African American Student Success Research Articles

Improving Retention and Success of African American Students in Computer Science: A Mixed-Method Case Study at an HBCU

This case study introduces the STARS (Supporting Talented African American Undergraduates for Retention and Success) project, designed to foster the retention and success of academically talented African American computer science students from low-income backgrounds at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the U.S. The STARS program employs a holistic approach, integrating four primary pillars of support: academic, social, career, and financial. Specific support provided includes near-peer mentoring, technical skill development seminars, undergraduate research, and high school outreach activities. To explore the program’s effectiveness and areas of improvement, a mixed-method evaluation study was conducted, collecting data through surveys, observations, individual interviews, and focus group interviews. The findings revealed that the STARS program contributed to high levels of retention among its scholars, and the mentoring program provided valuable networking opportunities. The study suggests that the program’s comprehensive approach, tailored to scholars’ needs, and combined with a culturally affirming learning environment, facilitates the retention and success of talented African American students in computer science.

African American Student Success and First-Year Seminars:

The purpose of this study was to examine the retention and academic performance of African American students who participate in a first-year seminar course and persist past the first year of college compared to those who do not participate in the course. Higher education scholars point to first-year seminars as means of increasing retention or persistence from first to second year (Jaijairam, 2016). It is also salient to note the body of literature conveys that African American students are retained at a lower rate than their White counterparts (Johnson, 2013). These factors present a unique opportunity to explore approaches to retention past the first year of college that may positively affect African American students. This quantitative study sought to uncover the impact of a first-year seminar course on the retention of African American students past their first year at one urban university in the Northeast region of the United States.

Investigating Teaching in Conceptually Oriented Mathematics Classrooms Characterized by African American Student Success

This article outlines several forms of instructional practice that distinguished middle-grades mathematics classrooms that were organized around conceptually oriented activity and marked by African American students' success on state assessments. We identified these forms of practice based on a comparative analysis of teaching in (a) classrooms in which there was evidence of conceptually oriented instruction and in which African American students performed better than predicted by their previous state assessment scores and (b) classrooms in which there was evidence of conceptually oriented instruction but in which African American students did not perform better than predicted on previous state assessment scores. The resulting forms of practice can inform professional learning for preservice and in-service teachers.

Increasing African American Student Success in Speech-Language Pathology Programs

At this time just under 8% of the speech-language pathologists in the United States identify themselves as minorities (ASHA, 2016a) despite the efforts of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association to increase diversity. African Americans are poorly represented in the field at 3% of the membership (ASHA, 2016a). In order to identify potential mechanisms for increasing the diversity of the field, 11 African American Speech-Language Pathologists were asked to provide recommendations for improving African American student retention in speech-language pathology undergraduate and graduate educational programs. Participants offered recommendations for how to increase the success rate of African American students in speech-language pathology programs, including providing culturally competent and caring mentorship, co-mentoring opportunities in educational programs, and connections to critical resources.

Supporting African American Student Success Through Prophetic Activism

This article describes how African American students’ success can be improved via the increased support of Black churches and their partnerships with public schools. Findings and implications from a comparative case study of two North Carolina churches that strive to educationally assist African American public school students are detailed. Both churches have outreach programs in local schools, and their activities indicate the value of faith-based partnerships embodying “prophetic activism” that benefits broader communities and empowers African Americans overall. We draw upon the study’s findings to recommend partnership strategies for church and public educational leaders.

Culture and Climate: Factors That Influence the Academic Success of African American Students in Prelicensure Nursing Education.

Despite numerous calls to diversify the nursing workforce, little progress has been made in increasing the numbers of African American graduates from prelicensure nursing programs, thus widening the diversity gap in the number of African Americans who enter the RN workforce. An integrative literature review was conducted to determine whether, from the students' perspective, the institutional climate and culture influenced their academic success. Themes of Alienation and Isolation, Persistent Determination, and Difficulty Seeking Help emerged as having an influence on students' academic success. On the basis of this review, professional development programs on topics such as implicit bias, microaggressions, and other unintentional and unconscious behaviors are recommended.

Factors That Promote and Impede the Academic Success of African American Students in Prelicensure Nursing Education: An Integrative Review.

