Track Students Research Articles

Tracking Students in Poverty: Latent Profile Transition Analysis of Students with Learning Difficulties in Math

Tracking Students in Poverty: Latent Profile Transition Analysis of Students with Learning Difficulties in Math

Preceptor perceptions of block scheduling and institutional track programs to prepare APPE students for residency or hospital careers

IntroductionButler University College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (BUCOPHS) and Purdue University College of Pharmacy (PUCOP) created Block Scheduling and Institutional Track programs with the goal of better preparing students interested in pursuing postgraduate residency and/or a career in institutional practice. While informal feedback has been positive from both students and preceptors, more formalized feedback was sought. The objective of this study was to determine whether preceptors perceived additional benefits in precepting students selected through Block Scheduling and Institutional Track programs compared to students scheduled on rotations through a traditional preference or optimization process. MethodsA 12-item electronic survey instrument was sent to BUCOPHS and PUCOP preceptors who had precepted block-scheduled and/or institutional track students in the 2014–15 and 2015–16 academic years. ResultsThe majority of preceptors (71.4%) felt that the time they spent orienting block and institutional track students was less or significantly less when compared to orienting traditionally scheduled students. Seventy-three percent (73.2%) of preceptors reported that block-scheduled and institutional track students were more or significantly more prepared for residency positions than traditional students. The majority of preceptors (93%) indicated they would recommend block scheduling or an institutional track to other practice sites. Reported benefits to the preceptor included additional time to dedicate to patient care, additional time to complete projects and initiatives for the pharmacy department, and publishable research produced from student projects mentored. ConclusionPreceptors perceived benefits in precepting block-scheduled and institutional track students compared to traditionally scheduled rotation students.

Contrasting Incoming Medical Students' Attitudes Dual Degree vs Traditional Tracks.

The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University (AMS) recently implemented a novel dual degree MD-ScM program in primary care and population medicine (PC-PM) that enrolls up to 24 of its nearly 144 yearly matriculants. The overarching goal of this track is to train medical students to become physician leaders who focus on issues in population medicine within primary care. We conducted a baseline assessment of the students enrolled in this parallel track in comparison to our traditional students to identify characteristics of and group differences between students in the PC-PM program and traditional students. Data was collected from first-year students matriculating in the 2015 and 2016 academic years (N=277) using portions of nine validated surveys with an emphasis on caring for the underserved and cultural competence, professionalism, working in interprofessional teams, tolerance of ambiguity, empathy, patient-provider interactions, and patient safety/quality improvement. We identified slightly higher significant baseline differences on three scales in which the PC-PM students (n=38) were higher than those in the traditional track students (n=239). These measured cultural competency (t[275]=-3.05, P=.003), professionalism (t[273]=-3.10, P=.002), and attitudes toward working with underserved populations (t[267]=2.31, P=.02). The higher differences for these three elements may be important to the success of the PC-PM program. We plan to track the growth of the PC-PM students as well as our traditional students through their 4 years of medical school to investigate growth and development throughout the academic career.

Study-Abroad Experiences of Two South Korean Undergraduate Students in an English-Speaking and a Non-English-Speaking Country

Benefits of the study-abroad (SA) experience have been reported in many studies. However, most prior studies on EFL students’ SA experiences track students in relatively short ESL programs during school vacation months. In addition, EFL learners’ SA experiences in non-English-speaking countries, where English is not the L1, remain underexplored. Applying case study methodology and gathering data from monthly reports during SA, and pre- and post-SA interviews, this study aimed to investigate SA experiences of two South Korean undergraduate students in two different SA environments with respect to the impact of the participants’ choice of SA destination on the SA experience and the participants’ interactions with the SA environment. The SA destination had a significant impact on the student in Finland. Dealing with a third language and failing the language course, the student in Finland had to leave the program earlier than planned. The student in Australia took great advantage of social networks she established through diverse venues, which enriched her SA experience and facilitated her learning. It is particularly meaningful that the present study broadened the scope of SA research, as it extended the context to “other” regions.

Tracking students’ visual attention on manga-based interactive e-book while reading: an eye-movement approach

This study employed an eye tracking technology to explore university students’ visual attention and learning performance while learning Japanese using an interactive manga-based e-book. The developed e-book consisted of 8 pages accompanied by 13 annotations with both text and graphical formats. The subjects consisted of 60 students whose eye movements were tracked and recorded by the eye tracking system. These students came from the applied foreign language department in a northern university in Taiwan, of which 30 were assigned to high prior knowledge (PK) group and the other 30 were assigned to low PK group. Eye tracking measurements, including total contact time, number of fixations, latency of first fixation, and number of clicks on the defined regions of interest of the two groups were compared to indicate their visual attention. The results revealed that overall students spent more time on reading text and annotation than graphic information. The high PK students showed longer fixation durations on the texts, while the low PK students showed longer fixation durations on the graphics and annotations. Meanwhile, the low PK students used more clicks to look up underlined annotations whenever they didn’t know words or phrases on the e-book. In addition, with respect to the latency of the first fixation, the graphic captured the attention faster than the text because of the size and its appeal to the students. Further analysis of saccade paths indicated that the low PK students showed more inter-scanning transitions not only between the text dialog and the annotation zone but also within annotation zone. Finally, the results of reading comprehension pretest and posttest found that there was a significant difference in learning outcomes between each PK group.

