Cultural transition and academic achievement of students from ethnic minority backgrounds: a content analysis of empirical research on acculturation     

Elena Makarova  Dina Birman 《Educational research; a review for teachers and all concerned with progress in education》2013,55(3):305-330

Background: The achievement gap between immigrant and non-immigrant students that has been identified in most OECD countries and the considerable educational dropout rate among students from ethnic minority backgrounds in some countries have become serious challenges for national educational systems. The educational underachievement of young people from ethnic minority backgrounds is embedded in the process of their acculturation. In the tradition of cross-cultural psychology, acculturation describes individual or ethno-cultural group changes in behaviour and attitudes in the situation of intercultural contact. Such cultural changes are central to the experience of ethnic minority students including newly arriving immigrants, children of immigrants and members of marginalised ethnic and racial groups. Acculturation has been described as a stressful process, and acculturation orientations adopted by young people from ethnic minority backgrounds have been shown to have an impact on their adjustment.

Purpose: The school context has been recognised to be the crucial context for acculturation of young people from ethnic minority backgrounds. The academic achievement of these students is thus embedded in the acculturation process, which involves cultural identity development, psychological adjustment and behavioural adjustment. The study is aimed at analysing and systematising the findings of empirical research on acculturation in the school context with a focus on the academic achievement of young people from minority backgrounds.

Design and methods: For this study, 29 peer-reviewed articles from a total of 348 articles that matched the search criteria in the database of the Education Resources Information Centre were selected according to inclusion criteria. The selected articles addressed academic achievement of young people from minority backgrounds in relation to at least one of the issues of acculturation such as cultural identity, psychological adjustment and behavioural adjustment. The articles were analysed by applying the method of qualitative content analysis, using MAXQDA software. The findings presented in the selected articles were analysed and integrated according to a deductively developed and inductively enriched category system.

Conclusions: Overall, the results of our analysis offer insight into issues of acculturation in relation to academic achievement. Moreover, our findings reveal the complexity of the relationship between cultural transition and school adjustment for young people. As shown in our review, although a bi-cultural orientation was predominantly positively related to school adjustment of minority students, some studies also identified assimilative attitudes as advantageous for students’ academic achievement as well as for their psychological and behavioural adjustment. Moreover, our study has also shown that young people’s acculturative attitudes may have a different impact on their school adjustment relative to acculturative behaviours.  相似文献   

Learning about sustainability and gender through Farmer Field Schools in the Taita Hills,Kenya     

Dina Najjar  Harry Spaling  A. John Sinclair 《International Journal of Educational Development》2013

This research uses transformative learning theory to explore how Farmers Field Schools (FFS) of the Taita Hills, Kenya have contributed to environmental sustainability, with a particular focus on gendered learning. Both genders experienced transformations in their meaning schemes related to farming (e.g., men and women switched their traditional roles in tillage and planting). A significant change in meaning perspective occurred among men who overcame personal biases and a cultural practice of land inheritance for males to now include their daughters. More research is needed to explore how all participants (farmers, extension agents, scientists) could enhance sustainability efforts and gender equality through agricultural participatory education projects such as FFS.  相似文献   

Enhancing Web‐based Courses through a Mutual Aid Framework     

Dina J. Wilke PhD  Karen A. Randolph  Linda Vinton 《Journal of Teaching in Social Work》2013,33(1):18-31

Students taking a class together belong to a group where members typically develop a sense of connection to each other by engaging in mutual support and assistance through shared experiences and knowledge. Some have argued that the lack of face‐to‐face interaction precludes such processes and prevents the effective teaching of social work in an online environment. When online students were asked what they liked most and least about their classes, one‐third of the responses referred to ideas that reflected interactions among students and with faculty. These comments were evaluated in the context of Shulman's (1999 Shulman, L. 1999. The skills of helping individuals, families, groups and communities, Itasca, IL: Peacock.  [Google Scholar]) processes of mutual aid. This exploratory study suggests that despite a lack of face‐to‐face contact, mutual aid is relevant to online students and could be used to strategically enhance the delivery of course content in an online environment and facilitate a sense of connection among students.  相似文献   

Figuring out what works: learning and engaging with ideas about evolution within integrated informal learning environments     

Nesimyan – Agadi  Dina  Ben Zvi Assaraf  Orit 《Instructional Science》2022,50(3):391-424

Instructional Science - Informal learning environments can be a fun and effective means of introducing visitors to a variety of topics in evolution. Our study examined 120 sixth-grade...  相似文献   

Conceptual Trends and Issues in Biology Didactics     

Tsybulsky  Dina 《Science & Education》2020,29(2):483-485

Science & Education -  相似文献   

Commercial science, scientists’ values, and university biotechnology research agendas     

Leland L. Glenna  Rick Welsh  David ErvinWilliam B. Lacy  Dina Biscotti 《Research Policy》2011,40(7):957-968

