Education Commons^™

Bridging The Gap Between General Education And Accredited Engineering Technology Fields, Jose Reyes Alamo, Yu Wang, Renata Budny

Publications and Research

General Education is a very important aspect of higher education. It provides guidelines to variety of disciplines via Student Learning Goals (SLGs). Course coordination strategies help different disciplines in implementing General Education SLGs. Many disciplines, especially in science and engineering go through accreditation processes. For instance, Computer Engineering Technology, is accredited by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). The disciplines that go through accreditation must comply with a set of standards. In the process of implementing Course Coordination in Computer Engineering Technology we noticed that several of these standards were similar to the General Education SLGs. This paper …

Incorporating Undergraduate Research Experiences In An Engineering Technology Curriculum, Benito Mendoza, Pamela Brown

Publications and Research

Undergraduate research is a high-impact practice leading to student success, engagement, interest in higher education, and skills development. There are two well-known models for incorporating research experiences in a program: Undergraduate Research Experiences (UREs) and Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs). UREs represent the apprentice model. They feature individual students in faculty research laboratories and provide the opportunity for one-on-one mentoring. On the other hand, CUREs are embedded into the curriculum and are open to most students. CUREs put high demands on one or a few mentors to guide many students. UREs and CUREs vary in selectivity, duration, setting, mentoring, and …

College Presidents Worry About Higher Ed’S Future, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

One of the major responsibilities of college and university leaders is to look into the future and act accordingly. They are supposed to see things coming, whether good or bad. That is why they are assumed to be good thermometers about the prospects for higher education.

Now a new survey gives us a glimpse about how they see the present and the future. Published just a few weeks ago, the study, titled “2017Survey of College and University Presidents,” shows the level of concern by U.S. higher education presidents about the future of their institutions. According to the survey, only six …

Going Beyond The Existing Consensus: The Use Of Games In International Relations Education, Michael Lee, Zachary C. Shirkey

Publications and Research

Despite the popularity of using games to teach international relations, few works directly assess their effectiveness. Furthermore, it is unclear if games help all students equally, or if certain students are more likely to benefit than others. Finally, how closely the game must mirror the concept being taught to be an effective pedagogical tool has received scant attention. We address these points by discussing the use of an updated version of the classic American election game, Consensus, to help illustrate the role of domestic political coalitions in an international political economy course. Assessing the performance of 39 students via …

Neighbors Link's Parent-Child Together Program: Supporting Immigrant Parents' Integration To Promote School Readiness Among Their Emergent Bilingual Children, Carola Otero Bracco, Judith Eisenberg

Publications and Research

The authors of this article describe Neighbors Link, a multi-service community and worker center in suburban Westchester County, NY. This organization created Parent-Child Together in the belief that supporting immigrant parents' integration and social inclusion, in activities that also engage long-term community residents, would improve school readiness outcomes for preschool children. A key assumption in the program design is that immigrant parents are best supported when teaching respects their home language and incorporates their home culture and customs. Among the program's positive results has been greater acceptance of the assets and strengths that immigrants bring to the community. The community, …

Why The History Of Cuny Matters: Using The Cuny Digital History Archive To Teach Cuny’S Past, Stephen Brier

Publications and Research

This article describes the newly launched CUNY Digital History Archive (CDHA), a project of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the CUNY Graduate Center. The CDHA is designed to provide open, online access to a rich array of digitized historical sources that detail the important history of the City University of New York (CUNY). The article reviews that history, focusing on the postwar expansion of the city’s tuition free municipal college system and the subsequent birth of the CUNY system in 1961. CUNY’s growth helped launch a student-led fight for open admissions at various CUNY campuses …

Personalized Outreach To University Students With A History Of Reading Difficulties: Early Screening And Outreach To Support Academically At-Risk Students, Hélène Deacon, Rebecca Tucker, Bradley W. Bergey, Annie Laroche, Rauno Parrila

Publications and Research

We examined whether identification of and personalized outreach to a group of students with a history of reading difficulties would impact their use of support services and academic outcomes. Using a brief self-report questionnaire, we identified students with a history of reading difficulties (n = 175) and a comparison group of university students without a history of reading difficulties (n = 100). One half of the students with a history of reading difficulties were individually invited to visit the Academic Advising Centre; the other students received standard university communications about and access to university support services. Students with …

Does Unconscious Bias Effect Higher Ed Hiring?, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

Nobody wants to be called a racist or a misogynist. Most people think that they are not. However, we are constantly making decisions that are influenced by unconscious biases.

