Ready for What?: A Longitudinal Investigation of Eleven "College-Ready" Students' Disciplinary Literacy Learning Experiences from High School into College

Resounding calls for reform in K-12 education in the service of “college readiness” have become all but ubiquitous. The K-12 standards-based and literacy reform efforts have urged for teaching and learning that advances the practices and inquiry approaches within and across disciplines—called disciplinary literacy learning— which seeks to replace generic approaches to reading and writing instruction that lacks attention to domain-specific practices and skills. Despite these reform efforts and advancements in K-12 teaching and learning, little is known of what students will encounter academically once they enroll in colleges and universities. This begs the question “ready for what?”— what academic and literacy learning experiences do students encounter once in college and how do students navigate these experiences? This study investigates the experiences of eleven “college-ready” students from their junior years of high school through their first two years of college. I investigated the nature of the teaching and learning from their high school years, which resulted in these students meeting every commonly used metric of college readiness. Then, I followed the students to seven different institutions of higher education to document their learning experiences and how they navigated these demands. Data sources included 76 hours of audio recorded interviews along with numerous (over 1,400) academic artifacts, syllabi, exams, assessments, presentations, and “daily diaries” to analyze the nature of the academic learning experiences in high school and college. I used constant comparative analysis to identify the patterns among students, their courses, and across time. In high school, I found that these eleven students experienced disciplinary literacy learning and inquiry regularly within and across courses. This involved the use of disciplinary texts, the use of problem frames, inquiry cycles, and engagement in the practices of the disciplines. Students were encouraged to pursue topics of interest and were positioned as novice apprentices learning alongside their teachers and classmates in “communities of practice.” In contrast to the disciplinary literacy learning and apprenticeship-style of teaching that occurred in high school, once in college, these eleven students experienced a preponderance of telling and testing across domains and courses. Students’ main academic activities involved taking exams following lecture-style teaching. Especially within the natural sciences and social sciences, students reported that spaces and courses that may have been considered collaborative or for disciplinary practices (discussion sections; lab-based courses) also became additional spaces for lecture-style teaching and exams. When students did encounter rare opportunities for disciplinary literacy learning in college, students expressed feelings of confusion and difficulty. I found that this confusion often stemmed from a lack of scaffolding and support for students. However, these students leveraged their backgrounds and skills to navigate these confusing experiences by seeking additional information from professors and teaching assistants. Together, the findings of this study suggest that K-12 education reform efforts are encouraging students to develop particular dispositions and skills within and across domains. In contrast, college teaching and learning seems to be dominated (at least in the first two years of college) by a pedagogy of telling and testing. This study serves as a warning that even “college-ready” students encountered regular confusion, difficulties, and even boredom during college. This study holds implications for the use of a disciplinary literacy learning framework in college in order to improve access, support, and relevance for all learners.PHDEducational StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147584/1/bmaher_1.pd

How a service-user educator can provide insight into the recovery experience

This article describes a collaboratively designed and delivered teaching and learning session where mental health nursing students met with a service-user educator after reading a range of research papers about recovery. They generated questions based on their reading and then explored the validity of the findings with a patient with experience of the services described in the literature. The authors explain the rationale for the session then reflect on the process and experience from three different perspectives, those of the service-user educator, two students and a nurse lecturer. The accounts confirm that this approach motivated the students to learn about recovery, the stigma of mental health illness, the realities of services and that all the participants found the sessions rewarding and beneficial

Larval Survival of Fuller's Rose Weevil, Naupactus cervinus, on Common Groundcover Species in Orchards of New Zealand Kiwifruit

Fuller's rose weevil, Naupactus cervinus (Boheman) (Curculionidae: Entiminae), is an important quarantine pest of New Zealand kiwifruit exported to Asian markets. Both adults and larvae are considered to be polyphagous. In this study, the survival of larval N. cervinus was estimated on common groundcover species of kiwifruit (Actinidia spp.) in the Bay of Plenty, the main region in New Zealand where kiwifruit is grown. The botanical composition of groundcover in commercial kiwifruit orchards, characterised by survey, was dominated by ryegrass (Lolium perenne), with white clover (Trifolium repens), creeping buttercup (Ranunculus repens), wild strawberry (Duchesnea indica) and broadleaf dock (Rumex obtusifolius) in lower abundance. Survival to mature larvae or adult was relatively low (·11%) for N. cervinus introduced as neonates to field plots or potted ryegrass, white clover and broadleaf dock. White clover was a more favourable host for survival to adults than ryegrass. This study suggests that increased survival of N. cervinus larvae may occur where white clover and large dock plants are abundant, but that survival is likely to be highly variable because of the heterogeneous availability of preferred host plants and host plant quality. These data suggest that larval polyphagy is a strategy that enables N. cervinus to persist at low densities in kiwifruit orchards despite variation in the quality and diversity of groundcover

CLAS App ML

This is a multi-language (ML) update of the CLAS App original design by Bridget Maher from the School of Medicine at University College Cork, Ireland. The current version has an improve counting mechanism and has been translated from English to Spanish, Catalan and German languages within the European project PATIENT (www.patient-project.eu). The CLAS App ML aims to train good written communication skills as they are essential to the practice of medicine and avoidance of medical error. The hospital discharge letter is probably the most important of all written communications between hospital and General Practitioner (Family Doctors). However, discharge letters vary greatly in quality, structure, cohesion, and ‘readability’. Most discharge letters are written by junior doctors and frequently omit important information. The School of Medicine at University College Cork developed a comprehensive check-list i-phone application to improve the quality of hospital discharge letters. The CLAS scale lists the key elements of a discharge letter - reason for admission, investigations, results, diagnosis, problem list, medications, management plan, name and contact details of doctor writing the letter etc. There are 4 pages of items, divided into various sections. Either a section heading or an individual item can be ticked. Most items score 1, but some items of particular importance, such as medication, score higher. Total CLAS score is 50. At the end, the user is shown his total score and can swipe to see a list of unchecked items. By using the CLAS application as a point-of-practice reference tool, doctors and medical students can improve their letter-writing skills, decrease the risk of medical error and improve patient safety. With the new version CLAS App ML we aim to provide a standard within Europe for the structure of hospital discharge letter. Therefore, the App has been translated to 3 new languages.This work has been partly funded by the Patient Project (with support from the European Commission. 527620-LLP-1-2012-1-NLERASMUS-FEXI, http://patient-project.eu/