Sarah Ransdell

Metacognitions about Language Skill and Working Memory among Monolingual and Bilingual College Students: When Does Multilingualism Matter?

Previous research has shown that individual differences in working memory (WM) are highly predictive of a wide range of cognitive behaviours. Until recently, research has focused on monolingual, or undifferentiated, populations. The present research compares metacognitive awareness, as measured by self-ratings of reading, writing, speaking and listening skills in college students of varying language experience backgrounds. Monolingual, bilingual and multilingual university students within three cultural contexts, America, Estonia and France, read for comprehension and remembered sentence final words of comprehended sentences in a reading span task in their native languages. The results show that bilingual and multilingual students have better metalinguistic awareness of their language skills in reading and WM than do students who are monolingual, but who have comparable native language skills.

There’s Still No Free Lunch Poverty as a Composite of SES Predicts School-Level Reading Comprehension

School-level performance on standardized reading comprehension was obtained for 259 public schools in a South Florida district with 270,000 children. Eleven percent of the students were English Language Learners (ELLs), and another 20% were English proficient (EP) and former ELLs, for a total of 31% or about 87,000 ELL students. Thirty-eight percent of all children, or about 100,000, qualified for free or reduced lunch (FRL) because of low family income. This study conducts a school-level analysis where SES markers are as available (and reliable) in both poor and relatively rich schools. Socioeconomic status included the percentage of children in the school with FRL, the average family income, and the average cost of the homes in the neighborhood of the school. Poverty is particularly important to define in a complex way in South Florida because bilingual status interacts with it to a substantial degree. Six unit-weighted composite variables including poverty, bilingualism, ethnicity, child risk behaviors, school resources, and teacher resources were created from 22 measured school-level variables. Schools identified as resilient are important because they have higher reading scores and higher poverty levels than other schools. Other notable characteristics of these resilient schools are that they obtain more state money per pupil, have less crime, and have a better student to teacher ratio.

Meaningful posts and online learning in Blackboard across four cohorts of adult learners

In the present study, meaningful posts were tracked in Blackboard in a longitudinal study of a graduate statistics course in order to predict online learning. In previous research by the present author, digital immigrants from a baby-boomer cohort fare better than digital natives due to social reliance and meaningful posts. Meaningful posts include discussion comments that reflect meaning-based engagement with the course material. Students with optimal patterns and types of discussion participation do better than those students who just follow a point system of quantity-based engagement. Students were given three behavioral assessments and then monitored for meaningful posts and successful online behavior using the tracking features within Blackboard. Results were analyzed using a multiple regression and showed that a significant percentage of online learning is predicted by meaningful posts and homework performance while total online activity does not uniquely predict learning outcomes. Students with more meaningful posts show more engagement with the online materials and better learning than those with less meaningful posts.

There’s Still No Free Lunch

School-level performance on standardized reading comprehension was obtained for 259 public schools in a South Florida district with 270,000 children. Eleven percent of the students were English Language Learners (ELLs), and another 20% were English proficient (EP) and former ELLs, for a total of 31% or about 87,000 ELL students. Thirty-eight percent of all children, or about 100,000, qualified for free or reduced lunch (FRL) because of low family income. This study conducts a school-level analysis where SES markers are as available (and reliable) in both poor and relatively rich schools. Socioeconomic status included the percentage of children in the school with FRL, the average family income, and the average cost of the homes in the neighborhood of the school. Poverty is particularly important to define in a complex way in South Florida because bilingual status interacts with it to a substantial degree. Six unit-weighted composite variables including poverty, bilingualism, ethnicity, child risk behaviors, school resources, and teacher resources were created from 22 measured school-level variables. Schools identified as resilient are important because they have higher reading scores and higher poverty levels than other schools. Other notable characteristics of these resilient schools are that they obtain more state money per pupil, have less crime, and have a better student to teacher ratio.

There’s no free lunch: Poverty as a composite of SES

School-level performance on standardized reading comprehension was obtained for 259 public schools in a South Florida district with 270,000 children. Eleven percent of the students were English Language Learners (ELLs), and another 20% were English proficient (EP) and former ELLs, for a total of 31% or about 87,000 ELL students. Thirty-eight percent of all children, or about 100,000, qualified for free or reduced lunch (FRL) because of low family income. This study conducts a school-level analysis where SES markers are as available (and reliable) in both poor and relatively rich schools. Socioeconomic status included the percentage of children in the school with FRL, the average family income, and the average cost of the homes in the neighborhood of the school. Poverty is particularly important to define in a complex way in South Florida because bilingual status interacts with it to a substantial degree. Six unit-weighted composite variables including poverty, bilingualism, ethnicity, child risk behaviors, school resources, and teacher resources were created from 22 measured school-level variables. Schools identified as resilient are important because they have higher reading scores and higher poverty levels than other schools. Other notable characteristics of these resilient schools are that they obtain more state money per pupil, have less crime, and have a better student to teacher ratio.