for student interaction, activities, and teacher experience compared to students in other high schools. A question for consideration then is, “can the limited educational opportunities choices found in rural schools be offset or enhanced by community engagement?” I use a school’s winning percentage in high school football as a proxy for “community specific social capital” (Fischel 2009). I incorporate the definition of community specific social capital provided by Fischel as being “one’s network of friends and acquaintances,…having established a network of personal relationships…” within a community as part of the interpretation of my data. Fischel further suggests that some of the most important sources of community specific social capital would be found in the suburban and small town communities. (Fischel 2009). I test whether the winning percentage of a school’s football team affects the average ACT score of the schools within rural counties. Classification of a school as rural is determined by criteria developed in the Common Core Database (CCD) from the National Center for Education Statistics. My data include the average ACT scores and the recorded participation of high school football teams of 234 high schools in Kentucky for the years 2008 – 2010. Results of the study indicate that there is a significant positive relationship that exists between a school’s in participation football and the average ACT score of schools within a rural locale

AN EXAMINATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ASSOCIATE DEGREE PROGRAM PREADMISSION GRADE POINT AVERAGE (GPA), AMERICAN COLLEGE TEST (ACT) SCORES AND DEGREE COMPLETION AND SUCCESS ON THE NATIONAL COUNCIL LICENSURE EXAMINATION-REGISTERED NURSES (NCLEX-RN)

AbstractAN EXAMINATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ASSOCIATE DEGREE PROGRAM PREADMISSION GRADE POINT AVERAGE (GPA), AMERICAN COLLEGE TEST (ACT) SCORES AND DEGREE COMPLETION AND SUCCESS ON THE NATIONAL COUNCIL LICENSURE EXAMINATION-REGISTERED NURSES (NCLEX-RN).Associate Degree Nursing programs in Alabama have more applicants than available spots, making them highly competitive programs to gain entry. The community colleges that offer these programs are facing many challenges including performance-based funding, open-enrollment policies, and high attrition rates. Given these conditions, program directors institute an application grading process in an effort to select applicants whom the programs believe is most likely to graduate and to be successful on the NCLEX-RN licensure exam. This study examines the relationship of the American College Testing (ACT),) and students pre-admissions GPAs in an attempt to interpret which academic factor makes a better predictor of student success. The study revealed that GPA was the only statistically significant indicator for student success in both program completion and NCLEX-RN pass on the first attempt.Keywords: Student Success, Alabama Community College Nursing, ACT Scores, GP

Overcoming the Poverty Challenge to Enable College and Career Readiness for All: The Crucial Role of Student Supports

This white paper focuses on an important and under-conceptualized thread in the weave of efforts needed to ensure that all students graduate from high school prepared for college and/or career training: enhanced student supports. It argues that in order to overcome the educational impacts of poverty -- the poverty challenge, schools that serve high concentrations of low income students need to be able to provide direct, evidence-based supports that help students attend school regularly, act in a productive manner, believe they will succeed, overcome external obstacles, complete their coursework, and put forth the effort required to graduate college- and career-ready. Next, it highlights the unique role that nonprofits, community volunteers, and full-time national service members can play in the implementation of these direct student supports. It concludes by exploring how federal and state policy and funding can be designed to promote the implementation and spread of evidence-based, direct student supports. The paper draws on the emerging evidence base to examine these topics, and calls upon the insights gleaned through the author's fifteen years of participant-observation in the effort to create schools strong enough to overcome the ramifications of poverty and prepare all students for adult success

Learning from Turnaround Middle Schools: Strategies for Success

In New York City and around the nation, there is intense interest in the question of what it takes to turn around a low-performing school. This study focused on two sets of initially low-performing NYC middle schools. The first group (the "turnaround schools") exhibited significant growth in academic performance between 2006 and 2010, while the other group saw minimal growth or remained stagnant during the same period. To gain an understanding of how the turnaround schools improved, researchers conducted in-depth interviews with principals and focus groups with teachers in both sets of schools. This report presents a rich picture of the conditions and strategies that enabled the turnaround schools to boost student achievement. Specifically, it identifies three interrelated "essential conditions" that were largely principal driven: aligning needs with goals, creating a positive work environment, and addressing student discipline and safety. These essential conditions, in turn, set the stage for implementing specific strategies to improve teaching and learning: developing teachers internally, creating small learning communities, targeting student sub-populations, and using data to inform instruction. The report also describes several ongoing challenges faced by all the schools. Finally, it draws on the study's findings to make recommendations for improving the effectiveness of middle schools here in New York City and around the country. The study is part of an ongoing focus on the middle grades for the Research Alliance