Posts Tagged: education
How to best serve Latino students
Dive Brief:
- The University of California has received criticism for not adequately serving Latinos, the state's largest ethnic group, since affirmative action measures were banned from use in admissions decisions in California's public institutions in 1996, The New York Times reports.
- The university system's newest campus, UC Merced, most closely resembles the diversity of California with an undergraduate Latino population of 53%. UCLA and UC Berkeley, the system's flagship campuses, serve Latino populations of 21% and 13%, respectively.
- While Merced lacks traditional markers of academic excellence including star faculty members, better than average admissions test scores and a high graduation rate, Latino students are attracted to Merced because professors and administrators have created programs and services that directly cater to them. This includes parent workshops in Spanish during student orientation, culturally appropriate celebrations, availability of cultural foods and more.
Dive Insight:
Studies show that the growing racial disparities in higher education occur amongst not only student populations, but faculty members and administration as well. This may have serious implications on the success of racial and ethnic minorities who may also be first-generation college students or come from low-income families.
Current research on the success of African American college students points to elements like the development of relationships with faculty members, involvement in minority student organizations and management of relationships with family and friends back home as essential parts of a plan to attract and retain a diverse student body.
Changes in student demographics are expected to continue to have a direct impact on retention in higher education during the next few years. Texas A&M University – San Antonio is an example of an institution that has a multi-year rebranding project centered on ensuring that the campus is a welcoming environment to the city's large military population and underserved minorities.
Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana published the results of a 2016 study of the 21st Century Scholar initiative to improve student success outcomes across its 32 campuses. The program administered by The Indiana Commission for Higher Education reported results of an increase in first-year persistence of 8.8 percentage points, up from a historical average between 36.9% and 45.7%. The scholars who participated in the program were Pell eligible and first-generation college students. Participants received executive-style coaching to support them not only in academics, but in other areas of life that may have been hindering their success.
Source: Published originally on www.educationdive.com, How to best serve Latino students, by Halona Black, August 2nd, 2018.
To attract more blacks and Hispanics to STEM, universities must address racial issues on campus
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was not Tiana Young's first choice for college, even though Young wants to dual major in aeronautical and mechanical engineering, and the private university is one the top schools in the country for science, technology, math and engineering.
The school had one big drawback: Rensselaer's student body is more than two-thirds white and Asian, according to federal data. For Young, who is black and whose high school in Spring Valley, New York was almost entirely African-American and Hispanic, “the lack of diversity was a very big concern,” says the freshman. But Young, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, needed significant financial aid to attend college, and Rensselaer made a financial offer she couldn't refuse.
Academically, the school has been challenging but rewarding, a sentiment echoed by other African-American freshman. “I feel like I'll leave here 1,000 times smarter and ready for any job,” says Young's friend Charles Omoregbee, an engineering major. While Young has made white friends in her dorm — everyone rallied to help her when a mouse scampered into her room and hid — and in the Society of Women Engineers, her closest friends are all African-American. Most white students are friendly, but small slights and one major incident have left Young and other African-American students stressed by more than just homework.
During the first month of school, a white student who is part of the alt-right group Turning Point USA created a Facebook post that called for the return of separate water fountains for whites and “Coloreds.”
Young and her African-American classmates were shaken up by the post, and equally angered by the fact that the school never publicly addressed the issue. Some even contemplated transferring. “When we got here they acted like it's all rainbows and sprinkles at Rensselaer, but when something happens then everyone is silent,” says Jenari Mitchell, a freshman computer science major.
Students of color studying science, technology, engineering and math (collectively known as STEM) are underrepresented at schools around the country and even though most don't face overt racism they face a set of challenges that have led to persistent issues of under-representation at the graduate levels and across STEM professions.
African-American and Latino workers comprise just 16 percent of the advanced manufacturing workforce, 15 percent of the computing workforce and 12 percent of the engineering workforce, rates that have remained essentially flat for more than a decade, according to the 2015 US News/Raytheon STEM Index. And yet some STEM industries are already facing shortages of qualified personnel, and others project major growth in the future. Encouraging blacks and Hispanics, both growing populations, to pursue STEM careers is both an equity issue and crucial for the economy, according to Rodney Andrews, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Texas at Dallas. But, experts say, higher education must do more to address a set of challenges that keep blacks and Hispanics from pursuing STEM degrees.
