Education Commons^™

Effective Integration Of Nasa Stem Curricula Is Allowing Students To Appreciate Earth Science Concepts, Nazrul I. Khandaker, Stanley Schleifer, Krishna Mahabir, Newrence Wills, Matthew Khargie

Publications and Research

NASA Minority University Research and Education Project (MUREP) Aerospace Academy - MAA is a national, innovative activity designed to increase participation and retention of historically underserved and underrepresented K-12 youth in the STEM disciplines, particularly earth science and human exploration (HEO). HEO is dedicated to informing and educating the public about NASA's plans for a new era in space exploration. Utilization of NASA satellite images, online climate education, space mathematics and other earth science-related resources is allowing students to conduct basic research and prepare themselves for a New York City-wide science competition. In addition to offering school children a solid …

Experiential Learning Opportunities Through Nasa Stem Content Allows Greater Grass Root-Level Understanding Of The Present Day’S Extreme Climate Change Scenario, Nazrul I. Khandaker, Stanley Schleifer, Matthew Khargie

Publications and Research

The NASA MAA (MUREP Aerospace Academy) project at York College has demonstrated a track record of providing experiential learning opportunities (ELO) to its participating students. ELOs associated with MAA are designed to increase learners’ involvement, knowledge, comprehension and application of learning in one or more STEM subjects/disciplines. They involve inquiry-and-activity-based learning approaches designed for the level of the learner to inspire, engage, and educate while progressively challenging each student. ELO activities enable learners to acquire knowledge, understand what they have learned, and apply that knowledge through inquiry-based tasks. Specifically, we are prepared to address the following priority: Encourage, increase, and …

Montauk Point, An Essential Field Experience For Students In The New York City Area, Stanley Schleifer, Nazrul I. Khandaker, Keshaw Narine

Publications and Research

Except for a thin strip of Proterozoic and Paleozoic metamorphic and igneous rock along its very western edge and an outcropping of coastal plain deposits along its northwestern edge, the surface of Long Island is immediately underlain by unconsolidated deposits consisting of moraines of glacial till, outwash plains of stratified drift, and beach and dune complex formed by wave action. Two very prominent features of the island are the Harbor Hill Moraine, which marks the southernmost extent of the last major advance of continental glacier ice in the New York area during the Pleistocene and the Ronkonkoma Moraine, which marks …

Learning From Australia’S Funding Of Higher Ed., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

One of the most controversial issues in higher education today is its cost, particularly for the students who end up carrying the burden of heavy college loan debt. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the total U.S student loan debt was $1.26 trillion in 2016, which is more than the total credit card debt in the country.

Despite Changes, College’S Role Remains The Same., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

In these times of continuous change and challenges

to higher education, it is not a bad idea to ponder

whether or not its fundamental mission has changed.

Most people accept that the main mission of colleges

and universities is the transmission of knowledge.

Whether that knowledge is used to learn

skills, get a better job, or simply for advancement of

intellectual growth, that is and has always been the

mission of higher education.

Declining Financial Support Drives Students Away., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

Cutting taxes in order to spur economic development

is an idea still making its way around

the political landscape. It doesn’t seem to matter

how many times “trickle down” economics has

been debunked not only by economists, but also

by history, it seems to linger. Yet, this is part of

an ideology that is considered as gospel by many

politicians.

Of course the idea has one superficial appeal

and one superficial appeal only. It promises to

cut taxes, even if the ones who benefit the most

from such policies are the ones who need them

the least.

Principles And Practices Fostering Inclusive Excellence: Lessons From The Howard Hughes Medical Institute’S Capstone Institutions, Patricia Marten Dibartolo, Leslie Gregg-Jolly, Deborah Gross, Cathryn A. Manduca, Ellen Iverson, David B. Cooke Iii, Gregory K. Davis, Cameron Davidson, Paul E. Hertz, Lisa Hibbard, Shubha K. Ireland, Catherine Mader, Aditi Pai, Shirley Raps, Kathleen Siwicki, Jim E. Swartz

