Carol D. Lee

Fragile X Premutation Is a Significant Risk Factor for Premature Ovarian Failure: The International Collaborative POF in Fragile X Study—Preliminary Data

The preliminary results of an international collaborative study examining premature menopause in fragile X carriers are presented. A total of 760 women from fragile X families was surveyed about their fragile X carrier status and their menstrual and reproductive histories. Among the subjects, 395 carried a premutation, 128 carried a full mutation, and 237 were noncarriers. Sixty-three (16%) of the premutation carriers had experienced menopause prior to the age of 40 compared with none of the full mutation carriers and one (0.4%) of the controls. Based on these preliminary data, there is a significant association between fragile X premutation carrier status and premature menopause.

Is October Brown Chinese? A Cultural Modeling Activity System for Underachieving Students:

This article analyzes the quality of intellectual reasoning of a class of high school students with standardized reading scores in the bottom quartile. The analysis situates the intellectual work on 1 day of instruction in terms of the history of the activity system out of which the dispositions of these students were constructed over time. The analysis deconstructs the historical dimensions of the cultural practices these students learned to acquire. Using a framework of cultural-historical activity theory, the article examines the knowledge base of the teacher, in this case the researcher, to coach and scaffold a radically different intellectual culture among students who were underachieving. The framework for the curricular design implemented and the strategies modeled explicitly aligned the cultural funds of knowledge of the African American students with the cultural practices of the subject matter, in this case, response to literature.

“Every Shut Eye Ain’t Sleep”: Studying How People Live Culturally

We call for the integration of cultural socialization and identity processes in learning as a goal of educational research. Our aim is to improve educational outcomes for racial and ethnic minority youth and for youth facing persistent intergenerational poverty. This requires that educational researchers understand the cultural niches in which young people develop. We illustrate this claim through the lenses of the Cultural Modeling Framework and the Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory, using African-American youth as our case model. We demonstrate both the application of the framework and the theory in an educational intervention and posit implications for requirements to carry out such research.

2008 Wallace Foundation Distinguished Lecture—The Centrality of Culture to the Scientific Study of Learning and Development: How an Ecological Framework in Education Research Facilitates Civic Responsibility

This article was presented as the 2008 Wallace Foundation Distinguished Lecture at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New York City. It argues that, to generate robust and generative theories of human learning and development, researchers must address the range of diversity within human cultural communities. The argument is warranted on implications from brain science regarding human adaptability and on core findings with regard to relations between cognition, perceptions, and emotions, all influenced by broad ecological contexts that influence human functioning. Implications for education are discussed, with examples of research that address fundamental questions of learning through examinations of practices within communities of color.

‘Every good‐bye ain’t gone’: analyzing the cultural underpinnings of classroom talk

This article explicates the Cultural Modeling Framework for designing robust learning environments that leverage everyday knowledge of culturally diverse students to support subject‐matter‐specific learning. It reports a study of Cultural Modeling in the teaching of response to literature in an urban underachieving high school serving African‐American students from low‐income communities who are also speakers of African‐American English. The study is situated in the history of research on African‐American English as a resource for academic learning, particularly in relation to literacy. Results document the ways that African‐American rhetorical features served as a medium for complex literary reasoning and provided contextualization cues to enhance participation.

Why We Need to Re-Think Race and Ethnicity in Educational Research

This introduction describes the rationale for a special theme issue, “Reconceptualizing Race and Ethnicity in Educational Research.” The rationale includes the historical and contemporary ways that cultural differences have been positioned in educational research and the need for more nuanced and complex analyses of ethnicity and race.

Signifying as a Scaffold for Literary Interpretation

This study investigated the efficacy of signifying, a form of social discourse in the African American community, as a scaffold for teaching skills in literary interpretation. Specifically, the hypotheses of this study were that skill in signifying and prior knowledge about social conventions, themes, and values on which the instructional texts were based would positively influence skill in interpreting fiction. Prior to instruction, two tests were administered to measure prior social knowledge and skill in signifying. Pretest and posttest essay exams were administered to test progress in literal and inferential reading categories. Rasch scale analysis was used to calibrate the tests and to estimate person measures. Six classes of average level seniors from two high schools in a large midwestern urban district participated in the project: 4 experimental classes and 2 control or no-treatment classes. The majority of students, however, scored below national norms on standardized reading tests. The experimental group achieved a statistically significant mean gain over the control group. The experimental group achieved statistically significant gain in two of the inferential reading categories. Signifying and prior social knowledge measures showed statistically significant correlations with achievement at both the pretests and posttests.

Soaring Above the Clouds, Delving the Ocean’s Depths: Understanding the Ecologies of Human Learning and the Challenge for Education Science

This article was originally the presidential address for the 2010 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. It offers three orienting ideas drawn from across human development, neuroscience, cognition, and cultural psychology, as well as studies of biological systems: (1) the intertwining of culture and biology in human development, (2) adaptation through multiple pathways, and (3) interdependence across levels of context. The author argues that these orienting ideas provide warrants for a dynamic view of human learning and development, rooted in both human biology and culture. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Toward A Framework for Culturally Responsive Design in Multimedia Computer Environments: Cultural Modeling as a Case

This article offers a framework for the design of learning environments that takes culture explicitly into account. This article situates a rationale for the framework based on research in the learning sciences, cultural psychology, and cultural-historical-activity theory. The Cultural Modeling Framework is of-fered as an example of a culturally responsive approach to design. This article makes an explicit argu-ment for the function of culturally responsive design in computer-based tools. It illustrates culturally responsive design in technology and its consequences for student learning.

Historical Evolution of Risk and Equity: Interdisciplinary Issues and Critiques:

this chapter I first offer a historical overview on how risk, equity, and schooling have been conceptualized with regard to youth from nondominant groups.1 I argue that the dominant discourses around these issues have been characterized by deficit assumptions that have been buffered by what were determined to be state of the art theories in psychology, sociology, and human development. These dominant discourses have positioned nondominant communities as passive recipients of structured hegemony and have not reflected the generative sources of resilience and resistance in these communities. Political critiques of the apparent, persistent, and historical educational risks faced by youth from nondominant groups document the structuring of inequality. One inadvertent consequence of the ways we have approached the topic of risks, equity, and schooling has been to position youth from nondominant groups outside the bounds of normative development and to restrict our investigations into isolated silos that separate thinking from emotions, that focus on one site of activity (e.g., the family or the school), and that have a restrictive vision of culture and its influences.