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Although interest in blended learning for students has grown within elementary and secondary school contexts, limited research exists on the implementation of blended professional development (PD) for teachers. The current mixed-method action research study examined teacher participation in blended learning PD in a large California district, offered in response to the challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a survey and interviews, the authors examined teacher self-efficacy and the reported influence of the PD on their practice. Findings suggest that the blended PD provided participants with the perceived self-efficacy needed to implement new instructional practices. In addition, collaboration among teachers was essential, teachers were able to learn through different pathways and at different rates, and ongoing support from a qualified PD instructor was necessary. This study sheds light on the implementation of blended PD for K-12 teachers, shares insights on practical considerations for planning and application, and suggests areas for future research.

A compelling body of research suggests that students from racially marginalized and minoritized (RMM) backgrounds are systematically deterred from Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields when teachers and scientists create ideologically colorblind STEM learning environments where cultural differences are deemed irrelevant and disregard how race/ethnicity shapes students' experiences. We examine whether and how STEM faculty can serve as important sources of information that signal racial/ethnic diversity inclusion (or exclusion) that influence RMM students' motivation to persist in STEM. Specifically, we focus on RMM students' perceptions of their faculty research mentors' cultural awareness--the extent to which students believe that their faculty research mentor acknowledges and appreciates racial/ethnic differences in STEM research. Results from a longitudinal survey of RMM students (N = 150) participating in 74 faculty-led STEM research labs demonstrated that RMM students who perceived their faculty research mentor to be more culturally aware experienced more positive "social climates" in the lab and were more "identified as scientists." Increased science identity, in turn, predicted their motivation to pursue STEM careers 3 months later. These findings demonstrate the importance of acknowledging, welcoming, and celebrating racial/ethnic diversity within STEM learning environments to broaden inclusive and equitable participation in STEM.

This ethnographic case study utilizes intersectionality and sense of belonging to understand students' experiences in a Latino Bible study and how it contributes to their overall college experience. The findings suggest that the Bible study offers a unique space for students to explore faith, ethnic identity, and politics in a culturally appropriate format that helps them feel like family. This study helps demonstrate the value and role of student groups in students' college experience.

College classroom communication in the United States is linked to critical issues that are constructed in the larger sociopolitical and political background. As social conflicts and the unstable political environment in the U.S. continue to escalate, universities are caught in the midst of agitated public debates where identity politics continue to be at the center. Within this context, both faculty and students seem to be trapped in classroom dynamics where silence, taboo topics, stereotyping, and self-censorship are hijacking authentic opportunities for learning, critical debate, and human development. It is against this backdrop that this study takes place, with the aim to analyze students' and faculty's construction of communicative relationships within culturally diverse classrooms and a climate where sociocultural tensions continue to grow. The findings suggest that participants move between two communicative modalities or dispositions: (1) the avoidance of conflict by creating silence; and (2) the engagement of productive discomfort by creating trust. Participants agreed that the construction of the classroom as a safe place was a collective project toward the humanization of social interactions; however, they emphasized that the instructor played a critical role in moderating difficult conversations and helping students achieve moral imagination.

This article examines the initial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on undocumented college students. Deploying an ecological framework, we situate students' experiences within their families, communities, and educational institutions. We draw on qualitative and quantitative survey responses from 1,067 undocumented students attending California 4-year universities. Qualitative findings show that immigration status exacerbated the negative economic effects of the pandemic, leading to severe financial strains that had cascading negative effects on undocumented students' academics and health. Regression analyses confirm the strong association between students' preexisting economic insecurity and negative effects of the pandemic. Legal vulnerability and family strains moderated this relationship, but campus environment had little effect.

Alternative education is one of the contexts that receives little attention in research and practice. This narrative inquiry study explores the narrative of a school counselor at a continuation high school to better understand his experiences, challenges, contradictions, and opportunities of serving in an unfamiliar educational sector. This paper provides recommendations for policy and practice, specifically for professional school counselors, school district counseling personnel, and counselor educators to consider in their efforts to support counselors and students in continuation high schools/alternative education.

Educators have sought to understand and address the disproportional representation of students from certain student subgroups in gifted education. Most gifted identification decisions are made with national comparisons where students must score above a certain percentage of test takers. However, this approach is not always consistent with the overall goal of gifted education. Scholars have long argued for the use of local normative criteria to increase the diversity of students identified for gifted services, and although some districts across the country have applied such recommendations, little research has been carried out. In this study, we use a large data set to assess the extent to which identifying gifted students with either school-level norms or a combination of national and school-level norms would improve gifted education representation rates for students who are from African American and Latinx families. A preprint of this registered report and this project's preregistration documentation are available at https://osf.io/z2egy/.