The aim of this review is to identify factors that impact the academic success of African American nursing students in prelicensure nursing education programs, given the need for RN health care workers to be more reflective of the general U.S. A literature review was conducted to integrate the findings of the research related to African American nursing students in entry-level nursing programs to identify perceived barriers and supports to their retention and graduation. The review revealed alienation, isolation, and being different as barriers to success. Academic support, mentoring, and integration and inclusivity were factors that helped promote success. Recommendations for the establishment of diversity and inclusivity plans, structured enrichment and academic support services, mentorship, and activities that fostered student engagement and integration were actions that could contribute to the academic success of African American nursing students.

High School Teachers and African American Parents: A (Not So) Collaborative Effort to Increase Student Success

This is a case study about a group of African American parents that banded together in an effort to increase their own involvement, the involvement of other African American parents, and the success of African American students at one public high school. The various ways in which this group of parents sought to accomplish their goals, however, was not entirely embraced by school faculty. Consequently, their efforts were undermined and unutilized. The findings suggest that schools require parents, even when unified and with a common purpose, to comply with a specific protocol for involvement or risk being marginalized. It is argued that parent involvement is often based on support and compliance. Parents, moreover, are frequently regarded as one homogenous group, which ignores the varied experiences, visions, and values of ethnic minority parents.

Letter from the Editorial Board

Letter from the Editorial Board Jennifer Job, Managing Editor As we publish the second issue of our 95th volume, Occupy Wall Street protests have inspired people in over 1500 cities around the world to take to the street. The protesters feel that their voices are being ignored in a corporation-run market, and they are looking to their governments for relief. Currently, the Occupy Wall Street protests are in their second month with no signs of abating. America's schoolshadtheir own"Occupy" moment when Senator Rand Paul (Klein, 2011) stood up against the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary EducationAct (ESEA).OnOctober 19th, the ESEA, most widely known for its implementation of No Child Left Behind, was due to move easily through committee and onto the Senate floor. However, Sen. Paul used a rare procedural rule to put a halt to the meeting. He argued that there had been no hearings on the bill, and he wanted to hear from teachers and school superintendents before he was asked to make the decision to reauthorize ESEA. "I have yet to meet a teacher who is in favor of No Child Left Behind," Education Week quoted him as saying (10/19/11). The hearings Sen. Paul called for, which began November 8th, included several teachers, principals, and one superintendent as witnesses. These occurrences may be signaling an opening in public debate over education that may finally invite educators. After nearly a decade of the academy bemoaning the corporatization of education, perhaps the pendulum is ready to swing back to listening to public voices more than corporate ones. If we as researchers are to play a role in our communities, it is more important than ever that the academy do good work and that we make that work accessible to those in schools, where ever-shrinking budget conditions are demanding new ideas and approaches. And, more than ever, we need to listen to the voices of teachers and students in our efforts to create better schools. This issue highlights three studies that are working to those ends. The first, "Promising Homework Practices: Teachers' Perspectives on Making HomeworkWork for Newcomer Immigrant Students," by Hee Jin Bang, investigates how teachers of English Language Learners can re-envision the purpose of homework in order to better serve students. "Systems Thinking Tools for Improving Evidence-Based Practice: A Cross-Case Analysis of Two High School Leadership Teams," by Lisa Kensler, Ellen Reames, John Murray, and Lynne Patrick, examines how dialogue and evidence-based practice can improve school climate. And finally, "A Preliminary Examination of Academic Disidentification, Racial Identity, and Academic Achievement among African American Adolescents," by Kevin Cokley, Shannon McClain, Martinique Jones, and Samoan Johnson, looks at the role academic disidentification plays in the academic success of African American students. These three articles also share another commonality—they recognize successes going on in schools across the country. Educators are doing great things in American schools—our challenge now is to expand those pockets of excellence to meet the needs of all students. Jennifer Job, Managing Editor jgjob@email.unc.edu Reference Klein, A. (2011). ESEA markup paused due to Sen. Paul procedural objection. Education Week Blogs. Retrieved from: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2011/10/esea_markup_paused_due_to_sen.html. [End Page 1] Google Scholar Copyright © 2011 The University of North Carolina Press

Constructing Membership Identity through Language and Social Interaction: The Case of African American Children at Faith Missionary Baptist Church

In this article, the author explores how African American children in a Black church Sunday school community in northern California developed positive membership identity. Focal participants were Sunday school children ages 9 to 12 and their Sunday school teachers. Drawn from a two‐year ethnographic study, data showed that adults prepared children for membership through an interactive framework of instruction, which also formed the base for communicative competence in the setting. The author describes this framework and offers new insight into conditions that give rise to African American student success. [African American children, church, identity, communicative competence]

