American Educational Research Journal

This study used ethnographic methodology to explore the academic world of regular and learning disabled high school students to determine what aspects of that world might relate to potential dropout behavior. It was conducted in a high school that was discovered to have a lower dropout rate than anticipated in view of national or local trends.

We describe the accommodating nature of this high school that may enhance the ability of students to become and remain academically engaged and hence accounts for the comparatively low dropout rate. This accommodation is described in terms of institutional, classroom, and interpersonal processes that reflect the school’s responsiveness to the needs of students as those needs are perceived by various institutional actors. The effect of these accommodation processes results in a modification of demands made of students and the provision of support for students to enhance their ability to meet those demands.

The concerns of students identified as at-risk of dropping out of school in an urban setting were studied using innovative ethnographic methods. Students from the subject population were hired to act as collaborators rather than informants and to collect taped dialogues between themselves and their peers. As collaborators, they also participated in the analysis of data and contributed to identifying the research questions of the inquiry. Data indicated that pressure and boredom were most often mentioned as negative factors in the lives of the students, with pressure emanating from social forces outside of school but contributing to boredom inside.

A within-class design was used to study process-product relationships between the quality of classroom discourse and student achievement. Six communicative logic variables based on Grice’s Cooperative Principle were identified. Ten sixth-grade teachers taught a 1-hour lesson on light. Students were classified by level of academic aptitude, and lesson content was classified by level of cognitive complexity. For each of the 10 classes, the teacher discourse that was related to specific items on the posttest was analyzed. Statistically significant results in terms of consistency across classrooms were obtained. These results consisted of negative relationships between violations of communicative logic and high-aptitude students’ percentage-correct responses on the test items. The value of this design for process-product research is discussed.

A program designed to enhance children’s prosocial development was conducted in three suburban elementary schools for 5 consecutive years, focusing primarily on a single cohort of children as it moved from kindergarten through fourth grade. Repeated observations were conducted each year to assess program implementation and student interpersonal behavior in classrooms in the three “program” schools and in three “comparison” schools. Analyses of these observational data revealed significantly higher scores in the program than the comparison classrooms on each of five indices of program-relevant activities and practices: Cooperative Activities, Developmental Discipline, Activities Promoting Social Understanding, Highlighting Prosocial Values, and Helping Activities. Further analyses indicated that students in program classrooms scored significantly higher on two indices of interpersonal behavior: Supportive and Friendly Behavior and Spontaneous Prosocial Behavior. Corroborative data from a second, 2-year cohort in the same schools is also presented. Implications of these findings for educational practices that emphasize supportive teacher-student relationships and the provision of opportunities for student decision-making, autonomy, and collaborative interaction are discussed.

The main purpose of the present study was to investigate how teachers’ and schoolmates’ judgments of a child’s academic, emotional, and social functioning are influenced by the knowledge that his or her parents are divorced. One hundred four teachers and 120 seventh- and eighth-grade students were shown the same film of a child engaging in a variety of activities. The target child was introduced as either a boy or a girl and as living either with both parents or with a divorced mother. The results showed a more negative evaluation of the child of divorced parents by both teachers and students on all three judgment dimensions. The results also showed meaningful patterns of selective and inferential memory of the facts, which varied according to the subject’s beliefs as to the marital status of the target child’s parents.

Previous investigators have found that cooperative learning group approaches to instruction are substantially more effective than methods with competitive or individualistic reward systems in the achievement of computational and recall objectives. The findings for higher order objectives are less clear. Two instructional field experiments were conducted to compare the effects of a cooperative learning group method (Slavin’s Student Teams Achievement Divisions) to a whole-class method on the acquisition of selected social-environmental studies problem-solving skills by grade 4 students. The results showed that both methods outperformed the control and that the cooperative strategy was slightly less effective than the whole-class approach.

The process of choosing a scientific major was examined in a nationally representative sample of male and female college students of above-average ability. Science majoring was predicted by different constellations of factors for male and female students. Women who were attending a 4-year college, who reported having been influenced by high school teachers and guidance counselors in making plans for college, and who placed a high priority upon aspects of their future family and personal lives were less likely to major in science than their female peers. High socioeconomic status, positive assessments of their high schools, and attending a 4-year college predicted science majoring for men.