Policies designed to promote the commercialization of university science have provoked concern that basic and publicly accessible research may be neglected. Commercialization policies have altered traditional institutional incentives and constraints, which raises new questions regarding the influence of scientists’ values on university research agendas. Our research builds on previous quantitative studies measuring changes in research outcomes and qualitative studies probing differentiation among scientists’ value orientations. We developed a nation-wide survey of 912 plant and animal biotechnology scientists at 60 research universities. Our analysis reveals that scientists’ value orientations on what we classify as “market” and “expert” science affect the amount of industry funding they receive, the proprietary nature of their discoveries, and the percentage of basic science research conducted in their laboratories. We also find that the percentage of industry funding is significantly associated with more applied research. Our findings provide insights for science and society theory and suggest that strong incentives for public-science research along with adequate public-research funds to preserve the university's vital role in conducting basic and non-proprietary research are needed to complement private-sector research investments at universities.  相似文献   

On becoming a civic‐minded instructional designer: An ethnographic study of an instructional design experience     

Farrah Dina Yusop  Ana‐Paula Correia 《British journal of educational technology : journal of the Council for Educational Technology》2014,45(5):782-792

This ethnographic study took place in a graduate course at a large research university in the Midwestern United States. It presents an in‐depth examination of the experiences and challenges of a group of four students learning to be Instructional Design and Technology professionals who are concerned with the well‐being of all members of a society, and wish to utilize their knowledge and skills to help solve social problems and improve people's lives. Building on the results of previous research, findings indicate that the course, designed using the Civic‐Minded Instructional Designers (CMID) framework, succeeded in enhancing students' civic‐minded agency, the group's purposeful and reflective acts that aim at addressing the educational needs of community members. The course was designed to mimic a small, multiteam Instructional Design and Technology consulting company offering professional‐level services free of charge. Community partners consisted of four real‐world clients to whom students addressed an instructional issue. Data were collected from observations, focus groups, individual interviews with students and community partners, and analyses of course artifacts and students' reflections. Students were found to diligently address community members' needs, give voice to their community partners, address sustainability of their projects, be sensitive to their community partners' perspectives and acknowledge their community partners as design partners. Challenges encountered include reconfiguring students' roles and building trustful relationships with their community partners. This study contributes a deeper understanding of the roles of instructional design professionals within larger social contexts. Lessons learned can inform the implementation of the CMID framework in other educational programs.  相似文献   

Early development among dual language learners: The roles of language use at home,maternal immigration,country of origin,and socio-demographic variables     

Adam Winsler  Margaret R. Burchinal  Hsiao-Chuan Tien  Ellen Peisner-Feinberg  Linda Espinosa  Dina C. Castro  Doré R. LaForett  Yoon Kyong Kim  Jessica De Feyter 《Early childhood research quarterly》2014

Using nationally representative data from the ECLS-B, we examined children's outcomes and growth from 9 to 65 months as a function of language used in the home at 24 months (English only n = 7300; English and another language n = 1500; other language only n = 400). We also examined whether demographic variables moderated the effects of DLL status in predicting child outcomes. Results revealed substantial variation within the DLL population within and across language groups in immigration status, heritage country, child outcomes, and family socioeconomic risk. DLL status was associated with differential outcomes, gains over time, and processes in complex ways. Maternal birth outside of the U.S., child gender, and parental education moderated relations between home language and child outcomes. Use of the heritage language at home served as a protective factor for children of immigrant families for a few outcomes. Gender and parental education were more strongly associated with child outcomes among English-speaking households than among DLLs.  相似文献   

The development and early care and education of dual language learners: Examining the state of knowledge     

Dina C. Castro 《Early childhood research quarterly》2014

Early care and education (ECE) programs, policymakers and practitioners across the United States are facing the reality of the increase in the population of dual language learners (DLLs). To address these children's unique and varied characteristics and experiences, ECE programs find that they must adjust and adapt their efforts. However, there is limited evidence for early childhood strategies to support DLLs and limited understanding of DLLs’ development. There are increased accountability requirements for ECE programs to meet the needs of all children, including DLLs. This special section “The Development and Early Care and Education of Dual Language Learners: Examining the State of Knowledge” includes six articles reporting on the research activities of the Center for Early Care and Education Research – Dual Language Learners (CECER-DLL). The Center was federally funded to advance the research field to improve assessment, child care, and education for DLLs from birth through five years of age. This introduction and commentary discusses the most relevant findings from the set of critical reviews of literature and the secondary analysis of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey-Birth Cohort conducted by the Center. Also, the major methodological challenges and research gaps found in the literature reviewed, across topic areas, are presented and recommendations for future directions to advance research on the development and early care and education of DLLs are provided.  相似文献   

Methods for automatically evaluating answers to complex questions   总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1  

Jimmy Lin  Dina Demner-Fushman 《Information Retrieval》2006,9(5):565-587

Evaluation is a major driving force in advancing the state of the art in language technologies. In particular, methods for automatically assessing the quality of machine output is the preferred method for measuring progress, provided that these metrics have been validated against human judgments. Following recent developments in the automatic evaluation of machine translation and document summarization, we present a similar approach, implemented in a measure called POURPRE, an automatic technique for evaluating answers to complex questions based on n-gram co-occurrences between machine output and a human-generated answer key. Until now, the only way to assess the correctness of answers to such questions involves manual determination of whether an information “nugget” appears in a system's response. The lack of automatic methods for scoring system output is an impediment to progress in the field, which we address with this work. Experiments with the TREC 2003, TREC 2004, and TREC 2005 QA tracks indicate that rankings produced by our metric correlate highly with official rankings, and that POURPRE outperforms direct application of existing metrics.

Dina Demner-FushmanEmail:

  相似文献