Paying for college can be a major obstacle for black and Hispanic students, who are more likely to live in poverty than their white peers and more likely to be the first in their family to attend college. They're also more likely to attend poorly resourced segregated public schools that lack the tough curriculum needed to prepare them for college-level STEM courses. When they arrive on campus, college culture also makes a difference to the number of black and Hispanic students pursuing STEM degrees Experts and students say colleges and universities, especially STEM research institutions, aren't doing enough to ensure that students of color don't switch majors or drop out entirely.
According to one recent study, 37.5 percent of white and Asian-American students completed STEM degrees after five years, while completion rates for African-American and Latino students were 22.1 percent and 18.4 percent respectively. “It's no longer enough to just teach students,” says Tim Scott, assistant provost for undergraduate studies at Texas A&M University. “We need to ask, ‘What tools do we need to retain them?'”
Eugene Fiorini, a mathematics professor at Muhlenberg College who oversees a summer preparatory program, says schools don't do enough to integrate students of color into campus life. “The research shows that the trouble these students have in college has nothing to do with intelligence they don't feel like they are part of the college and they drop out more because of cultural isolation,” he says.
For black and Latino students shifting from segregated high schools, where they rarely saw a white face, to STEM-oriented research institutions where blacks and Hispanics are a tiny percentage of the student population, the adjustment can be especially difficult. “When I got here I thought, ‘Wow, so this is what it means to be a minority,'” says Young. Rensselaer's student population is 15 percent black and Hispanic this year, according to statistics provided by the school. “It was a culture shock.”
To read the whole article visit The Hechinger report.
Source: Published originally on The Hechinger Report,To attract more blacks and Hispanics to STEM, universities must address racial issues on campus, by Stuart Miller, January 23, 2018.
Expansion of AP computer science courses draws more girls and minorities
Latino and African American students were also in short supply, a problem that has bedeviled educators for years and hindered efforts to diversify the high-tech workforce.
Now, an expansion of AP computer science classes is helping to draw more girls and underrepresented minorities into a field of growing importance for schools, universities and the economy.
Testing totals for female, black and Latino students all doubled in 2017, following the national debut of an AP course in computer science principles. It joined a longer-established AP course focused on the programming language Java.
Racial and gender imbalances persist. But education leaders said the data show a significant advance in a quest to banish the stereotype that computer science is mainly for coding geeks who tend to be white or Asian American boys.
“We're trying to diversify a field that for whatever reason has remained not so for generations,” said David Coleman, president of the College Board, which oversees the AP program. “Really, what this is about is computer science breaking out of its narrow role.”
Coleman acknowledged: “There's more work to do.”
About 27 percent of roughly 100,000 AP computer science test-takers last spring were girls. Black students accounted for 5 percent of those tested and Latino students for 15 percent, well below their overall shares of school enrollment.
The quest to broaden the computer science talent pool hinges, in many ways, on stoking the passion of students such as Adesoji Adenusi and Daijah Etienne to explore the power of programming.
The two Maryland teenagers were hunting one recent morning for commands in Java to maneuver a wheeled robot, known as the Finch, through left-handed turns along the edges of a square floor mat. Keeping the gizmo on track was not easy.
At the keyboard, Adenusi toyed with numbers for wheel velocity. “A couple extra zeros never harmed anybody,” he joked.
“It depends,” shot back Etienne as she walked with the balky little robot. “What if you put a couple extra zeros on a check?”
Adenusi, 18, and Etienne, 17, both seniors, are in the Java-centered class called AP Computer Science A at Charles H. Flowers High School in Prince George's County.
Adenusi, who aims to major in computer science in college, said he is drawn to video-game design and has developed an appreciation for the precision and creativity the subject demands. “Everything really in coding is a choice,” he said. “Colors, shapes, sizes — that's all up to you.”
Etienne, who is considering studying computer engineering in college, also took AP Computer Science Principles in the past school year. She said the courses have deepened her understanding of the power of software to make objects come to life. “An iPhone, for example,” she said. “A block of metal, in all honesty. But when you add the coding, it becomes something more.”
At Flowers High, 86 students took an AP computer science test in the spring. That was more than triple the total of 26 in 2016. The new principles course fueled the growth. Most of the school's students are African American. Nearly half of those enrolled in AP computer science are girls.
College Board data show that 20 high schools in Maryland, Virginia and the District notched gains in 2017 of at least 50 students in AP computer science testing, compared with the previous year. Thomas S. Wootton High in Montgomery County had the largest growth: Its students took 238 of the exams, up from 76 in 2016.