Publications and Research

Best-practices pedagogy in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) aims for inclusive excellence that fosters student persistence. This paper describes principles of inclusivity across 11 primarily undergraduate institutions designated as Capstone Awardees in Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s (HHMI) 2012 competition. The Capstones represent a range of institutional missions, student profiles, and geographical locations. Each successfully directed activities toward persistence of STEM students, especially those from traditionally underrepresented groups, through a set of common elements: mentoring programs to build community; research experiences to strengthen scientific skill/ identity; attention to quantitative skills; and outreach/bridge programs to broaden the student pool. This paper …

Extreme Poverty Affects Many College Students., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

One of the most painful realities of higher education in the 21st century – and one that gets very little attention – is the fact that some college students live in extreme poverty, oftentimes sleeping in libraries, cars, or temporarily with friends. Despite the extreme conditions under which they live, or in many cases because of them, these students still seek the education and training needed to be able to get a job and move out of poverty. Some colleges and universities are taking steps to help.

Slavery, Racism Still Cast Shadow On Colleges., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Study Abroad Scholarships A Good Use Of Taxes., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

There is little doubt that an international experience

is one of the most life-changing events for a college student.

That is what one hears from students when they

return, particularly from those who have never even

been abroad in their lives. Cost is usually mentioned

as the major barrier for Americans to have such an

experience. And this barrier can be particularly high for

minority and first-generation college students.

Yet, there is a little known but very successful federal

program known as The Benjamin A. Gilman International

Scholarship Program that serves to help U.S. college students

interested in going abroad.

Scandals Are Threatening Higher Education., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

Among the unfortunate curses affecting the

image of higher education are the scandals taking

place with unrelenting regularity. Whether

they have to do with athletics, sexual assaults,

murders, cheating, hazing, or corruption, the

media are echoing those scandals, sometimes

in excruciating detail. In some cases, like the

“Sandusky affair” that made headlines for

months and tarnished the reputation of Penn

State University and its renowned football coach

Joe Paterno, these scandals have a lasting effect

on public opinion.

We in academia have always been worried

about the effect of these scandals on an issue

very important to colleges and universities …

Cultivating Minority Scientists: Undergraduate Research Increases Self-Efficacy And Career Ambitions For Underrepresented Students In Stem, Anthony Carpi, Darcy M. Ronan, Heather M. Falconer, Nathan H. Lents

Publications and Research

In this study, Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) is used to explore changes in the career intentions of students in an undergraduate research experience (URE) program at a large public minority-serving college. Our URE model addresses the challenges of establishing an undergraduate research program within an urban, commuter, underfunded, Minority-Serving Institution (MSI). However, our model reaches beyond a focus on retention and remediation toward scholarly contributions and shifted career aspirations. From a student’s first days at the College to beyond their graduation, we have encouraged them to explore their own potential as scientists in a coordinated, sequential, and self-reflective process. …

Should The New England Education Research Organization Start A Journal In The Age Of Audit Culture? Reflections On Academic Publishing, Metrics, And The New Academy, Edward Lehner, Kate Finley

Publications and Research

A large regional educational research association can straightforwardly establish a scholarly journal associated with its annual meeting. However, this work underscores the complicated scholarly ecosystem that an association enters when publishing a journal. The social sciences’ scholarly literature exists in a related series of networks that could be described as a type of “audit culture.” Within audit culture, two major academic publishers, Elsevier and Thomson Reuters, have established competing, yet strikingly collinear, journal metrics systems: Scopus and Web of Science, respectively. These and other bibliometrics systems are used to assess, order, and rank the supposed value of a researcher’s work. …

Editorial: Learn, By Listening To The Child In Neoliberal Schools, Debbie Sonu, Julie Gorlewski, Daniel Vallée

Publications and Research

This Special Issue for the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies emerged out of a disappointed search for literature on the experiences of neoliberal education as spoken by children and youth. While there is no shortage of work on the reverberations of market ideology within the structures, policies, and practices of schooling in the United States, an overwhelming majority of this is discussed through the reflective hindsight of the adult. Thus, we as editors, purposefully designed this issue to address the marginalization of a constituency who we believe can illuminate the state of schooling in ways that we as adults …

How Adjunct Faculty At Community Colleges Describe Their Sustained Motivation To Teach, Maureen E. Sheridan

Publications and Research

There is mounting concern over the influence that hiring larger percentages of adjunct faculty has had on the quality of instruction delivered in higher education. Studies have noted these contingent workers are being hired as an economic resource or commodity rather than viewed as academic partners. This basic inductive study on adjunct faculty in northeast U.S. two-year colleges was important to add to the existing body of knowledge. Utilizing a basic inductive approach allowed the researcher to explore adjunct faculty experiences and to gather data through individualized, semi-structured interviews. Data analysis was examined through the lens of hygiene-motivation theory that …

Sharing Your Student’S Research With Voicethread, Curtis Izen

Publications and Research

One of the ways of sharing your student's individual research with the entire class is using VoiceThread. This provides all students the ability to learn about everyone's work. This eliminates the barrier between the student and instructor.

