Education Commons^™

A Comparison Of Pre-College Enrichment Program Participants And Non-Participants: College Academic Performance Measures, Sherron Mckendall, Alan Mckendall, Ann Chester

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

This paper analyzes College Grade Point Averages (CGPAs), American College Testing Composite (ACTC) scores and Scholastic Assessment Test Total (SATT) scores of over 1,300 undergraduates at West Virginia University (WVU) who participated in the Health Sciences and Technology Academy (HSTA) to those students who did not (Non-HSTA). Traditionally, pre-college enrichment programs provide academic enrichment to underrepresented youth with the intent of increasing their chances for post-secondary entry and success. Factorial design determined if HSTA participants were better prepared to pursue postsecondary study. Overall, the results reveal that HSTA students outperformed their Non-HSTA counterparts in that there were significant differences in …

Demonstrating The Efficacy Of The Health Sciences And Technology Academy: Using Archival Standardized Test Scores To Analyze An Ost College-Preparatory Program For Underserved Youth, Feon Smith, Sherron Mckendall, Ann Chester, Bethany Hornbeck, Alan Mckendall

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

To combat educational and health disparities, out-of-school-time (OST) STEM enrichment programs provide services to underserved youth to encourage them to pursue college and health careers. This article describes a study conducted to determine if the Health Sciences and Technology Academy (HSTA) program participants who receive year-round educational interventions to prepare them for STEM and health sciences majors performed better on the West Virginia Educational Standards Test (WESTEST2) than non-participants. This study provides descriptive and inferential statistics, specifically one-way ANOVAs with one-to-one matching based on grade level, gender, race, and GPA at the end of the 8th grade year for 336 …

Symmetry Of Energy Divergence Anomalies Associated With The El Niño-Southern Oscillation, Evan Kutta, Jason A. Hubbart, Timothy P. Eichler, Anthony R. Lupo

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a dominant source of global climate variability. The effects of this phenomenon alter the flow of heat from tropical to polar latitudes, resulting in weather and climate anomalies that are difficult to forecast. The current work quantified two components of the vertically integrated equation for the total energy content of an atmospheric column, to show the anomalous horizontal redistribution of surface heat flux anomalies. Symmetric and asymmetric components of the vertically integrated latent and sensible heat flux divergence were quantified using ERA-Interim atmospheric reanalysis output on 30 model layers between 1979 and 2016. Results …

The Effects Of Different Versions Of A Gateway Stem Course On Student Attitudes And Beliefs, Xiangming Wu, Jessica Deshler, Edgar Fuller

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Background

Substantial research has been conducted focusing on student outcomes in mathematics courses in order to better understand the ways in which these outcomes depend on the underlying instructional methodologies found in the courses. From 2009 to 2014, the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) studied Calculus I instruction in United States (US) colleges and universities in the Characteristics of Successful Programs of College Calculus (CSPCC). One aspect of this study attempted to understand the impact of these courses on student experience.

Results

In this paper, we describe results from an examination of the effect of course structure on students’ attitudes …

Gender Fairness Within The Force Concept Inventory, Adrienne Traxler, Rachel Henderson, John Stewart, Gay Stewart, Alexis Papak, Rebecca Lindell

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Research on the test structure of the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) has largely ignored gender, and research on FCI gender effects (often reported as “gender gaps”) has seldom interrogated the structure of the test. These rarely crossed streams of research leave open the possibility that the FCI may not be structurally valid across genders, particularly since many reported results come from calculus-based courses where 75% or more of the students are men. We examine the FCI considering both psychometrics and gender disaggregation (while acknowledging this as a binary simplification), and find several problematic questions whose removal decreases the apparent gender …