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Studies of academic recovery courses (ARCs) focus almost exclusively on academic outcomes, such as postcourse grade point average (GPA) and academic standing. This study explores the role of noncognitive factors--specifically attribution perspective, shame resilience, and academic identity--for students engaged in ARCs. Pre- and postcourse data from ARC students revealed significant correlations between noncognitive factors and academic standing and statistically significant relationships among non-cognitive factors, as well as a significant difference in mean shame scores by gender. Practice implications are presented to guide educators in their retention efforts with probationary students and to encourage future research.

This paper examines students' patterns of success in classes with high DFW rates at a research-intensive university. We investigated whether certain assignment types were associated with inequitable grade distributions for underrepresented minority (URM) and transfer students and whether assignment grade patterns were similar to final grade patterns. Across eight classes, 745 students' grades were analyzed from 27 assignments including tests, papers, projects, homework, and oral reports. In every class, URM students received lower final grades than non-URM students, and transfer students received lower final grades than non-transfer students. In five classes, different patterns of equity emerged across different assignment types and different groups of students. These findings support the importance of going beyond the disaggregation of final grades by disaggregating grades on individual assignments, and the need to develop institutional practices that examine the presence of equity gaps in the classroom.

College 101 is powerful Pre-College Opportunity Program (PCoP) designed to expose at-risk high school students to the benefits of post-secondary education, to motivate them to stay in school, and to help them envision a future that includes post-secondary education. The unique features of College 101 include that it is grounded in the pedagogical approach of Real Talk (Hernandez, 2015), and that it is led mainly by College Positive Volunteers (CPVs). The goal of this study was to explore the experiences of at-risk high school students who engaged in the program at a mid-sized research university located in the Midwest. An interactive activity that captured students' perspectives on their goals, barriers to success, and steps needed to reach their goals; and a post-event survey aimed to measure their perspectives on the helpfulness of College 101, revealed that College 101 is a unique and effective program for engaging, motivating, and helping at-risk high school students see post-secondary education as a realistic option for their future success.

This paper presents findings emanating from a larger investigation. In essence, this qualitative project sought to uncover the ways in which early childhood Religious Education (RE) teachers' experience of a formation-based program, known as The T.I.T.U.S Project (Testament In Teachers Using Scripture), transformed their own religious literacy and subsequently, their teaching of RE; it is these findings that form the focus of this paper. Religious literacy is explained as consisting of more than content, to include the complex relationship of content with both context and learner. It is in this nexus between content, context and learner that The T.I.T.U.S Project resided. With existing literature clearly identifying teachers' lack of confidence in teaching scripture within RE, that is, in engaging with context and context as Cullen explains it, this research is significant. The findings from the qualitative survey, interview data and reflective journals suggest that teachers' own personal formational experiences and growth in religious literacy transformed their teaching of classroom Religious Education, including their confidence in teaching scripture.

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNC Charlotte) is an urban, four-year, public institution serving over 30,000 students. Like other institutions, we were caught off-guard by the COVID-19 pandemic and scrambled to move our instruction online to comply with our state's stay-at-home order in mid-March 2020. The shift to remote instruction resulted in widespread changes to our assessment of student learning plans at the course, program, and institutional levels. We discuss these changes and the challenges they posed. We also discuss silver linings that have emerged since March, including new relationships with faculty and renewed faculty interest in best practices for teaching and assessing learning remotely.

A grand challenge is a problem that requires broad cooperation for successful resolution from a community of scholars. Several national and international organizations have generated lists of grand challenges to unify the efforts of scholars and practitioners in a field. However, the field of assessment has yet to identify its own set of grand challenges that could serve to organize and motivate progress toward meaningful goals. This article describes the process by which potential grand challenges were identified and subsequently evaluated by professionals in the field through a national survey. Results of the survey demonstrate broad support for the importance of four challenges: 1) Use assessment findings to increase equity; 2) Use assessment findings to direct immediate pedagogical improvements; 3) Produce visible and actionable assessment findings that drive innovation; and 4) Examine changes in institutional effectiveness (including student learning) over time. The article concludes with a discussion of the grand challenges that emerged from this work and a description of an ongoing national effort to address these challenges through strategic planning.

Students at many higher education institutions are expected to acquire effective written communication skills and strong critical thinking skills. Although these student learning outcomes are common, these skills are complex. Assessing students' attainment of these outcomes at an institutional level can be difficult as many approaches to measuring student learning have inherent flaws or biases. This study uses direct and indirect measures of student learning to triangulate freshmen and seniors' attainment of written communication and critical thinking outcomes. The data collected through these complementary methods allowed institutional stakeholders to examine student learning through different lenses and to create a detailed and nuanced portrait of student learning within the institution.