Guest Editors' Comments: Preparing Students for the New Millennium

As Cooper (1996) has earlier argued, U.S. society remains stratified by both race/ethnicity and class. Being African American continues to have particularly negative connotations and consequences (Peters,1981). Despite the academic achievement and educational gains made by African American students in recent years, the achievement gap between students of differing racial and ethnic backgrounds in the United States continues to exist (Miller, 1995). Given such adverse social conditions, researchers have maintained that African American children especially must be guided to develop a positive sense of self and ethnic identity in order to be successful (Boykin, 1986; Johnson, 1981). If Black youth are to be sufficiently prepared to meet the challenges of the new millennium, it is important that they come to see themselves as intellectually and affectively competent in both academic and social circles, and that they are able both to enter as well as graduate from institutions of higher education. Differing educational outcomes have caused many scholars to investigate the relationship between student achievement and such issues as schooling context, curriculum, and instruction (Cooper, 1999, 2000); educational policies and practices (Darling-Hammond, 2000; Elmore, 1996); parental involvement (Epstein, 1995; Sanders, 1996, 1998; Sanders & Herting, in press); and even intergroup relations (Schofield, 1991; Slavin & Cooper, in press). Many researchers and policymakers have denounced the use of deficit models to explain the negative schooling experiences of African Americans and are engaged in research exploring and isolating the multiplicity of factors that contribute to the academic success of Black students (Sanders, in press). They are choosing to shift the framing of their inquiries from a focus on the academic failure of African American students to an examination of alternative structures, organizations, and practices that lead to greater academic achievement. This line of inquiry flows from the educational resilience construct described by Wang and Gordon (1994) and Winfield (1991) that focuses on success rather than failure. It views educational resilience not as a fixed attribute of some individuals, but rather as the culmination of processes, mechanisms, and conditions that can be replicated across various school and family contexts. Utilizing such an approach helps to identify potential individual, school, and community factors that lead to and foster academic success among African American students (Winfield, 1991). How can African American students be prepared for the new millennium? Researchers and policymakers have volleyed this question about as if successful African American students constitute a rare, and only rarely sighted, species that had not yet been classified. They seem to accept almost intuitively that successful African American students are somehow different from their peers and from their non-African American counterparts. Volumes of research have been produced on the sociological factors that contribute to this presumed difference-factors such as poor and underfunded schools, economically depressed communities, single-parent families-all aimed at explaining the seemingly inevitable failure of large numbers of African American students. Yet, some of these students do succeed. Given the dearth of research on successful African American students, this issue of the jNE offers a refreshing look at an often-neglected population. The educators and researchers whose articles are collected herein contend that the successful African American student is more than a statistical anomaly, and they boldly face the task of understanding and explaining how and why these students succeed. Specifically, they each examine the question, What are the factors that contribute to the academic success of African American students? The nine articles that follow explore a different facet of the schooling experiences of high-achieving African American students, including the cultural, social, and personal. …

Successful African American Students: The Role of Parental Involvement

Research on parental involvement suggests that families play a key role in students' school success. Using social capital theory as a conceptual framework, this study sought to identify unique characteristics of social capital held by successful African American students compared to those of successful White and nonsuccessful Black peers. It examined social capital along four dimensions: (a) parent-teen interactions, (b) parent-school interactions, (c) parent-parent interactions, and (d) family norms. Despite their comparatively more disadvantaged home environments, successful African American students demonstrated higher levels of social capital on 6 of the 11 indicators examined. The implications of these findings for parents, educators, and educational policymakers are discussed. INTRODUCTION Changes in technology are increasing the necessity for participants in the U.S. labor market to possess a postsecondary degree. Although the high school completion rate for African American students has increased over the past several decades, attaining postsecondary educational opportunities and achieving lofty academic goals represents a critical challenge for many African American students (Solorzano, 1992). In the search for strategies that foster academic success among African American students, attention has been focused on increasing parental involvement in these students' schooling. However, parental involvement has multiple meanings (Cassanova, 1996), and it has been operationalized in studies in a variety of ways. Nonetheless, parental involvement is widely recognized as an important contributor to the academic success of African American students (Coleman,1991; Comer & Haynes,1991; Cooper & Datnow, in press; Epstein,1995; Lareau,1989). The majority of the studies that have investigated the issue of parental involvement are primarily based on samplings of White students. However, the evidence of positive parental involvement on children's school performance based on that demonstrated with White students may not hold true for students of other racial/ethnic groups (Steinberg, Dombush, & Brown,1992). Likewise, studies examining the effect of parental involvement on African American students often focus on the factors that place these students at risk and ignore the ways in which African American families promote successful school achievement and experiences. More recently, the focus of studies of African American students has shifted to include other factors that contribute to these students' success. Clark (1983) studied high-achieving African American students from low-income home environments. Through intensive interviews and observations, Clark discovered that the parents of such students engaged in distinctive parent-child interactions. That is, they typically created emotionally supportive home environments, engaged in frequent and meaningful dialogue with their children, helped them with homework, and communicated clear and consistent behavioral limits to them. Other studies have supported these findings. Sanders (1997), for example, interviewed high-achieving African American students from urban areas and reported that Black parents' efforts to promote their children's positive racial/ethnic socialization helped promote the latter's academic success as a response to racism and discrimination. Datnow and Cooper (1996) studied the role of peer networks in affirming academic success and racial identity among African American students attending predominantly White independent schools. Using national representative data, Lee, Winfield, and Wilson (1991) examined both family and school factors as they contribute to the academic behaviors of high-achieving African American students. A notable limitation of the research mentioned above, with the exception of the study by Lee et al. (1991), is that they represent small-scale qualitative studies. In order to address the limitations of previous studies of parental involvement and African American students' educational attainment, the present study utilizes national sample data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88). …