America’S Law Schools Need To Be Reformed, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

Increasing costs, decreasing enrollments and doubts about its practical value has placed legal education in the U.S. under a controversial light. Until the mid-19th century legal training was essentially technical in nature. During that time many lawyers – like Abraham Lincoln – could afford to study the law by themselves without even attending any law school. By passing the bar exam, they were admitted into the legal profession.

After the Civil War legal education started to change. In 1870 a lawyer named Christopher Langdell was named dean of the Harvard Law School. During his 25 years at the helm of …

Affirmative Action In Higher Ed Sustained With Caveats., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

The term affirmative action was first used in an executive order by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. The motivation was to favor members of a disadvantaged group that historically suffered from discrimination due to oppression of any kind. This concept has been employed in many spheres and one of those has been to promote diversity in higher education on the basis that many universities have effectively discriminated against admitting and/or promoting minorities. Two weeks ago the U.S. Supreme Court announced a decision on affirmative action that originated in higher education. The 4-to-3 decision reaffirmed the University of Texas’s admission …

The Challenge Of Teaching Chinese Philosophy: Some Thoughts On Method, Andrew Lambert

Publications and Research

In this essay I offer an alternative perspective on how to organize class material for courses in Chinese philosophy for predominately American students. Instead of selecting topics taken from common themes in Western discourses, I suggest a variety of organizational strategies based on themes from the Chinese texts themselves, such as tradition, ritual, family, and guanxi (關係), which are rooted in the Chinese tradition but flexible enough to organize a broad range of philosophical material.

Should College Students Assessed As Needing Remedial Algebra Take College-Level Statistics Instead?, Alexandra W. Logue

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Modes Of Mindfulness: Prophetic Critique And Integral Emergence, David Forbes

Publications and Research

As mindfulness becomes more secular and popular, there are more arguments about its purpose and use value. Because of its disparate uses, many proponents of any one side often talk past each other and miss their mark. This paper employs an integral meta-theory that accounts for subjective, inter-subjective, objective, interobjective, and developmental perspectives on mindfulness. This helps categorize modes of mindfulness in order to clarify their purposes and functions within a society characterized by neoliberal principles and structures. It adopts the standpoint of a prophetic critique similar to those critiques of McMindfulness and insists on the inseparability of both universal …

Review: Posner, Richard A. Divergent Paths: The Academy And The Judiciary. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

Legal education in the United States has been controversial in the last few years

due to its cost, decreasing enrollments, and doubts about its practical value. Until

the mid-nineteenth century legal training was essentially technical in nature. At

that time many lawyers—like Abraham Lincoln—could afford to study the law by

themselves without even attending law school and then, by passing the bar exam,

were admitted in the legal profession.

Review: The New Celebrity Scientists. Out Of The Lab And Into The Limelight. Fahy, Declan. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

In the last couple of decades, we have seen the widespread ascendancy of the

phenomenon of celebrity in society. Celebrities as a cultural manifestation are not

necessarily something new. We saw that notion in the twentieth century being

exploited by Hollywood through their “star system” as well as by sports teams

hungry to increase their revenues. Now that phenomenon has expanded into areas

that we would not have imagined decades ago, and one of them is in the field of

science. With the advent of social media and the relaxation of social views

regarding stereotypes, we have seen the rise …

Using Student-Developed Narratives To Improve Learning And Engagement In Computer Problem-Solving Courses, Candido Cabo, Reneta Lansiquot

Publications and Research

In our Computer Systems major, we require all students to take a problem-solving course (PS) to prepare them for subsequent courses in computer programming. As part of the PS course, students learn basic procedural programming concepts such as input, sequencing, selection (if/else), repetition (for and while loops), and output, using flowchart interpreters like Visual Logic (www.visuallogic.org). When trying to solve flowcharting problems, students have difficulty translating word problems into computer algorithms. Moreover, most problems proposed to students are closely related to mathematics and accounting, and our students are not well prepared in mathematics. Partly for this reason, students are often …

Integrating Creative Writing And Computational Thinking To Develop Interdisciplinary Connections, Candido Cabo, Reneta Lansiquot

Publications and Research

A typical college curriculum does not make it easy for students to establish connections between required general education courses and courses in their majors. Intentional linking of courses from different disciplines using interdisciplinary pedagogical strategies allows students to make those connections while developing the interdisciplinary skills which will benefit their college and post-college careers.

