Andrew Dean Ho *
Comparing Score Trends on High-Stakes and Low-Stakes Tests Using Metric-Free Statistics and Multidimensional Item Response Models ( Stanford University , 2005)
Test score trends indicate degrees of progress or regress for students, teachers, schools, districts and states. Interpretations of trend statistics form the basics for newspaper headlines, scholarly reports, and educational policies. This dissertation describes counterintuitive features of large-scale test score trends that threaten these widespread interpretations. First, popular trend statistics are “pliable” under considerations that could be described as arbitrary: the choice of a passing score, the choice of a percentile for reporting, or the choice of a score scale. This pliability can warp trend magnitudes and, in dramatic situations, reverse the sign of the trend. Second, trend statistics for “high-stakes” tests are shown to be discrepant with and generally more positive than trend statistics for matched “low-stakes” tests. This dissertation addresses these inconsistencies in turn. First, a “metric-free” methodology overcomes the shortcomings of popular trend statistics. Second, a conceptual and statistical framework models trend discrepancies as a consequence of numerous factors, including differences in content, examinee motivation, and sampling procedures. These contributions have implications for many educational controversies, including the validity of gains in high-stakes test scores, trends in score gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students, and the attribution of test score trends to particular educational policies.
Gregory M. Walton *
The Role of Social Identity Processes in Motivation ( Yale University , 2005)
Four studies explore the underpinning of academic motivation in students’ social ties with others in school. In Studies 1-3, fostering connections between students and other people invested in an achievement domain improved their motivation. Students were led to feel optimistic about their prospects of forming ties to others in a field of study (Study 1), to feel they had a minimal relationship with a peer there (based on a shared birthday, Study 2), and to feel that they belonged to a minimal group associated with the field (Study 3). These manipulations generated large effects on students’ motivation. They affected not only students’ self-perceived belonging and academic potential, but also their freely chosen behavior as enacted in private (e.g. persistence on an insoluble academic puzzle). Study 4 extended the conceptual analysis to the academic underachievement of students from historically excluded ethnic groups. It evaluated an intervention that discouraged ethnic minority students from interpreting adverse social events as evidence of their lack of social connection to school. This intervention improved Black students’ motivation and achievement (e.g., GPA). Discussion addresses the role of belonging concerns in motivation.
Katherine Mellen Charron
Teaching Citizenship: Septima Poinsette Clark and the Transformation of the African American Freedom Struggle ( Yale University , 2005)
Black South Carolinian Septima Poinsette Clark (1898-1987) began her teaching career in 1916, but is best remembered for her role in developing the Citizenship Schools in the late 1950s. During the modern civil rights movement, thousands of disfranchised southern African Americans in the Citizenship Schools learned how to read and write so that they might register to vote. The program that Clark fashioned succeeded because it represented a natural extension of her life’s work as an educator and civic activist: teaching citizenship by helping people to help themselves. Clark ’s activist educational experience challenges dominant narratives and chronologies of both the civil rights and the women’s movements. Placing the organizing tradition of southern black women teachers and clubwomen like Clark at the center of this investigation demonstrates that their efforts had long-term political consequences. Theorizing a practical pedagogy to answer black adult education and voter registration needs in the 1950s and 1960s, Septima Clark adapted a grassroots political vision forged by southern black women and rooted in Progressive Era conceptions of education, citizenship, and the state, to the opportunities occasioned by structural changes in the law, politics, and the freedom struggle itself in the World War II years. In so doing, she helped train a new generation of black women civic organizers to continue working for change in their communities.
Stephanie Jones
Living Poverty as a Girl: Literacy and Identity Between Social Classes ( University of Cincinnati , 2004)
This dissertation examines the lives, literacies, and identities of seven White and one African American working-poor girls and their mothers across contexts. Using critical ethnography and action-oriented methodologies, this three-year study draws from diverse data sources including fieldnotes, interviews, student work samples and photographs, photographs taken by the researcher, historical artifacts, videos of classroom activity, and autobiography. Critical social theories inform this project that merges anthropology, critical psychology, feminist sociology, and new literacy studies to promote more nuanced readings of data. Sociocultural and critical analyses of the girls’ and their mothers’ engagements with school demonstrate that they each faced psychosocial challenges as they attempted to construct future trajectories that deviated from their own mothers’ histories. These challenges were complicated by their daily experiences and relationships with White middle-class teachers and the impact of social class difference on classroom engagements. With a lens clearly centered on how class is lived, felt, understood, and discussed, this study challenges the tasks, expectations, and interactions in classrooms that are closely aligned with hegemonic beliefs and practices. While focusing broadly on literacy education, this work aims to stimulate productive discourse around social class, girls, schooling, and conducting research across class lines in the United States .
Christine P. Li-Grining
Social Foundations of Early School Success Among Low-Income Children: The Role of Self-Regulation and Home, Classroom, and Policy Contexts (Northwestern University, 2005)
Efforts to understand economic disparities in school readiness have often focused on cognitive skills, yet social skills, such as controlling behavior and attention, are central to understanding children’s adaptation to school. This dissertation sought to advance understanding of how children’s self-regulation and social contexts shape their school success in three interrelated studies. Setting the stage for the dissertation, Study 1 examines developmental patterns and predictors of preschoolers’ self-regulation. Using the Three-City Study (TCS, Study 1 found that preschoolers’ self-regulation was jeopardized by three types of poverty-related risks: low birth weight, sociodemographic stressors, and residential stressors. Using hierarchical linear modeling, Study 2 showed that children’s self-regulation predicted gains in reading and mathematics trajectories from kindergarten through first grade. Furthermore, self-regulation was especially protective for children in poverty. These findings are based on the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten Cohort, a nationally representative sample of kindergarteners. Using the TCS, Study 3 used econometric techniques to examine whether mothers’ welfare and work transitions compromised the school readiness of preschoolers with lower self-regulation. These studies suggest that early social skills are highly important for later school success, particularly for children at risk, and that school readiness programs should not focus solely on academic skills.
* Exemplary Dissertation Award Winner eligible for $25,000 research grant.