Today, higher education faces increased accountability to assess and measure student learning. However, traditional metrics (like standardized tests and graduation rates) fail to provide a comprehensive understanding of exactly what students learn in a contextualized program of study. To address this gap, the researchers piloted a charrette model to bring together students, faculty, and external stakeholders. Current and former students were asked to metacognitively reflect on their learning experiences and share them in a storytelling format. Stakeholders then provided critical feedback to faculty on what they perceived students had learned. Data results showed that external stakeholders were able to assess student learning and to provide actionable feedback on next steps, establishing trust and enhanced understanding between all groups. This model may serve as a viable approach to provide much-needed context to stakeholders on student learning outcomes in higher education.

The National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) was introduced into Australian schools in 2008. Since NAPLAN's standardised tests are now regarded as high-stakes assessment, how well students perform has now become much more important. The findings presented in this paper pertain to students' experiences of how NAPLAN has affected their learning of mathematics. This investigation makes a contribution to understanding student experiences of high-stakes testing, from an Australian perspective. To best ascertain students' experiences of NAPLAN and to gain an understanding of how NAPLAN affected the teaching and learning of mathematics, a qualitative approach to research design was selected.

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought increased attention to the critical mathematical literacy of citizens in the United States and around the world. A statistically and mathematically literate society is crucial for ensuring that citizens are able to sift through political rhetoric to maintain life-saving procedures such as social distancing and other infection dampening efforts. Additionally, recent civil unrest due to the disproportionate killings of Black men by police provokes investigation into the public's mathematical literacy. In this paper, we investigate adolescent students' critical mathematics consciousness and mathematics literacy as they reason through two interview tasks on the coronavirus and police shooting data. Drawing on Frankenstein's program of Critical Mathematics Education, we introduce an analytic framework for documenting the critical mathematics consciousness of adolescent students. We interviewed fifteen 14- to 16-year-old students as they solved five tasks designed to elicit their critical and ethical mathematical awareness. Our findings indicate that students exhibit very little critical mathematics consciousness in the context of the police problem but show awareness that data can be presented in ways that manipulate the public's emotions in the coronavirus problem. We conclude the paper with a discussion of implications for designing future instruction to support students' growth in critical mathematics consciousness.

Discourse on quality, within the context of childcare, has moved beyond the level of licensing to consider children's right to belong. Within Western Australia (WA), there has been a paradigm shift as international research literature on quality childcare has advocated the long-term benefits for individuals and the community when children experience high quality early education and care. This paradigm shift has resulted in new legislation in WA that articulates the components of quality across childcare, as well as the criteria on which centres are assessed. This paper reports the findings of an investigation into the constructs of quality from two stakeholder groups; parents and educators. Findings from this study indicated that, when it comes to quality, what matters most to both parents and educators are the types of interactions children have with others and their environment; the ways in which children's needs are met; and children's experiences for development and learning. These findings align with the themes of the nationally mandated early years' document--The Early Years Learning Framework (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations [DEEWR], 2009) Belonging, Being and Becoming.

In Western Australia (WA) early learning centres, also referred to as childcare centres, are required by law to employ at least one degree qualified teacher. As such, graduates from early childhood degree programs are able to seek employment as a teacher across the school and childcare sectors. This paper presents research that investigated pre-service early childhood teachers' perspectives on teaching within the early learning sector in WA. The impetus was to ascertain pre-service teachers' perspectives of the childcare sector, specifically how they viewed the role of the teacher in this context. Perspectives were gathered before and again after a ten week professional experience within a centre. A mixed methods approach was adopted to facilitate the collection of data by survey and interview. Quantitative survey data were analysed through statistical analysis and compiling percentage and frequency graphs. Qualitative interview data were transcribed and coded to determine emerging themes. Findings illustrated that whilst education and care has become a unified concept at the policy level, an education-care dichotomy continues to exist within the early learning sector. Implications arising from this disconnect relate to staffing, conditions and the quality of experiences afforded to children. These implications highlight the need for Australian governments to investigate international approaches for creating unity in early learning centres.

Research on teacher formation emphasises the need for teachers in Catholic schools to be involved in ongoing, purposeful, professional and spiritual formation (Franchi and Rymarz 2017). Contextually, Catholic Education Western Australia (CEWA) requires teachers of Religious Education (RE) in Catholic schools to participate in ongoing professional development, including opportunities for spiritual and faith formation. This paper presents initial findings from a project that engaged twelve Catholic early childhood RE teachers from one Western Australian school in a series of formative sessions. The project was named The T.I.T.U.S. (Testament In Teachers Using Scripture) Project and comprised four sessions that offered teachers opportunities for spiritual and faith formation through the use of Scripture. A qualitative approach to the research design was employed and data gathered included survey, journaling and semi-structured interviews. Data were analysed through a process of thematic coding. The initial findings provide insight into early childhood RE teachers' perspectives of their own spiritual and faith formation.