This study centers the experiences of 9 Latinas enrolled in a continuation high school. This study attempts to understand how this continuation school engages with Latinas and attempts to improve their conditions and opportunities in this marginalized sector that is overrepresented with racially minoritized youth. Despite all the challenges they have encountered, their resiliency and agency was evident in their narratives as they remain hopeful and optimistic about their education and future. This study offers recommendations for continuation high schools on how to engage and support the educational aspirations of Latinas.

Discourses about educators in continuation high school suggest that many of them are forced or pushed out to work in this educational sector by their school districts as a form of punishment. Yet, whether this still holds truth requires an examination of the experiences of educators in continuation high schools. This phenomenological study investigates the lived experiences of nine educators by examining their roles and how they utilize their agency to disrupt inequities to create structures to support racially minoritized youth in continuation high schools. Findings document how educators understand their crucial role to work in continuation high schools, their acts of pedagogical caring practices inside the classroom, and their efforts to strengthen the continuation high school-community partnerships. Implications are presented for practitioners, policymakers, and researchers who work to intervene and provide educators with the resources and support needed to effectively support racially minoritized youth in continuation high schools.

The purpose of this research study was to determine how Community Based Instruction (CBI) affects the social skills of middle school students with moderate to severe disabilities. Existing literature is limited in findings related to the influence of CBI on middle school students with moderate to severe disabilities. This qualitative study was completed using interviews and observations. Participants included students, teachers, and paraprofessionals from a middle school in Southern California. The findings of this study are intended to support the use of CBI in middle school special education classrooms and to demonstrate how a functional program can improve the social skills of students with moderate to severe disabilities. Educators and administrators who may want more information on CBI and its benefits may also utilize the findings.

This study explores the narratives of first-generation, Latinx graduate students whose parents emigrated from Mexico. We aimed to understand the life trajectories of six participants, particularly the ways in which they made sense of graduate education (MA and EdD) as part of their personal journeys, identity and practice as educators. Focus groups and image elicitation techniques allowed us to learn from our participants. Participants' narratives about their life journey were our unit of analysis. Our results suggest that participants pursued graduate school as a tool to engage in self-actualization and to revitalize their families and communities. Central to our findings is the role that trauma played in the approach they used to engage in graduate education. Trauma worked as a catalyser to seek transformative learning experiences that could help them not only expand their selves but also the community where they serve. Students' re-framing of personal trauma encouraged them to persist in graduate education and consolidate their service-oriented missions.

This manuscript draws from a 2-year multiple-case ethnography on the educational experiences of Mexican immigrant families with California middle schools. The article explores the influence of the political landscape and raciolinguistic ideologies surrounding the nature and implementation of a middle school dual language bilingual program, and it shares ethnographic snapshots from both a school- and home-based perspective of (in)equity issues related to the program. Data sources include home and school observations, and interviews with students, parents, administrators, and teachers. Findings suggest that though all students are considered "language learners," educational-reform policies and practices may be undermining the school's effort to implement an equitable bilingual program. Implications for practice include the interrogation of educational policies and practices that can further marginalize students across race and class in the process of becoming bilingual in the US.

Technology has become a way of life since March 2020 and the statewide shutdowns after the COVID-19 pandemic. People who had gotten by without ever having to use the internet, much less turn on a computer, had to learn quickly to change and adapt. The administrative team of Fontana Adult School realized the need to help students with basic digital literacy "survival" skills. The administrative team of Fontana Adult School came up with two ideas to help students: Digital Literacy Orientations and Getting Started with Computers. Each program is explained below in detail to help other sites develop similar programs to innovate their instructional practices, especially if they have students with almost no computer or digital literacy knowledge whatsoever.

Prior research has established that undocumented immigrant experiences are dynamic, reflecting the complex web of immigration-related policies that create legal vulnerability. As such, undocumented college students' experiences must be situated in their current policy context. Drawing on descriptive analyses of a survey of 1,277 undocumented 4-year college students in California, we examine how undocumented students are faring in a relatively inclusive policy context. Results demonstrate the heterogeneity of undocumented student experiences and unpack the challenges they confront while also demonstrating the ways they thrive. We document how respondents are performing across a variety of academic, well-being, and civic and political engagement outcomes. We also show that undocumented students' perceptions of legal vulnerability are complex and varied, taking into account family-level legal vulnerability and individual protections. Further, students perceive campuses as fairly welcoming spaces, with some differences arising across the two university systems. Ultimately, we argue that undocumented college students' experiences merit more nuanced and contextualized analysis.