Almanya’daki Türkiye Asıllı Gençlerin Eğitim Başarısı ve Eğitim Fırsatları

<p class="ql-align-justify">Using data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), this study provides a quantitative overview of educational achievement and opportunities among Turkish youth in Germany. The findings show that students with a Turkish background are the most disadvantaged group at the fifth and ninth grade level in the fields of German and mathematics. Moreover, proportionally, they are the least-represented group among academic high school track students; the track provides opportunities for admission to universities and universities of applied sciences. Fifty years after the first migration from Turkey to Germany began, Turkish youth have had problems regarding using German in everyday life, friendship networks, and residential segregation. According to the segmented assimilationist perspective, different immigrant groups experience different levels of accommodation in destination countries. In the German context, data show that other immigrant communities gradually adapt to German society one way or another, whereas the problems of Turkish accommodation are passed on to younger generations.&nbsp;

Tracking Student Mistreatment Data to Improve the Emergency Medicine Clerkship Learning Environment.

IntroductionMedical student mistreatment is a prevalent and significant challenge for medical schools across the country, associated with negative emotional and professional consequences for students. The Association of American Medical Colleges and Liaison Committee on Medical Education have increasingly emphasized the issue of mistreatment in recent years, and medical schools are tasked with creating a positive learning climate.MethodsThe authors describe the efforts of an emergency department (ED) to improve its clerkship learning environment, using a multifaceted approach for collecting mistreatment data and relaying them to educators and clerkship leadership. Data are gathered through end-of-rotation evaluations, teaching evaluations, and an online reporting system available to medical students. Mistreatment data are then relayed to the ED during semi-annual meetings between clerkship leadership and medical school assistant deans, and through annual mistreatment reports provided to department chairs.ResultsOver a two-year period, students submitted a total of 56 narrative comments related to mistreatment or unprofessional behavior during their emergency medicine (EM) clerkship. Of these comments, 12 were submitted in 2015–16 and 44 were submitted in 2016–17. The most frequently observed themes were students feeling ignored or marginalized by faculty (14 comments); students being prevented from speaking or working with patients and/or attending faculty (11 comments); and students being treated in an unprofessional manner by staff (other than faculty, 8 comments).ConclusionThis article details an ED’s efforts to improve its EM clerkship learning environment by tracking mistreatment data and intentionally communicating the results to educators and clerkship leadership. Continued mistreatment data collection and faculty development will be necessary for these efforts to have a measurable effect on the learning environment.

Senior High School Students’ Entrepreneurial Inclination: The Case of Accountancy, Business, and Management Track Students in Pampanga, Philippines

The study investigates the entrepreneurial inclination of senior high school students in Pampanga, Philippines. Specifically, the undertaking examines the significant differences in respondents? inclination towards entrepreneurship when grouped based on school affiliation, age, sex, plan to pursue a college degree, and family business background. The participants of the study were randomly selected from two (2) public schools and (4) private high schools during the school year 2016-2017. These schools offer SHS ABM track where entrepreneurship course is one of the major components of the curriculum. Using independent sample t-tests, the findings reveal that all demographic factors ? school affiliation, age, sex, plan to pursue a college degree, and family business background show no statistical significant difference in the entrepreneurial inclination of the respondents. This result suggests that all identified demographic variables do not affect or influence SHS-ABM track students? entrepreneurial inclination. Implications of the study on the entrepreneurship education in the Philippines and the directions for future research are also provided.

The new school advantage? Examining the effects of strategic new school openings on student achievement

This paper examines the effects of strategic new school openings (SNSOs) on student achievement at brand new (“relief”) campuses built to alleviate overcrowding at neighboring “feeder” campuses in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). We focus on a subset of schools involved in LAUSD's Public School Choice Initiative (PSCI), which aimed to increase high quality school options by awarding management of newly-constructed relief schools to diverse operators based on innovative and evidence-based school plans and autonomies from district policies. We employ a Comparative Interrupted Time Series approach using administrative student-level data that tracks students for 10 years, following students in the first (1.0) and second (2.0) cohorts of PSCI schools for three and two years of implementation, respectively. We find that relief school openings had negative start-up effects on student achievement, but led to improved achievement in subsequent years of PSCI. We find suggestive evidence that improvements made to the reform after the first round of relief school openings helped Cohort 2.0 schools perform significantly better than Cohort 1.0 schools.