The mandated early childhood framework in Australia requires educators working in early childhood services to attend to children's spirituality. Also, one of the five outcomes in this framework tasks educators with promoting children's connectedness with and contribution to the world, including natural environments. In this paper I present findings from a qualitative investigation to determine educators' understandings and practices around promoting young children's spirituality in the context of religious childcare centres in Western Australia aligned with a focus on nature engagement. A social constructivist theoretical perspective with a phenomenological and interpretivist paradigm framed the research. Interview and observational data were collected and analysed through interpretative phenomenological analysis revealing that educators were able to articulate the connection between spirituality and engagement with nature in childhood. However, in practice, educators rarely offered opportunities for children to experience nature. Recommendations include the provision of professional development in the area of children's spirituality and its connection with nature along with the creation of guidelines on pedagogical practices that afford children opportunities to engage with their spirituality through nature.

Online exchanges among learners are an important form of communication in language learning contexts. This is due to the affordances this medium of communication creates for learning as well as the growing interest in internationalization of curricula. In fact, online communication can foster connections between people, including learners, across the globe. This paper is based on a qualitative analysis of online chat communication between Canadian learners of German and German learners of English. We discuss how these learners negotiate closing sequences in their chats, considering that the patterns for closing sequences may be different in different languages or be culture-specific and learners need to make choices on a spectrum between business focus (i.e. staying on task) vs. personal focus (i.e. addressing personal information). Hence, learners must negotiate interactive patterns that they may not be familiar with in creative ways that establish and maintain interpersonal relationships. Research about online communication helps to better understand learner communication, especially in an international context. In addition, it helps raise language awareness for teacher training and provides impetus for sensitizing teachers and learners to the ways in which interaction works and how relationships are maintained in communication.

Childcare within Australia has undergone significant reform as a result of the implementation of the nationally mandated "Belonging, Being and Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework" [EYLF] (Department for Education, Employment and Workplace Relations [DEEWR]. 2009. "Belonging, Being and Becoming. The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia." Canberra: Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations). The EYLF articulates contemporary perspectives of the child through its principles, practices and learning outcomes. Educators are required to promote these principles, practices and learning outcomes with children aged from birth to 5 years. This paper reports the findings from a research project that sought to investigate how educators applied their understanding of learning outcome two of the EYLF (children are connected with and contribute to their world). The focus of this research was educators working with children aged two to three years within childcare centres operating on school sites, in metropolitan Western Australian. The research design was qualitative and situated within the interpretivist paradigm. Observations were used as the method for gathering data and these were analysed through a process of coding. This paper presents the observational findings of educators' practices within learning outcome two. Composite vignettes from the voice of the child are included to present the observational findings. In centralising the voice of the child, contemporary perspectives are made explicit.

Online distance-learning (ODL) programmes in higher education enable students to remain in their domicile country to study with institutions based in other countries. ODL students can find themselves studying with others from many different countries, adding greater heterogeneity of personal, environmental and cultural perspectives compared with on-campus education. This is likely to impact the learners' experience in different ways. The current research examined the experience of students living outside of the European Union, who were registered with an ODL programme with a higher education institution based in the European Union. The research identified a number of important factors that influenced the students' experience in different ways. The results emphasise the need for ODL programmes to fully consider individual students' contexts, regardless of where they are in the world, and for these needing to be embedded in a pedagogical framework that gives due consideration to globally diverse cohorts of students.

Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is an established qualitative methodology widely adopted within health-based research. However, one gap in the literature is that little has been written about IPA's employability within educationally situated research. Our paper aims to demonstrate that IPA is a suitable methodology for education research. This paper has two parts. In the first part, the authors utilise the method of exegesis and theoretical analysis to explicate and provide clarity concerning the often-misunderstood philosophical and theoretical background of IPA. In the second part, we advocate for IPA as a suitable option for qualitative research in educational contexts. To execute this advocacy, the authors present a specific example of qualitative research that successfully employed IPA as its methodological approach and system for analysis. We present the details of a research project that utilised IPA to explore spirituality in early childhood education contexts, and in doing so the authors illustrate how the theories and methods of IPA can be actualised, thus introducing IPA into education contexts in a coherent fashion. The overall aim of the paper is to affirm IPA as a viable qualitative approach for education researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australian children read for pleasure less and less as they move through primary school, with a noticeable decline emerging in the middle primary school years (Scholastic, 2019). It has also been found that reading for pleasure at school has become de-prioritised in primary schools, with greater emphasis in the broader literacy education dialogue placed on instructional reading pedagogy and standardised literacy testing (Merga & Gardiner, 2018). The research presented in this paper focuses on the aspects of school culture that meaningfully support Reading for Pleasure at School (RfPS) in Years 3-6. It aims to explore the perspectives of five educators and 14 Years 3-6 children from one Western Australian independent public school. Consistent with a phenomenological perspective, this qualitative case study collected data through semi-structured individual interviews and focus group interviews with the participants. The research found that there were notable discrepancies between the educators' and the children's perspectives of RfPS culture, highlighting the importance of children's perspectives being sought if schools wish to improve the quantity and quality of their reading for pleasure practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse on quality, within the context of childcare, has moved beyond the level of licensing to consider children's right to belong. Within Western Australia (WA), there has been a paradigm shift as international research literature on quality childcare has advocated the long-term benefits for individuals and the community when children experience high quality early education and care. This paradigm shift has resulted in new legislation in WA that articulates the components of quality across childcare, as well as the criteria on which centres are assessed. This paper reports the findings of an investigation into the constructs of quality from two stakeholder groups; parents and educators. Findings from this study indicated that, when it comes to quality, what matters most to both parents and educators are the types of interactions children have with others and their environment; the ways in which children's needs are met; and children's experiences for development and learning. These findings align with the themes of the nationally mandated early years' document--the Early Years Learning Framework (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations [DEEWR], 2009) Belonging, Being and Becoming., Introduction The early childhood education and care sector, within Western Australia (WA), has undergone significant change. This change has been focused on a national initiative to improve quality within the [...]

A large body of evidence indicates that socioeconomic status (SES) is a strong predictor of school achievement, college graduation and child outcomes in general. Better developmental and health outcomes are strongly associated with family assets, income and education. We introduce a model incorporating a range of theoretical and empirical literature about the relationships between a household's socio-economic position, household interactions, and child educational outcomes. The intention is to illustrate how these frequently cited factors are exacerbated and aligned by stress or difficult environments which cause long-term challenges for children in high-risk circumstances. Finally, we modify the model to illustrate the dynamic nature of these relationships, highlighting how the developmental trajectory of a child who lives with toxic stress might differ from a comparable child with social supports in a situation of low or tolerable stress. (Contains 4 figures.)

This paper presents findings emanating from a larger investigation. In essence, this qualitative project sought to uncover the ways in which early childhood Religious Education (RE) teachers' experience of a formation-based program, known as The T.I.T.U.S Project (Testament In Teachers Using Scripture), transformed their own religious literacy and subsequently, their teaching of RE; it is these findings that form the focus of this paper. Religious literacy is explained as consisting of more than content, to include the complex relationship of content with both context and learner. It is in this nexus between content, context and learner that The T.I.T.U.S Project resided. With existing literature clearly identifying teachers' lack of confidence in teaching scripture within RE, that is, in engaging with context and context as Cullen explains it, this research is significant. The findings from the qualitative survey, interview data and reflective journals suggest that teachers' own personal formational experiences and growth in religious literacy transformed their teaching of classroom Religious Education, including their confidence in teaching scripture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Western Australia (WA), Religious Education (RE) is a mandated learning area within the compulsory years of the Catholic school sector. RE is advocated as a curriculum subject, timetabled for and assessed alongside other subjects and focussed on developing religious knowledge and understanding. In addition to the RE lesson, faith development, or catechesis occurs through the intersection of RE and other faith-based activities in the Catholic school. In the early learning centre that caters for children prior to compulsory schooling, there is no formalised RE curriculum and educators are tasked with raising the religious awareness of children as opportunities arise. This paper presents findings from research that explored educators' understandings of, and practices in, promoting children's spirituality specifically in connection to RE. As a result, the paper advocates for spirituality as the starting point for developing young children's religious beliefs. In addition, it become evident through this investigation that understandings of spirituality, religiosity and RE continue to be complex and educators require assistance to disentangle these if they are to intentionally promote children's spirituality, and subsequently, their religious beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describes the development of a mentoring program that paired faculty and graduate students and changed the institutional environment for minority students, examining one black graduate students' reflections on the change and her struggle to adjust to the new, predominantly white environment. Discusses several issues that must be confronted when developing support structures for minority students in higher education. (SM)