Universities are tracking these developments closely because they have struggled for years to broaden the demographic base of students in computer science beyond white and Asian American men. The AP program, which enables students to obtain college credit through testing, offers one of the strongest links between high schools and higher education.
For more than 30 years, high schools have offered AP classes in computer science. But about 10 years ago, educators began to worry about participation. Overall numbers were low. About 20,000 students took the computer science tests in 2007, fewer than the totals for AP French or studio art.
A closer look showed even more dismal trends that year: Only about 3,360 females and 1,300 Latino students took the computer science tests. The African American total was a mere 734.
Trevor Packer, senior vice president of the College Board and longtime head of the AP program, said annual reports on computer science testing in that era would make him wince. Idaho, for example, counted 25 boys taking the tests in 2007 — and zero girls.
Tenth-graders Marcellus Cannon, left, and Christian Vasquez Rubio work with a robot in a Computer Science Principles course at Flowers High. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
With help from the National Science Foundation, the College Board and computer scientists at various universities fashioned a new course meant to appeal to a broader audience. AP Computer Science Principles, or CSP, launched nationally in fall 2016.
A College Board video promoting the course made explicit appeals to underrepresented students. “A lot of girls are intimidated because they see computers as, like, a ‘guy thing,' ” one girl says in the video. “If more girls were, like, encouraged, then that wouldn't be an issue anymore.”
Last spring, 92 girls from Idaho took an AP computer science test. Most were in Computer Science Principles.
Owen Astrachan, a professor of the practice of computer science at Duke University who helped develop the new class, said it is meant to complement Computer Science A.
“In CSA, it's all programming, all the time,” Astrachan said. “In CSP, programming is part of it, but it's not the center of it.” Students have more freedom to design their own projects in CSP. They are assessed at the end of the course on a digital portfolio of work — including a task focused on creating a computer program — as well as a multiple-choice test.
Duke gives credit to students who get a top score of 5 on the new exam or scores of 4 or 5 on the original computer science exam, allowing the students to place into higher-level courses. “I'm a big fan of trying to empower high schools,” Astrachan said.
Expanding computer science in high schools takes more than adding a new AP course. It also requires investing in teachers, who often are not experts in the field. Course offerings have long been skimpy in many schools. In 2014, The Washington Post found that fewer than 1 in 10 high school students in the Washington region were taking a computer science course.
College professors, mindful of these issues, aim to help.
David J. Malan, who teaches a popular introductory course in computer science at Harvard University, said a version of it tailored to the AP CSP curriculum is available online for high school teachers who want to mine it for problem sets and homework assignments. The goal, he said, “is broadening access to and interest in computer science.”
At Flowers High, Marilyn Fitzpatrick has taught computer science for five years. She said she wants students to see connections from the classroom to the working world in disciplines such as software development and cybersecurity.
“I try to engage them all,” she said. “We need more minorities in the field.”
On this December morning, her computer science classes were bustling with students who programmed robots — including a daredevil racing device with nubby tires called an Ollie — and completed self-paced assignments at terminals.
On the walls were posters with inspirational quotes, including one from President Barack Obama: “Don't just play on your phone, program it.”
Christian Vasquez Rubio, 15, a sophomore in CSP, fiddled with coding commands for an Ollie to navigate an obstacle course. He said it was his first AP class. “This is a fun way to learn,” he said. “I like it when we're able to do hands-on stuff.”
Vasquez Rubio said he's intrigued by careers related to computer science. “I don't know what exactly, but somewhere in the field.” And college? “Of course,” he said. “That's a big goal of mine.”
Source: Published originally on The Washington Post, Expansion of AP computer science courses draws more girls and minorities, by Nick Anderson, January 8th, 2018.
UCR Identified as National Leader for Latino Student Success
Report comes on the heels of similar findings related to African American graduation rates
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — The University of California, Riverside has been listed among ten top-performing colleges nationally for Latino student success according to findings released today in Washington, D.C.
The Education Trust, a non-profit think tank based in Washington D.C., looked at 613 public and private four-year colleges nationwide and singled out ten campuses nationwide as models for promoting Latino student success. Rather than ranking schools strictly on national averages, The Education Trust compared institutions of similar size, SAT scores, and number of Pell Grant recipients and then highlighted those campuses with significantly higher than average graduation rates among Latino students. The findings are published in, “A Look at Latino Student Success: Identifying Top- and Bottom-Performing Institutions.
UCR is widely respected as a national model for student success across ethnic and economic categories. According to the most recent national data, the six-year graduation rate for Latino students in the U.S. is 54 percent. The rate at UCR is nearly 20 percentage points higher at 73 percent.