Prior research has established that undocumented immigration status disrupts students' transition into life after college, but limited research has examined their preparatory experiences in college. Drawing on interviews with 154 undocumented college students and 32 alumni, we examine how immigration status impacts undocumented students' career planning and preparation. We find that professional development opportunities and college social networks facilitate successful career transitions for both those who received DACA and those who did not. Although DACA facilitates access to a wider variety of professional development opportunities in college, a lack of permanent legal status continues to pose barriers. Yet, both those with and without DACA identify persistent feelings of uncertainty that constrain their career planning, particularly in the face of ongoing political threats to the DACA program. In all, we contend that DACA has supported the post-college transitions of undocumented young adults, but its effects are substantially constrained because it is an increasingly compromised form of liminal legality. We assert that experiences of liminal legality are shifting due to the increasingly temporary and threatened nature of contemporary immigration policy making.

Though college enrollment rates for Mexican-American students have increased over the past years, Mexican-Americans still have one of the lowest rates for degree completion. However, more work is recognizing the strengths of students of Mexican descent, particularly those related to culture such as familism, and calling for asset-based programs that validate the student to increase student retention and persistence. Programs infused with such an approach likely address aspects that improve performance amongst Mexican-American students; however, evidence-based assessment is limited. This paper will detail an asset-based program that uses a culturally validated model of student success services and academic and curriculum enhancements at a Hispanic-Serving Institution to increase overall Latinx student retention and persistence. The program infuses Validation Theory (Rendon, 1994) to address cultural strengths of students and validate their life experiences as first-time freshmen, by creating a culturally relevant curriculum, enhancing culturally relevant student support services, and promoting education equity. Students involved in this program report a high level of belongingness at the university as well as have higher pass rates in their culturally validated courses. Recommendations are discussed for implementation of such a comprehensive program at other institutions as well as implications for higher education.

This paper presents an interdisciplinary research project that studies the impact of collaborative project-based learning (CPBL) on the development of self-efficacy of students from various ethnic groups in an undergraduate senior-level computer networking class. Grounded in social constructivist and situated theories of learning, the study provides an in-depth analysis of how individual learners' characteristics, the social aspects of learning, and the pedagogical components in CPBL interact to affect student learning in an urban academic setting. The findings of this study indicate that significant learning outcomes and higher perceived efficacy in engineering design were directly related to the project experience. Moreover, although Hispanic students started with lower domain-specific efficacy, they demonstrated the largest growth of self-efficacy through CPBL. While subsequent studies have been conducted to create a more generalizable description, the current study suggests several areas to improve the CPBL learning experience for underrepresented engineering students within the urban context of this study.

Poor literacy achievement among English learners has contributed significantly to their high dropout rates, poor job prospects, and high poverty rates. The National Literacy Panel on Language Minority Children and Youth has suggested that English learners benefit from the same direct, systematic instruction in the five essential components of reading shown effective for native-English-speaking students: phonemic awareness, phonics, oral reading fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Implementing effective reading instructional practices for English learners may reduce the literacy achievement gap between English learners and native English speakers. In this study, we used multiple regression to examine data for 1,376 third-grade Latino English learners to determine the strength of oral English proficiency, oral reading fluency, and academic vocabulary knowledge as predictors of reading comprehension proficiency. Findings of this study indicate a mismatch between English learners' instructional needs and a widely used reading program component, assessment of words correct per minute (as a measure of oral reading fluency). Significant conclusions of this study suggest that educators seeking to promote the reading comprehension proficiency of Latino English learners consider using words correct per minute assessments and activities cautiously and strive to allocate more time for instruction and assessment of the prosodic dimension of oral reading fluency and academic vocabulary knowledge and skills.

At Fontana Adult School, they saw a need to create a strong, unified student group on campus to help them not only promote their school and the services they offer the community, but also to improve their school climate and understand student needs better. At the end of 2018, they created a student leadership team on their campus, and it has made a huge impact on their success as an adult school. This article shares how they made that happen.

The purpose of this research study was to determine how Community Based Instruction (CBI) affects the social skills of middle school students with moderate to severe disabilities. Community Based Instruction is instruction that takes place outside of the school campus and provides students with real life experiences that can help them become more independent individuals and members of society. CBI differs from typical field trips in that CBI outings are IEP based and focus on practicing functional skills that have been practiced in the classroom. The goal is for students with disabilities to begin to generalize these skills in different environments with decreasing amounts of prompting. Existing literature is limited in findings related to the influence of CBI on middle school students with moderate to severe disabilities. This qualitative study was completed using interviews and observations over the time frame of six months. Participants included students, teachers, and paraeducators from a middle school in Southern California. The findings of this study are intended to support the use of CBI in middle school special education classrooms and to demonstrate how a functional program can improve the social skills of students with moderate to severe disabilities. Educators and administrators who may want more information on CBI and its benefits may also utilize the findings.

