Education Commons^™

The Power Of Words: The Effects Of Vocabulary On Native American Communities, Nicola Calabrese

Education Student Scholarship

Major: Elementary and Special Education
Minor: Sociology
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Susan Skawinski, Elementary and Special Education The guiding question for this project was, “What is the best terminology to use when referring to people of Native American descent and why?” First, I focused on the terminology that has been used in the past to refer to Native American people. Next, I looked at the terms that are considered disrespectful to the Native American community. Then, I researched the terms that are considered appropriate to use. Finally, I concentrated on how educators can positively impact how the Native American community is …

Language Acquisition Vs Ethnic Identity: How Family Involvement Affects Heritage Language Maintenance, Lyndsy Cadet

Education Student Scholarship

Major: Elementary and Special Education
Minor: Spanish and Public and Community Service

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Ana Cecilia Iraheta, Foreign Language Studies

This project analyzes the relationship between ethnic identity and maintenance of a heritage language. Specifically, how the level of familiarity with the parent’s culture affects the acquisition of Spanish in first generation participants in the North-East region. The study has implications for participants and teachers. For participants, it is important to learn about their heritage culture to maintain their language skills to then pass down their history to future generations. For teachers, to promote the maintenance of a student’s …

Do School District Bond Guarantee Programs Matter?, Michael Cirrotti

Economics Student Scholarship

The State of Washington enacted a school district bond credit enhancement program in 1999. Oregon did the same in 1998. I use data from the National Center for Education Statistics for a representative sample of states in order to examine whether or not these programs increased the likelihood that school districts in Washington and Oregon issued bonds. I isolate the programs’ impact in Washington and Oregon through difference-in-differences analysis to control for other variation in the data in ten other representative states during the same time period. The results suggest that state-level school district bond guarantee programs increase the likelihood …

Part-Time Faculty In Higher Education: A Selected Annotated Bibliography, Robert Pankin, Carla Weiss

Sociology Department Faculty Publications

At this writing (Fall 2011), two-thirds of the faculty in higher education are contingent part-time or full-time. Only one-third of the faculty is tenured or on the tenure-track. This selected, annotated bibliography is organized by year of publication, from 1977 to 2010. (An earlier version was published in 2008.) It is the purpose of this publication to facilitate understanding of the meaning and implications of this major change in the structure of higher education. The annotations in the bibliography were written from the perspective of a part-time faculty member, unlike most of the literature, which is written from a management …