In addition to communication, critical thinking and reasoning, and collaborative skills, it has been recently argued that computational thinking (i.e., the application of computing concepts and methods to solve problems) should also be a part of a twenty-first century liberal education for a broad range of …

Should Students Assessed As Needing Remedial Mathematics Take College-Level Quantitative Courses Instead? A Randomized Controlled Trial, Alexandra W. Logue, Mari Watanabe, Daniel Douglas

Publications and Research

Many college students never take, or do not pass, required remedial mathematics courses theorized to increase college-level performance. Some colleges and states are therefore instituting policies allowing students to take college-level courses without first taking remedial courses. However, no experiments have compared the effectiveness of these approaches, and other data are mixed. We randomly assigned 907 students to (a) remedial elementary algebra, (b) that course with workshops, or (c) college-level statistics with workshops (corequisite remediation). Students assigned to statistics passed at a rate 16 percentage points higher than those assigned to algebra (p

A Study Of Flipped Information Literacy Sessions For Business Management And Education, Madeline Cohen, Alison Lehner-Quam, Jennifer Poggiali, Robin Wright

Publications and Research

This presentation reports the results of a quantitative study of flipped classroom approaches to information literacy instruction in business and education classes. The presenters used pre- and post-tests to assess learning objectives for students in traditional class sessions and flipped sessions. The findings of our study show a statistically significant improvement in student achievement on pre-tests for those students in the flipped group, but no statistically significant difference in learning outcomes on the post-tests. We discuss the implications of these and other results, as well as the design and execution of the classes.

Not All Are Created Equal: An Analysis Of The Environmental Programs/Departments In U.S. Institutions Of Higher Education From 1900 Until March 2014., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

Environmental academic programs in U.S. institutions of higher education have traditionally lacked definition of their nature and unifying principles. In order to ascertain how these programs are presently constituted in U.S. institutions of higher education, we surveyed 1050 environmental programs/departments between November 2013 and March of 2014. The states with the highest number of those programs/departments were New York (100), Pennsylvania (92), California (76), Ohio (56), Massachusetts (54), while those with the lowest numbers are Oklahoma, and Utah (4), Delaware (3), Arkansas, Hawaii, South Dakota, and Wyoming (2), North Dakota (1), and Idaho (0). However, when the state population is …

The Art Of Cheating In The 21st Millennium: Innovative Mechanisms And Insidious Ploys In Academic Deceit, Steven M. Lipson, Laina Karthikeyan

Publications and Research

Cheating is rampant throughout academia, with no hard evidence suggesting that such pedagogic deceit will wane. Cheating is most insidious on the college level, where such academic deceit has evolved from perhaps its basic pattern of merely peeking at another student’s examination, to planned deceit employing sophisticated subterfuges and interplay between two or more co-conspirators. Importantly, cheating per se may not necessarily be student initiated, but fostered by college/university staff for purposes of institutional or personal financial gain. Statistical studies (e.g., demographics) in complement with sociological and psychological factors associated with cheating have been previously described. This review does not …

From Marginality To Mattering: Linguistic Practices, Pedagogies And Diversities At A Community-Serving Senior College, Andrea Springirth, Hannah Göppert

Publications and Research

The cultural diversification of colleges and universities which initially targeted the needs of a specific minoritized group raises questions concerning the inclusion of every individual and the maintenance of the advances which have been made for the original population. This paper provides insight into the challenges and merits at the intersection of linguistic and racial/ethnic diversification within CUNY’s Medgar Evers College. Historically tied to the Black Campus Movement, the college is committed to being an agent of social transformation for the surrounding community. Aiming to understand the perspectives on language and diversity of the key stakeholders at the college, a …