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Monday, April 23, 2012

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Strong Family Relationships Help Halt 'Downward Mobility,' Study Finds



April 12, 2012

By Dan Berrett

One young person in four failed to reach his or her parents' level of postsecondary education, according to a study of American youth in 2007, and the phenomenon is one form of "downward mobility."

While researchers have traditionally seen class, race, aptitude, and the level of parental education as the chief explanations for academic success (or lack thereof), a new study being presented at the American Educational Research Association's annual meeting in Vancouver this weekend suggests paying attention to a powerful influence that is less examined: the tone and substance of family relationships.

"It appears families may be able to 'guard' against downward mobility by engaging in certain kinds of interactions with their children," Elizabeth Dayton, a doctoral student in sociology at the Johns Hopkins University, writes in her paper, "Falling Short of College." These interactions include family conversations about educational goals, supportive and engaged parenting, and involvement in young people's academic and social lives.

While acknowledging that parental education and family income can predict educational attainment, Ms. Dayton sought to answer why children of college-educated parents fall short of their parents' level of education. One-third of young people have parents who earned baccalaureate degrees, she writes, and the share of young people from this group who achieved the same or higher level of education as their parents narrowly exceeded those who did not.

Among the 18 percent of young people whose parents attended college but did not earn a bachelor's degree, half went to college, while the other half ended their education at high school, if not earlier.

Her point was not, she writes, that everyone must go to college. Instead, she argues, it is useful to understand why so many young people are following "seemingly surprising downwardly mobile educational paths," especially amid larger efforts to create a more educated citizenry.

Looking at 'Social Capital'

To analyze the dynamics of educational achievement among parents and their children, Ms. Dayton focused on the notion of "social capital." As articulated by the late sociologist James S. Coleman, social capital describes the assets that accrue to young people as a result of warm and trusting relationships, as distinct from strictly financial and demographic advantages.

Ms. Dayton analyzed data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. In 1997, researchers from the U.S. Department of Labor began following nearly 9,000 people between the ages of 12 and 16, and they have continued to interview their subjects every year, mostly in-person.

Several questions in the survey are designed to identify the tone and substance of family relationships, or the presence or absence of social capital in young people's lives. For example, young people are asked whether they feel supported by their parents and how often their parents help them do things they feel are important, or whether parents cancel plans for no good reasons and blame their children for their problems. The young people are also asked how involved their parents are with their lives, as revealed by whether parents know the children's friends, the friends' parents, teachers, and whereabouts after school.

The result, Ms. Dayton found, is that frequent conversations about young people's education and goals reduced by about one-third the odds that a young person would fall short of his or her parents' education. Engaged parenting, described as both strict and responsive, as opposed to permissive, lowered by more than half the odds that a child of parents who attended some college would not reach the same level of education. The presence of two parents in the home also had a major effect.

The significant influence of family relationships on college-going also held true when controlling for the young person's aptitude, as measured on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery.

"While background characteristics and aptitude are widely analyzed as fundamental influences on youth outcomes, family relationships are far more often missing from analyses," Ms. Dayton writes.

And, when parents place too much focus on providing material benefits to their children, it can have a negative effect, Ms. Dayton writes, referring to previous research. "While income is generally beneficial for educational attainment, if it comes at the cost of shared family time, attainment may be harmed."

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EduDemic: 8 Tips For Blogging With Students




Blogging is a great way to promote reflective writing in class. The best way to get started is to jump in and try it out, and this list should provide some pointers to get you started.
If you’re looking for more best practices and ideas, check out these 30 top-rated student blogs.
  1. Choose a platform – There are many places you can launch class blogs, each has pros and cons. First of all, you should decide whether you want class blogs to be public, so you can share and interact with other classes, or private so students don’t inadvertently share something they shouldn’t. This depends partly on how old your students are, and partly on how comfortable you are with student blogging. We recommend Tumblr for beginners and WordPress for more advanced users.
  2. Set guidelines for students - What topics are they allowed to write about? Do you need to read and approve posts before they are published? How informal can posts be – do they need to check grammar/spelling; can they use chat abbreviations? Check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s guide for student bloggers here.
  3. Teach your kids – Like any other skill, introduce it to students before asking them to do it. Explain what blogging is and how it works, show them other student blogs, and have them get their feet wet by contributing quality comments to other blogs.
  4. Define a purpose for each blog – This is not for the sake of limiting what students can write about, but rather to help them focus – it can often be hard to get started without any guidelines.
  5. Emphasize content over form – Blogging is an informal form of writing. While the blog has to be readable and make sense, it’s more important for students to feel comfortable expressing themselves.
  6. Don’t forget multimedia – Blogs can include images and video so teach students how to embed resources from other sites such as Youtube and Flickr.
  7. Put safety first – Make sure students know not to share personal info, or verbally attack another student in a post. Teach the difference between criticism and commentary. Encourage students to take responsibility for the words they write, and how those words affect other people when they’re public.
  8. Look for inspiration – Have students read other student blogs for inspiration, but make sure they know not to copy – explain that copyright applies even to blogs, and that they should respect the ownership they have of their own work.
Hopefully this list will get you started with your own students, and we’d love to see your own list for blogging with students. What would you add?