Peer Networks of African American Students in Independent Schools: Affirming Academic Success and Racial Identity

Analysis of qualitative data reveals that the formal and informal peer networks of African American students in predominantly White elite independent schools support these students' academic success, create opportunities for them to reaffirm their racial identities, and facilitate their adjustment to settings that are otherwise difficult for Blacks toit into. Contrasted to research showing that adopting academically successful behaviors leads Black students to being labeled as acting White, the sampled students made social gains within school when they were academically successful. However, this success did not result in full acceptance by African American peers outside the school. The authors conclude that the dynamics and ideologies of African American peer groups are more complex than prior research has suggested. INTRODUCTION A plethora of research documents the educational experiences of African American students. Early research in this area primarily focused on the failures of African American students to achieve at the same academic level as their White counterparts (Coleman et al., 1969; Jencks et al., 1972). More recently, the emphasis in research has shifted from studies of academic failure to studies of the factors that contribute to African American student success (Ladson-Billings, 1990; Lee, Winfield, & Wilson, 1991). Since the 1960s, increasing numbers of African American students have been enrolling in predominantly White elite independent schools known to prepare students for positions of power and leadership (Cookson & Persell, 1985). Much of the increase in enrollment can be attributed to the efforts of a number of organizations, including A Better Chance (ABC), Prep for Prep, Black Student Fund (BSF), and the Baltimore Educational Scholarship Trust (BEST), that have initiated and maintained the presence and participation of African American students in these schools (Cookson & Persell, 1991; Johnson & Anderson,1992). Additionally, the majority of these schools have enacted policies of nondiscrimination, and a growing number actively recruit minority students in their efforts to create more diverse student bodies on their campuses (Speede-Franklin, 1988). Despite these efforts, research shows that predominantly White elite independent schools, with their history of racial exclusion, are often places where African American students find it difficult to fit in (Brookins, 1988; Zweigenhaft & Domhoff, 1991). Moreover, African American students in such institutions have frequently reported that they feel caught between two cultures and consequently doubly marginalized.' They have also indicated that often they feel alienated from the culture of the school and from their own parents and friends, particularly in boarding school environments (Cookson & Persell, 1991). This is not surprising, as NELS:88 data indicate that African American students at predominantly White elite independent schools have substantially fewer family economic resources relative to the school populations as a whole (Schneider & Shouse, 1992). Research also suggests that African American students at these institutions may have weaker social relationships with their teachers than do their peers at the schools, and that this lack of connection may affect their motivation and academic performance (Schneider & Shouse, 1992). Given these findings, it appears that the social bonds that African American students at predominantly White elite independent schools develop with each other may provide an important but as yet unexplored support network that could potentially contribute to their academic performance and sense of identity and belonging. Although African American students in such settings often form their own cliques and clubs (Cookson & Persell, 1991), the functions served by these peer networks are not clearly understood. Thus, the study presented here used qualitative interview data to explore the peer networks developed by African American students enrolled in predominantly White elite independent schools through the Baltimore Educational Scholarship Trust (BEST). …