Unconscious biases are defined as social stereo- types that are formed about certain groups of people by individuals from outside their own conscious awareness. Psychologists agree that everyone holds unconscious beliefs about various social and identity groups, and that these biases stem from one’s tenden- cy to organize social worlds by categorizing.

Teaching Must Become Engaging To Be Effective., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

We live in a time of intense scrutiny as to the

effectiveness of instruction in higher education.

Questions are being asked of college and university

administrators about the retention and graduation

rates of their students. In fact, some states have tied

funding of public institutions to this data. Others

are asking how well we are teaching students to get

that well-paid job after graduation.

It is interesting that the fundamental question

of how well we are teaching our students is rarely

answered. One reason for this hesitation is that we

are still struggling with just how to measure teaching

effectiveness …

Female Administrators Face Discrimination In Ed., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

In past articles of this column we have reported

data that show that women in general find more

barriers than their male counterparts in getting

into academic careers. Further, female college professors

earn on average 10 percent less in salaries

than their male colleagues.

If you are a woman in academia and aspire to

an administrative job in order to substantially

improve your earnings and make them more in

par with the males around you, you should think

twice.

Revision Crítica Del Concepto De Género En El Discurso Escrito Y Su Aplicación Didáctica A La Enseñanza De Las Lenguas Con Propósitos Específicos. Critical Review Of The Genre Concept In Written Discourse And Its Pedagogical Application To Language Teaching For Specific Purposes, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

This paper provides a theoretical review of how the concept of academic and professional discursive genres has evolved, from a linguistic perspective when it first emerged to its current sociocognitive perspective. The stage it has reached is due to intertextuality and interdiscursivity processes caused by the contact between different disciplines. Similarly, the paper discusses some of the most current didactic recommendations on genre teaching proposed by the languages for specific purposes (lps) approach. The discursive genre has been regularly used in lps since learning how to develop the typical genres of a discourse community is a fundamental requirement to succeed …

Reframing Readiness: Through The Cracked Looking Glass: The Framework For Success In Postsecondary Writing As Assessment Model, David Hyman

Publications and Research

The Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing (Council of Writing Program Administrators, National Council of Teachers of English, and National Writing Project) describes experiences and habits of mind that will equip students for success in college writing. This column highlights examples of the values espoused by the Framework and aims to increase understanding of this statement, advocating for its rich conception of writing.

How History As Mystery Reveals Historical Thinking: A Look At Two Accounts Of Finding Typhoid Mary, Myra Zarnowski, Susan Turkel

Publications and Research

While the words clue, evidence, and detective might not be the first words you associate with history, the idea of history as a mystery to be solved by historian-detectives has a substantial and lively past. That is because the analogy of a historian to a detective solving a mystery is a strong one. Both historians and detectives try to answer the same question: What happened? Both work with evidence from the past to create a plausible narrative using only fragments left behind. Both engage in inferencing as a means of learning from evidence. Both are problem solvers.

In this article, …

What It Means To Be Special: Two Sisters Discuss Their Experiences, Gene Fellner, Mark Comesanas, Laritza Duperoy, Yaritza Duperoy

Publications and Research

In this article, two adolescent sisters discuss and reflect upon the impact that the special education classification of one of them has had on their lives. The sisters, co-authors of this text, participated in designing the study and analyzing the data we produced; their voices are the core of this article. Issues about inclusion, the harms and benefits of special education classification, stigma, the multi-edged meanings of what it means to be “special,” and the often complicit roles of educators in perpetuating exclusionary policies all arise in the sisters’ discussions with each other, with their co-authors, and with pre-service teachers.

