Education Commons^™

Understanding The American Subaltern: An Exploration Of Complex Literary Characters Through Socio-Cultural Lenses, Sophie Gioffre

English Summer Fellows

This project involves the analysis of three novels — Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Ann Petry’s The Street, and Toni Morrison’s Sula — featuring main characters who are forced to navigate realistic socio-economic environments rooted in racist, sexist, and classist systems of oppression in the United States of America. Through the process of completing close-readings of the novels, conducting extensive secondary research on historical contexts, and examining other scholarly criticisms and interpretations of these novels, I develop new insights into the main characters’ plights. To transfer this conceptual understanding into a more personal and empathetic …

Millennial Culture And Epistemology: Exploring The Meaning-Making Discourse Of An Emerging Generation, Sophia Driscoll Gamber

Sociology Honors Papers

Millennial Culture and Epistemology takes a mixed methods approach to understanding the culture and epistemological processes of the current cohort of millennial undergraduate students at a small residential liberal arts college. The study first identifies specific trends in epistemological frameworks, ethics, and claimed spiritual/religious identities among a sample of undergraduate students and finds that students are commonly utilizing subjectivist epistemological frameworks that are built around cultural relativism and skepticism. The study then unpacks markers of undergraduate millennial culture as they relate to epistemology and finds that students’ stances on issues of community, social ethics and responsibility, religion, and spirituality are …

Gender-Separate Education: The Effects On Student Achievement & Self-Esteem On Economically Disadvantaged Public Middle School Students In Philadelphia, Heather M. O'Neill, Allison Guerin

Business and Economics Faculty Publications

In 2003, three Philadelphia middle schools with similar demographics and failing student achievement levels were taken over by an educational management organization. Two were transformed into distinct single-sex academies within the original school buildings and a third remained coeducational. Students did not have the option where to attend, eliminating selection bias. Through funding from a Spencer Foundation grant, data was collected on 1,000 students for 2002-03 through 2004-05 to examine impacts of gender-segregation. We find students in single sex schools witness greater improvements in standardized test scores, with boys gaining the most, and no differences on Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem Scale.

The Right To Learn Across The Tracks: An Analysis Of School Funding And Integration In Seattle, Houston, Philadelphia, Chicago And Washington, D.C., Erin M. Pollard

Politics Honors Papers

Through examining the levels of integration in public and private schools across the United States, it is clear that the spirit of Brown v. Board of Education was never fulfilled. Students are still learning in an overwhelmingly homogeneous environment. Even in diverse neighborhoods there is a difference: the poor and minority children attend the public schools and the wealthy children attend private school. Thus, the urban public schools remain overwhelmingly minority, while private schools are overwhelmingly white. There is a clear discrepancy between black and white students in terms of size of school and quality of education.

To determine whether …

Cheating With Honor, Christian A. Pfeiffer

Business and Economics Honors Papers

The intent of this paper is to understand what leads a student to cheat within the context of a small (enrollment below 2,000 students) liberal arts college. The development of a model will examine cheating from three categories highlighted in the literature: demographics, college culture, and the perception of cheating. Demographics capture relevant personal attributes of a student such as gender, GPA, and major. Cultural variables include variables for the presence of an honor code and participation in a sport or social organization, which provide that student with a unique cultural experience. Perception variables deal with the perceptions the students …

Miss Snell's Way: A Life-Affirming Organic Model Created In Sport, Robin G. Cash

Eleanor Frost Snell Programs, Correspondence and Other Documents

This 156 page dissertation by Robin G. Cash, Ursinus College Class of 1972, was submitted to the faculty of Fielding Graduate Institute in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Human and Organizational Systems.

The dissertation explores a women’s way of coaching and being in sport that existed prior to Title IX. It considers a shift from an organic to a mechanistic coaching approach. An alternative model based on the concept of organicism and underlying principles of relational power, life-affirming actions, and inclusiveness of all beings is presented. This new model emerged from three …

Who Owns Our Values? Back To School, John Strassburger

Publications

This is the sixth in a series of occasional papers about the challenges confronting students and what Ursinus is doing to help them enter adult life.

Counting Quality, John Strassburger

Publications

This is the fifth in a series of occasional papers about the challenges confronting students and what Ursinus is doing to help them enter adult life.

Transforming Experiences: The Benefits Of Intellectual Risk, John Strassburger

Publications

This is the fourth in a series of occasional papers about the challenges confronting students and what Ursinus is doing to help them enter adult life.

Education For Self-Reliance, Responsibility And Hope, John Strassburger

Publications

This is the first in a series of occasional papers about the challenges confronting students and what Ursinus is doing to help them enter adult life.