Employment Program Components: Considerations for Modifying Programming for People Experiencing Homelessness

Employment programs typically include assessment, job search assistance, work readiness training, occupational training, job placement, and retention services. Research and experience suggest that programs can best meet individual needs, strengths, and interests by modifying these elements to ensure flexible services that support each individual's personal and developmental needs as they transition to employment. This best practice brief highlights a menu of enhancements and examples that programs may consider in providing supportive, flexible services for individuals experiencing or at risk of homelessness

Exploring core cognitive skills of Computational Thinking

Although still innovative and not largely disseminated, Computational Thinking is being considered as a critical skill for students in the 21st century. It involves many skills, but programming abilities seem to be a core aspect since they foster the development of a new way of thinking that is key to the solution of problems that require a combination of human mental power and computing power capacity. This paper presents an exploratory study developed to select psychological assessment tests that can be used to identify and measure Computational Thinking cognitive processes, associated to the programming component, so that strategies can be developed to promote it. After the literature review, we identified four central cognitive processes implied in programming, therefore important to Computational Thinking, and accordingly selected a set of four tests that were administered to a sample of 12 introductory programming students. Our results suggest that spatial reasoning and general intelligence are crucial dimensions for introductory programming, being also correlated to the students’ academic success in this area. However, arithmetic reasoning and attention to detail tests did not correlate. Based on these results, directions for future research have been defined in order to effectively identify and develop the core cognitive processes of programming, ergo, to help develop Computational Thinking.University of Susse

A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students, Volume II

Provides a comprehensive review of research on the academic acceleration of gifted students

An Investigation of the Combined Assessments Used as Entrance Criteria for a Gifted English Middle School Program

The purpose of this study was to determine if the four assessments for entrance into an academic middle school gifted English program were accurately predicting success, as measured by students’ grades each nine-week grading period. Some students were dismissed from the program each year because they could not maintain the required minimum average of 80%. The four entrance assessments evaluated were the Cognitive Abilities Test (CogAT), Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test (NNAT), STEP Writing test, and the Iowa Test of Basic Skills: Reading (ITBS). The sample consisted of 150 sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students studied longitudinally over the span of four years from a suburban middle school in a large Texas school district. Using correlation, logistic regression, and generalized linear regression models, the results showed that all the students selected to participate in the middle school gifted English program were statistically capable of success, whether they successfully remained in the program or not. Additionally, the results indicated that the two achievement tests (ITBS Reading and STEP Writing test) better predicted which students were successful, whereas the aptitude tests (CogAT and NNAT) did not. The achievement tests were determined to be better predictors of students’ success, as measured by grades, in this rigorous academic middle school gifted English program. Other findings include (a) students’ grades increased over time in the program, (b) females were predicted to earn about two point higher grades than males, and (c) the individual student was a significant predictor of success based on entrance scores. Finally, several recommendations were made for future research. These possibilities include repeating this study using standard scores for data analysis rather than the percentile scores that were available for this investigation. An additional recommendation is to investigate a possible replacement for the STEP Writing test, as it has not been nationally normed in decades. Another possibility would be to evaluate the curriculum and teacher effectiveness within the district using the NAGC (2010b) Pre-K-Grade 12 Gifted Programming Standards. A final potential study could implement specific interventions for use with students at-risk for underachievement to determine which strategies are most effective

Identifying cognitive abilities to improve CS1 outcome

Introductory programming courses entail students’ high failure and dropout rates. In an effort to tackle this problem, we carried out a qualitative study aiming to shed some light on the programming phase that is most challenging for students, in order to elicit the specific difficulties they experience while learning to program. In doing so, distinctive cognitive abilities, differentiating subjects in terms of the way they handle programming tasks, were detected. Such aptitudes are represented in three groups of students: those who learn easily, those who never seem to fully grasp what programming requires despite true effort, and those who experience a sudden insight, making them leap from a point were they had difficulties to another where they overcome them. By interviewing teachers and students, abstraction and sequencing elaboration were found to be the two core skills for programming. These results impelled us to consider the mental models’ approach, concluding that there are very specific cognitive functions that are more favorable to learn programming and that are fostered by more adequate schemas of representing reality. Some conclusions involving Problem-based learning as a fit teaching methodology to overcome students’ difficulties are also presented

Microcomputer-based tests for repeated-measures: Metric properties and predictive validities

A menu of psychomotor and mental acuity tests were refined. Field applications of such a battery are, for example, a study of the effects of toxic agents or exotic environments on performance readiness, or the determination of fitness for duty. The key requirement of these tasks is that they be suitable for repeated-measures applications, and so questions of stability and reliability are a continuing, central focus of this work. After the initial (practice) session, seven replications of 14 microcomputer-based performance tests (32 measures) were completed by 37 subjects. Each test in the battery had previously been shown to stabilize in less than five 90-second administrations and to possess retest reliabilities greater than r = 0.707 for three minutes of testing. However, all the tests had never been administered together as a battery and they had never been self-administered. In order to provide predictive validity for intelligence measurement, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised and the Wonderlic Personnel Test were obtained on the same subjects

Innate talents: reality or myth?

Talents that selectively facilitate the acquisition of high levels of skill are said to be present in some children but not others. The evidence for this includes biological correlates of specific abilities, certain rare abilities in autistic savants, and the seemingly spontaneous emergence of exceptional abilities in young children, but there is also contrary evidence indicating an absence of early precursors of high skill levels. An analysis of positive and negative evidence and arguments suggests that differences in early experiences, preferences, opportunities, habits, training, and practice are the real determinants of excellence