ConfChem Conference on Select 2016 BCCE Presentations: Tracking Student Use of Web-Based Resources for Chemical Education

This paper presents the technical infrastructure required to track student use of web-based resources in an introductory chemistry course, the design of a student dashboard, and the results from analyzing student web-based resource use. Students were tracked as they interacted with online homework problems and high quality course content videos. These videos were developed using funds from the National Science Foundation. We found that students did not use the online video resources as much as expected. If students do not use web-based resources, practitioners and researchers need to (i) track and analyze student use, (ii) implement strategies to increase student use, and (iii) only invest in resources students will use. This Communication summarizes one of the invited papers to the Select 2016 BCCE Presentations ACS CHED Committee on Computers in Chemical Education online ConfChem held from October 30 to November 22, 2016.

Dimensional comparisons: How academic track students’ achievements are related to their expectancy and value beliefs across multiple domains

In the present study, we investigated how students’ expectancies and values can be predicted by their achievements in multiple domains. Our major aim was to extend previous findings on dimensional comparison processes for expectancies to task values while systematically comparing multiple value facets defined in expectancy-value theory. We assessed the expectancies, values, and achievements of N = 857 students in Grades 5–12 from two German academic track schools in five academic domains. The results for students’ expectancies largely supported the predictions that were derived from dimensional comparison theory: We found strong evidence for negative cross-domain paths between achievements and expectancies in “far” domains such as math and languages, indicating contrast effects. There were also some positive cross-domain paths between achievements and expectancies in “near” domains such as math and physics, indicating assimilation effects. We also found similar patterns of cross-domain paths for students’ values. However, the results varied substantially across the nine value facets under investigation. We found the strongest evidence for dimensional comparison processes for the value facets most closely related to expectancy (e.g., intrinsic value and cost facets), whereas we found only a little evidence for dimensional comparison processes for the facets of utility value.

Preliminary Findings of Tracking Students’ Eye Movements in Cytotechnology Education

Preliminary Findings of Tracking Students’ Eye Movements in Cytotechnology Education

Tracking Students Through Life: A Critical Structural Analysis of Academic Tracking of Mexican Immigrant Students in the United States and Korean Immigrant Students in Japan

Students in the United States and Japan from high and middle socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds are afforded greater academic opportunities due to the systemic presence of hegemony in public schools (Darvin and Norton in J Lang Identity Educ 13(2):111–117, 2014). Minority and immigrant students, the majority coming from low SES, are more likely to suffer the negative effects of tracking. This paper explains how Mexican immigrant students in the United States, and Korean students in Japan are tracked into lower-level courses throughout their educational careers. Using critical structuralism as a theoretical framework, the paper analyzes the two educational systems and explains the implications of tracking on students’ access to higher education. The paper presents mediating mechanisms against the negative effects of lower-level tracking, while arguing for college preparatory education for Mexican and Korean immigrants in the U.S. and Japan respectively.

Content integration as a factor in math-game effectiveness

In this study we focus on the integration of mathematical learning content (i.e., proportional reasoning) in game-based learning environments (GBLE). More specifically, two kinds of GBLEs are set up: an extrinsically integrated GBLE and an intrinsically integrated GBLE. In the former environment, the mathematical content is not part of the core mechanics and structure of the gaming world. In the latter environment, the mathematical content is delivered through the parts of the game that are the most fun to play and embodied within the structure of the gaming world and the players’ interactions with it. Sixty-four vocational track students participated in the study, all of them working in either version of the self-developed GBLE “Zeldenrust”. The results of this study suggest that the way the content is integrated in a GBLE (i.e., intrinsically or extrinsically) matters: contrary to our expectations, students who played the extrinsically integrated game showed higher learning gains, motivational gains and perceived usefulness than students who played the game in which the content was intrinsically integrated.

Monitoring Student Cues: Tracking Student Behaviour in Order to Improve Instruction in Higher Education

In this paper, we focus on monitoring, a particular aspect of reflection related to teaching. We define monitoring as a feedback mechanism which entails attending to and evaluating a multitude of cues in the envi- ronment in order to evaluate progress towards a goal. We direct our attention to monitoring because it is a way in which a teacher is able to gain understanding of how effective his/her teaching actions are. Thus, knowing what cues to evaluate (and being able to do so) is a critical skill in reflection. Further, we focus exclusively in this paper on the concur- rent monitoring of cues related to students since we believe that attention to student cues while teaching provides teachers with a window into their students' learning experiences. We call this particular type of reflection, reflection-in-action. As well as depicting multiple examples of monitoring drawn from our research, we explore the contribution of this work to the literature in higher education and to faculty development activities, particularly, to the growing literature on teacher thinking.

