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The purpose of this paper is to provide a description of how critical reflection can be used to update and revise teaching practices in response to evolving student needs and challenges in higher education. The authors identify the types of challenges that faculty and graduate students face in the current educational environment. Generational differences between faculty and students, the impact of increased student stress levels, and advances in technology will continue to shape how we instruct graduate students. We identified a number of evidence-based practices which were reported to be useful in reducing stress and anxiety in students while still maintaining academic rigor. We found critical reflection to be beneficial in shifting instructional paradigms. Critical reflections are crucial at the individual level, but there is merit in performing them at the departmental and organizational level as well to promote systemic change.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the experiences of faculty of color (FOC) in communication sciences and disorders (CSD) with a specific emphasis on mentoring or being mentored during doctoral training and as faculty. FOC experience a number of unique obstacles to achieve success in higher education, often as a result of engaging in predominantly white spaces at the university or broader professional levels. Mentoring is a commonly recommended strategy for the recruitment and retention of FOC; however, little is known about the mentoring experiences of FOC in CSD. Method: Sixteen FOC, primarily women in tenure-track positions, provided 46- to 60-min semistructured interviews related to their experiences in academia. Interviews were transcribed, and for the purposes of this study, comments related to mentoring were identified and coded. A narrative thematic analysis was used to generate themes and subthemes evident in the interviews. Results: Six themes emerged from the data analysis: types of mentoring, cultural dynamics of mentoring, institutional support, motivation, ineffective mentoring, and effective mentoring. While participants chose to emphasize different aspects of their experiences as FOC, the importance of mentoring was notable and there were marked similarities in their experiences with mentoring. Conclusions: The data in this study indicated that mentoring plays an important role in shaping one's career success and trajectory in the discipline and the academy. A number of conclusions and recommendations were drawn from the experiences shared by the FOC. Recommendations include creating an environment to talk about mentoring, formally developing mentoring programs, and providing support and structure to guide mentoring relationships.

Purpose: The purpose of this tutorial is to discuss the use of curriculum-based language assessment (CBLA) with students who are English language learners and students who speak nonmainstream varieties of English, such as African American English. Method: The article begins with a discussion of the discourse of mathematics and the role of the speech-language pathologist (SLP), followed by a review of studies that includes those that examined the performance of English language learner and nonmainstream dialect-speaking students on word-based math items. Results: The literature review highlights the linguistic and content biases associated with word-based math problems. Useful strategies that SLPs and educators can incorporate in culturally and linguistically appropriate assessments are discussed. The tutorial ends with a discussion of CBLA as a viable assessment approach to use with culturally and linguistically diverse students. Conclusions: Tests used at national, state, and school levels to assess students' math abilities have associated linguistic bias and content bias often leading to an inaccurate depiction of culturally and linguistically diverse students' math skills. CBLA as an assessment method can be used by school-based SLPs to gather valid and useful information about culturally and linguistically diverse students' language for learning math. By using CBLA, SLPs can help modify curricular tasks in broader contexts in an effort to make math, including high-level math, "accessible and achievable for all" students (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, 2017).

Purpose: To examine lexical knowledge in children through a fast mapping task. Method: This study compared the performance of 60 African American English-speaking and general American English-speaking children between the ages of 4 and 6 years. They were presented with a comprehension task involving the fast mapping of novel verbs in 4 different argument structures (intransitive, transitive, transfer, and complement). The fast mapping task was developed to determine how children use syntactic cues to help fix the meaning of novel verbs. Results: The results indicated that both groups of children could fast map novel verbs at a relatively equivalent level. Conclusion: The promise of fast mapping as an alternative method of measuring word knowledge in culturally and linguistically diverse populations is discussed.

Purpose: To investigate children's performance on a fast mapping task. Possible effects across age, dialect group, and clinical status were explored. Method: Participants between the ages of 4 and 9 saw a series of pictured events and heard novel verbs. The novel verbs were in intransitive, transitive, dative, and complement syntactic frames or argument structures. The children then had to answer questions about the novel verbs that revealed what meaning they had attached to them. The field-testing of a new assessment instrument provided the data for typically developing children and children with language impairment from 2 linguistic communities: (a) mainstream American English speaking and (b) African American English speaking. Strict criteria were used for the 529 participants that defined both their clinical and dialect status. Results: There were significant effects of age and clinical status on the participants' ability to fast map a novel verb from its argument structure, but no significant effects for dialect. Conclusions: Regardless of dialect, children with specific language impairment have difficulty using syntactic frames to identify a likely meaning of a novel verb. In addition, the syntactic frames are differentially difficult, with complement structures being particularly hard.

The production of third-person /s/ on English verbs seems to be ahead of comprehension. Mainstream American English (MAE) is contrasted with African American English (AAE), in which /s/ is rarely supplied. Two studies explored what information children get solely from /s/ on the end of a verb. Sixty-five MAE- and 65 AAE-speaking four- to seven-year-olds participated in one of two experimental picture-choice comprehension studies. Neither group of four-year-olds could use the /s/ to determine if the event was generic rather than past tense on a verb (e.g. "cuts/cut"), or whether it was a verb or a noun compound as in "The penguin dresses"/"The penguin dress". MAE-speakers do not use the information in third-person /s/ alone until age five, and not reliably until age six years. In keeping with AAE production, AAE-speaking children do not use the information in /s/ at all in this age range.

Purpose: This investigation examined the comprehension of third person singular /s/ in 30 African American English (AAE)-speaking children as a subject-number agreement marker on a comprehension task. Method: A comprehension task was presented to 30 typically developing AAE-speaking children between the ages of 4 and 6. The children were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 groups to hear prerecorded counterbalanced stimuli. The comprehension task was designed to mask plurality of subject; therefore, the children had to focus on the verb as an indicator of subject number. Results: Repeated measure analysis revealed that AAE-speaking children in this investigation did not understand third person singular /s/ as a number agreement marker. An additional analysis, d' (pronounced "d prime"), indicated that the AAE-speaking children are not sensitive to the third person singular /s/ as a clue to subject number. Clinical Implications: The inclusion of comprehension tasks of third person singular /s/ to help diagnose language impairment in this population may be problematic.