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UCD CFD Blog: April 23, 2012



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Call for Papers – World Universities Forum, British Columbia, Canada

Call for Papers – World Universities Forum, British Columbia, Canada, 10-11 January Sixth World Universities Forum, University of British Columbia – Robson Square, Vancouver, Canada, 10-11 January 2013 The World Universities Forum (WUF) is interdisciplinary in scope, and seeks to explore the meaning and purposes of the academy in times of striking social transformation. The WUF brings together [...]

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New post on UCD CFD Blog


2nd Annual IUPUI Gateway to Graduation Critical Thinking Symposium

From my POD listserv: Please accept our invitation to the 2nd Annual IUPUI Gateway to Graduation Critical Thinking Symposium at IUPUI, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis on Monday and Tuesday, May 7th and 8th.  We are thrilled that Gerald Nosich, Ph.D., nationally known Critical Thinking expert, will be returning to IUPUI. He is the author [...]

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New post on UCD CFD Blog


New Issue of the International Journal of ePortfolio (IJeP)

The new issue of the International Journal of ePortfolio (IJeP), a double-blind, peer-reviewed, open access journal, is now available online. The following articles comprise Volume 2, Number 1 of IJeP: Instructional Articles Preparedness Portfolios and Portfolio Studios (Jennifer Turns, University of Washington, Brook Sattler, University of Washington, Matt Eliot, Central Queensland University, Deborah Kilgore, University of Washington, Kate Mobrand, [...]

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New post on UCD CFD Blog


Call for Youth-Led Projects using Mapping, Geography, GIS for Sustainable Development

From my ISSoTL listserv: Association of American Geographers, Esri, National Geographic Society, United Nations Environment Programme, United States Department of Agriculture, US Agency for International Development, US Department of State and other partners invite you to: Submit your youth-led sustainable development project and map in celebration of the UN Rio+20 Conference. Find helpful resources, tools, [...]

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New post on UCD CFD Blog


Call for Poster Submissions to IISSAM 2012

Call for Poster Submissions to IISSAM 2012 and Announcement that Registration is Open IISSAM, the International Institute for SoTL Mentors and Scholars, will be held at Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles, CA, June 1-3, 1012, with a preconference workshop on May 31, 2012. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning projects (already selected by a peer-review [...]

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New post on UCD CFD Blog


Conference of the International Consortium for Educational Development (ICED)

Conference of the International Consortium for Educational Development (ICED) "Across the Globe Higher Education Learning and Teaching" – Bangkok, 23rd – 25th July The general aim of the ICED2012 Conference is to become an international meeting point for participants to reflect and exchange ideas and experiences in researching and supporting educational development at different levels [...]

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New post on UCD CFD Blog


Call for Book Proposals

From my ISSoTL listserv: Call for book proposals Cutting-Edge Technologies in Higher Education series Book proposals for inclusion in the series Cutting-edge Technologies in Higher Education are solicited. We hope you will consider submitting one. Editorial Objectives The objective of this series is to provide new research on important emerging technologies in higher education, including [...]

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New post on UCD CFD Blog


The CEDA Project

In doing some other research and cybersleuthing for another project, I ran across the CEDA project – The META-Profession Project: Exploring and Recognizing the Full Complexity of the Skills required by Faculty Work in Higher Education. From the site: ‘The purpose of the Meta-Profession Project is to promote a better understanding of the full complexity [...]

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Flipped Classes and SETs

Jim Morrison (Professor Emeritus of Educational Leadership at UNC-Chapel Hill) talked in a recent POD post about an article in the Chronicle on "flipped" classrooms, peer instruction, and active learning and his experiences transitioning from using a “predominant lecture/teacher-led discussion mode to using a technology-enabled active learning approach” in his classes during the 1990s. He [...]

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