Absolute Versus Comparative Advantage: Consequences for Gender Gaps in STEM and College Access

We examine the impact of the competitive “STEM track choice”—a defining institutional feature of a number of national education systems—on gender gaps in STEM majors and college access. Many national education systems require high school students to make a largely irreversible, competitive choice between STEM and non-STEM tracks. This choice determines whether students will compete with STEM or non-STEM track students for college entrance. Using two datasets from China, we show that differences in how girls and boys make this choice are important reasons that girls select out of STEM, independent of gender differences in preference or ability. Specifically, we find that girls are more likely to choose their track by comparing their own STEM and non-STEM abilities (their “comparative advantage”) whereas boys are more likely to base their decision on how their STEM ability compares to others (their “absolute advantage”). Because girls often score higher in non-STEM subjects, looking at comparative advantage leads girls who would be competitive in the STEM track to nevertheless choose the non-STEM track. We further show that choosing the non-STEM track decreases the chance that these girls access college and elite colleges. Thus, the STEM track choice not only leads to gender imbalance in the number of STEM graduates but also to gender inequality in college access.

Systemic obstacles to lifelong learning: the influence of the educational system design on learning attitudes

ABSTRACTComparative research has often emphasized the importance of external barriers (e.g. enrolment costs) to explain inequalities in lifelong learning participation. However, individuals, in particular the low educated, are often not only prevented from participation by external barriers, but also by negative psychological dispositions about learning. In this article, we study how dispositions about learning as measured in PIAAC (2012) vary between countries. In particular, we assess how these cross-country differences are related to a number of design characteristics of the initial school system. We improve the cross-sectional research design by controlling attitudes among adults for attitudes collected among primary school students, making use of diff-in-diff and pseudo-panel-techniques. Overall, we find that strong external differentiation mechanisms, in particular tracking students at a young age and making extensively use of grade retention, are associated with less positive attitudes towards learning among adults. However, a number of methodological issues, related to small country samples and differences in data definition between surveys, calls for further investigation.

Flexible hybrid learning: comparison of two approaches and learning results

The ICT-enhanced instruction has become widely exploited through hybrid learning. The main objective of this article is to describe this process from the view of various criteria comparing: 1) two approaches to hybrid learning; 2) results of pedagogical experiment conducted at two higher education institutions; 3) tracking students' performance within this process; 4) the role of the mobile devices. Making the process of hybrid learning easier and more flexible to students, the criterion of individual learners' needs and preferences was taken into consideration, when applied in different ways at two Czech higher education institutions which have been the leaders in methodology and practice of the hybrid learning implementation. Their models were exploited in educational practice; and pedagogical experiments comparing learners' knowledge in flexible and non-flexible learning were conducted. However, the results did not prove statistically significant differences in the two approaches. Therefore, deeper attention was paid to the hybrid learning process, particularly to learners' activity within the ICT-enhanced work and the role of mobile technologies. The results show that despite being highly equipped with mobile technologies and having appropriate skills to use them for education, students' activity in the entire process of learning was not high.

Academic Tracking, High-Stakes Tests, and Preparing Students for College: How Inequality Persists Within Schools

Academic tracking is a common feature of school organization, but it produces inequalities in student outcomes. High-stakes testing policies offer new opportunities for assessing students’ progress, but the instruments raise concerns about relying on such narrow measures of learning. This study utilizes a longitudinal data set that follows one cohort of North Carolina school students from public high school through the state university system to examine the difference in outcomes associated with academic track. Results show that upper track students do better in college even when controlling for achievement on high-stakes tests and that such tests are a stronger predictor of college success for upper track students than they are for lower track students. Interviews suggest that these differences can be attributed to different methods of instruction in each track.

Proficient beyond borders: assessing non-native speakers in a native speakers’ framework

English language proficiency is considered a basic skill that students from different language backgrounds are expected to master, independent of whether they are native or non-native speakers. Tests that measure language proficiency in non-native speakers are typically linked to the common European framework of reference for languages. Such tests, however, often lack the criteria to define a practically relevant degree of proficiency in English. We approach this deficit by assessing non-native speakers’ performance within a native speakers’ framework. Items from two English reading assessments—the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the National Assessment (NA) for English as a foreign language in Germany—were administered to N = 427 German high school students. Student abilities were estimated by drawing plausible values in a two-dimensional Rasch model. Results show that non-native speakers of English generally underperformed compared to native speakers. However, academic track students in the German school system achieved satisfactory levels of proficiency on the PISA scale. Linking the two scales showed systematic differences in the proficiency level classifications. The findings contribute to the validation and international localization of NA standards for English as a foreign language. Practical implications are discussed with respect to policy-defined benchmarks for the successful participation in a global English-speaking society.