In addition to performing higher than national averages, UCR is one of few institutions nationwide to have eliminated achievement gaps across ethnic groups and income levels. In 2016, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities honored UCR with the prestigious “Project Degree Completion Award” for innovation in improving student success.
“Being named a top-performing institution is a testament not only to our students but also to the faculty and staff across campus dedicated to helping our students succeed,” said UCR Chancellor Kim A. Wilcox. “The disparities in student success are a national crisis in higher education in the U.S. The Education Trust's analysis is critical in identifying the schools like UCR that are moving the needle on graduation rates so that our successes can be emulated across the country.”
In March, The Education Trust released a similar report covering African American student success. UCR was one of just three schools to be named top-performing institutions in both reports.
Founded in the early 1990s, The Education Trust is a national non-profit advocacy organization that promotes academic achievement for students at all levels of the education system, particularly for students of color and low-income students.
Source: Published originally on ucrtoday.ucr.edu, UCR Identified as National Leader for Latino Student Success, by John Replogle, December 14, 2017.
La Iniciativa Alimentaria Global de UC ANR apunta hacia la seguridad alimentaria y obesidad
Tres estudiantes de la Universidad de California fueron elegidas por la División de Agricultura y Recursos Naturales como becarias de la Iniciativa Alimentaria Mundial (GFI, por sus siglas en inglés) durante el periodo 2017-18.
Las estudiantes de postgrado de la UC Berkeley Kristal Caballero, Elsbeth Sites y Sonya Zhu son las becarias de la GFI y trabajarán con académicos y personal de ANR para abordar el tema de cómo alimentar de manera sustentable y nutritiva a una población mundial que en el 2025 alcanzará los ocho mil millones de personas.
Las becarias de la GFI son parte de un grupo de 50 estudiantes y graduados de la UC que trabajan en proyectos relacionados con los alimentos en los 10 campus de la UC, la oficina del presidente de la UC, el Laboratorio Nacional Lawrence Berkeley y la UC ANR.
La presidenta de la UC, Janet Napolitano, lanzó a nivel estatal el programa Iniciativa Alimentaria Global en el 2014 con el objetivo de colocar a la UC, California y al mundo en vías a la sustentabilidad. Cada participante recibe un premio de cuatro mil dólares para ayudar a financiar investigaciones, proyectos o internados generados por estudiantes que apoyan los esfuerzos de la iniciativa enfocados en la seguridad alimentaria, salud y sustentabilidad.
Las becarias de la GFI se reúnen en conferencias, viajes de estudios y eventos para hacer contactos. La primavera pasada, UC ANR llevó a cabo el recorrido de becarios por el delta de los ríos Sacramento-San Joaquín para aprender más sobre la relación entre alimentos, agricultura y medioambiente.
Las becarias de la GFI 2017-18:
Kristal Caballero, de San José, es estudiante de postgrado de la Facultad de Salud Pública de la UC Berkeley. Con su trabajo en el equipo de Comunicaciones Estratégicas de UC ANR, Caballero se enfocará en esfuerzos de divulgación de información y educación para educar al público sobre nutrición, seguridad alimentaria, programas federales de alimentos, desperdicio de alimentos, obesidad infantil y temas relacionados. Caballero utilizará una variedad de herramientas de comunicación para publicar los resultados de la investigación del Instituto de Políticas sobre Nutrición sobre temas relacionados con la nutrición y alimentos y para informar a los legisladores.
Elsbeth Sites, de Benicia, es graduada de la Facultad de Salud Pública de la UC Berkeley. Como parte de su trabajo con los investigadores del Instituto de Políticas sobre Nutrición, Sites piensa explorar la forma en la que el sueño afecta a la obesidad infantil analizando los factores sociales y culturales que podrían impactar el sueño de los niños mexicoamericanos y a su vez saber cómo el sueño impacta su dieta y actividad física.
Sonya Zhu, de Iowa City, Iowa, es estudiante de postgrado de la Facultad de Políticas Públicas Goldman, de la UC Berkeley. Zhu conducirá un segundo análisis del estudio Comunidades Saludables en el Instituto de Políticas sobre Nutrición, un estudio observacional de más de cinco mil niños de entre cuatro y 15 años que fueron reclutados en 130 comunidades de todo EUA entre el 2013 y 2015. Ella examinará el efecto que tiene la inseguridad alimentaria en el hogar en la conducta dietética y actividad física.