Stimulating Learning About Textiles With Fast Fashion In Urban And Rural Settings, Diana Saiki, Alyssa Dana Adomaitis

Publications and Research

It is important for students who plan to work in the fashion industry to understand fast-fashion and its implications. A constructivist approach to teaching where an instructor starts with students’ experiences has been useful to teach fashion subjects. The purposes of this paper were to: 1) present and assess a teaching activity guided by constructivist theory where students were required to analyze quality of a garment made pre and another made post fast fashion, and 2) compare and contrast knowledge of fast fashion and quality among students given their rural versus urban experiences. Two textiles classes in rural (n = …

Gender Bias In Academe: An Annotated Bibliography Of Important Recent Studies, Danica Savonick, Cathy Davidson

Publications and Research

An annotated bibliography of studies examining the role of gender bias in hiring, promotion and tenure in higher education.

What Do You Do When Your Student Plagiarizes A Minor Assignment?, Norman Eng

Publications and Research

Time to ask the class, I thought. In the K-12 classroom, teachers do this all the time. When patterns of behavior occur, such as bullying or tattling, the best teachers call for “community meetings.”

Diversity More Than Race, Gender In Higher Ed., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

Most people when talking about diversity think

of matters revolving around race and gender, and

while those are obvious and important topics, the

fact of the matter is that the definition of diversity

is much larger.

Today diversity is seen in two dimensions.

The first one is what is called inherent diversity,

the diversity that is beyond people’s control.

Obviously, these issues include race and gender,

but also include national origin, age, sexual orientation,

disability, religious affiliation and socioeconomic

status. Certainly, you can change your

religious affiliation or socioeconomic status over

time, but being raised in a particular religion or …

Redeamericas: Building Research Capacity In Young Leaders For Sustainable Growth In Community Mental Health Services In Latin America, L. Yang, C. Pratt, E. Valencia, S. Conover, R. Fernández, M.S. Burrone, M.T. Cavalcanti, G. Lovisi, G. Rojas, R. Alvarado, S. Galea, L. N. Price, E. Susser

Publications and Research

The purpose of this paper is to describe the development and initial accomplishments of a training program of young leaders in community mental health research as part of a Latin American initiative known as RedeAmericas. RedeAmericas was one of five regional ‘Hubs’ funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to improve community mental health care and build mental health research capacity in low- and middle-income countries. It included investigators in six Latin American cities – Santiago, Chile; Medellín, Colombia; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Córdoba, Neuquén, and Buenos Aires in Argentina – working together with a team affiliated …

Not All Presidential Spouses Are Created Equal., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

One of the individuals who is usually around on campuses but many times is almost “invisible” is the president’s partner. Sometimes they take on major roles for social functions, fundraising, and public relations; others are quite inconspicuous. In some cases, they even get financial compensation for their work. In others, they have to make sacrifices for the wellbeing of their partners.

A new study helps to clarify the role of presidential partners and how they feel about their roles. “The Lives of Presidential Partners in Higher Education Institutions,” published by the University of Minnesota, provides a good understanding.

There Is Proof Diversity Makes Colleges Better., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

Since the time of the Civil Rights movement the

issue of diversity has been widely discussed in academia.

First it was considered that institutions of

higher education should increase the participation of

minorities of both faculty and students as a matter of

social justice.

Then came the legal aspect of increasing diversity

when the concept of affirmative action was introduced

in the early 1960s. After President John F. Kennedy

issued an executive order in 1961 that required not to

“discriminate against any employee or applicant for

employment because of race, creed, color, or national

origin" and "take affirmative action to …

Race, Education, And Reintegrating Formerly Incarcerated Citizens [Introduction, Chapter 6], Joni Schwartz, John R. Chaney

Publications and Research

Building on the framework of critical race theory (CRT), this book through academic research and analysis engages the voices of formerly incarcerated college students' lived experiences as well as college faculty and administrators' understanding of academia as created spaces for reentry.

Department Chairs Play Key Role In Education., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

In higher education, it has always been said

that the position of departmental chair is one of

the most difficult jobs. Chairs usually take over

the responsibility of managing the affairs of

their academic units without previous in-depth

preparation for the job and do so in a difficult

position where they have to implement policies

and practices from the college and university’s

administration, while having to still deal with

their colleagues on a daily basis.

On top of that they tend to return to the faculty

as another foot soldier after their stint as chair,

having to live with the …

Freedom Of The Press In Danger On Campuses., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

Anybody who has attended college is familiar with

student-run media. From newspapers to radio to even

TV stations, these outlets are oftentimes the main sources

of information to the college community.

They vary in quality and content, with some even

carrying out investigative reporting of their own institutions

and taking critical stances about policies and practices

that, while may seem inconsequential to outsiders,

are crucial to education.

Allen Teaches And Practices The Art Of Translation., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

An old Italian adage, “traduttore, traditore,” whose literal translation is “translator, traitor,” has been haunting the world of translation for decades. In fact, translation is a difficult art that not many people fully understand, and there are professors who teach it in college.

One of those professors is Dr. Esther Allen of the Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College of the City University of New York.

Probing The Enactment Of Reading Miscues: A Study Examining Reading Fluency, Edward Lehner

Publications and Research

Subsequent to the National Reading Panel’s (2000) report, more researchers have been examining the role that reading fluency plays in the development of a child’s reading skills. This study investigated the efficacy of the National Reading Panel’s research claim that a child learns reading fluency skills mainly through phonics and decoding instruction. Using a methodology to track the source of reading miscues, this paper demonstrates that a student’s cultural and semantic knowledge of text vitally influences the development of reading fluency skills. Specifically, the findings suggest that a child culturally enacts reading fluency both through graphophonic and semantic knowledge of …

College Enrollments Becoming Problematic., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

Enrollment has become the main focus of attention for

higher education administrators. For private institutions

enrollment is the major source of their funding. And due

to diminished support from states, it has also become

the major source of financial support for most public

colleges and universities. This dependence on tuition

wasn’t always so great for public institutions, but is the

result of a process that has been called the privatization

of public higher education.

Two reports that got little attention when published

recently were the Western Interstate Commission on

Higher Education, known as Wiche. This group released

its new projections …

The Cuny-Shanghai Library Faculty Exchange Program: Participants Remember, Reflect, And Reshape, Sheau-Yueh J. Chao, Beth Evans, Ryan Phillips, Mark Aaron Polger, Beth Posner, Ellen Sexton

Publications and Research

This chapter recounts the outcomes and experiences of six American librarians who participated in an international librarian exchange program that ran from spring 2010 through fall 2011. The exchange brought together the City University of New York (CUNY) and two universities in Shanghai, China: Shanghai University (SU) and Shanghai Normal University (SNU). The program was inspired, in part, by recognition of the diversity of CUNY’s student body and growing awareness of the increasing globalization of information and education. For the Chinese librarians, the exchange offered an opportunity to learn from the West and showcase their own innovations. The traveling participants …

Teaching And Learning Mathematics In The Ar/Vr Environment, Alexander Vaninsky

Publications and Research

This presentation discusses teaching and learning mathematics in augmented (AR) or virtual (VR) reality created by a combination of goggles and earphones. It claims that interactive learning in such an environment is more attractive and efficient. It increases motivation and interest in the subject matter. The approach is underlain by the findings of educational neuroscience considering the learning process as the formation of domains in the brain forming mathematics knowledge centers. The teaching process provides sensory excitation and establishes connections among these and other domains. Hardware and software are available in the market. The suggested approach allows for practical implementation …

Student Debt Disproportionally Affects Blacks., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

College student debt, now topping one trillion

dollars, is one of the most severe issues affecting

higher education. But if that amount (higher than

Americans’ combined credit card debt) sounds scandalous,

the problem is compounded by the fact that

it is affecting disproportionally people of color.

In a report published by the Brookings Institute

last October titled “Black-white disparity in student

loan debt more than triples after graduation,” its

authors found that by the moment they earn their bachelor’s

degrees, black college graduates owe $7,400

more on average than their white peers. And the

problem becomes even more acute over …