This paper examines 12 states' statutes that extend in-state resident tuition for undocumented students, illustrating their ambiguities and contradictions as they produce the "subject" in these on-going policy debates. This study asks and answers the question: "How are students' identities produced in ISRT policy?" At stake in this question are the discursive opportunities made available for enabling and/or constraining higher education opportunity, particularly for undocumented students. Findings point to a contradictory set of identities simultaneously made possible and impossible for undocumented students pursuing American higher education.

This article describes a study in which eighth grade students in one school learned to create multimedia mini-documentaries in a six-week history unit on early 19th-century U.S. history. The authors examined content knowledge tests, group projects, and attitude and opinion surveys to determine relative benefits for students who participated in a technology-assisted project-based learning experience, and contrasted their experiences to those of students who received a more traditional form of instruction. Results from content knowledge measures showed significant gains for students in the project-based learning condition as compared to students in the comparison school. Students' work in the intervention condition also revealed growth in their historical thinking skills, as many were able to grasp a fundamental understanding that history is more than presenting facts. Implications and suggestions for technology-enhanced project-based learning experiences are indicated. (Contains 5 tables and 2 figures.)

Aims: Examine intervention effects among mothers involved in a healthy eating randomized controlled trial. Furthermore, examine the mediating roles of individual and familial influences on observed outcomes. Methods: Between 2009 and 2011, 361 families were recruited; half were assigned to an 11-session community health worker-delivered family-based intervention targeting Spanish-speaking Latino families in Imperial County, California. The intervention was delivered over a 4-month period. Home visits and telephone calls were delivered approximately weekly, with tapering near the end of the intervention to promote independence from the "promotora." In this article, mothers' self-reported dietary intake was the primary outcome. Evaluation measures were taken at baseline, 4 months, and 10 months. Results: Daily servings of fruits were higher among intervention versus control mothers (mean = 1.86 vs. mean = 1.47; effect size [ES] = 0.22) at 10 months post-baseline. Mothers in the intervention versus control condition also reported consuming a lower percent energy from fat (mean = 30.0% vs. 31.0%; ES = 0.30) and a higher diet quality (mean = 2.93 vs. mean = 2.67; ES = 0.29). Mediators of improvements were behavioral strategies to increase fiber and lower fat intake, family support for vegetable purchasing, and decreased unhealthy eating behaviors and perceived family barriers to healthy eating. Discussion and Conclusion: Family-based behavioral interventions are effective for changing the skills and family system needed to improve diet among Latina mothers. Health care providers and other practitioners are encouraged to target skill development and fostering a socially supportive environment.

Teacher expectancy research has demonstrated the greatest effects for members of racialized groups. Most research has focused on students' near-term abilities; missing are understandings of how teachers perceive their students' future trajectories. Drawing on social mirroring and attribution theories, this study investigates how 14 elementary, middle, and high school teachers of Latino immigrant students described and explained their students' post-high school futures. Most teachers described their students as non-college-bound, with employment likely in the service sector. They attributed their students' futures to family related explanations more often than to structural factors. The study's implications emphasize the need to develop deeper understanding of structural inequalities that mediate students' trajectories including schooling factors.

This study addresses questions related to teacher preparation through online supported learning in an alternative certification program, CalStateTEACH. Specifically, this study analyzes and reports survey responses of 130 teachers and 84 supervisors related to preparedness of program completers to teach in a multiple subject classroom. The question asked is: Can online supported teacher credentialing programs prepare effective teachers? Data for the analysis were extracted from the Deans' Report. This paper summarizes the responses of teacher graduates and their site supervisors to the questions of teacher effectiveness. Additionally, a comparison between traditional and online teacher preparation is conducted.

This article presents results of a survey conducted in the spring of 2004 of practicing teachers in K-12 schools in Santa Clara County, California, also known as "Silicon Valley." Exposure to technology in teaching preparation programs, knowledge of software applications, and constructivist beliefs were found to be positively related to more frequent use of technology by teachers, both for themselves and their students. Other factors such as availability of technical support also seem to affect frequency of technology use. It is argued that the individual teachers do not mainly determine technology integration in K-12 classrooms, even in technology-centric regions such as Silicon Valley, but that other technology-specific and contextual factors also play critical roles.

This article presents a descriptive case study on the first experience moving a required teacher preparation instructional technology course from the university classroom into an elementary school setting. The key motivation was to help future teachers become more adept at integrating technology into their practice by learning about commonly used applications and best practices in an authentic setting, framed within a constructivist approach. In addition to lab time focused on the acquisition of computer skills, the course design included classrooms visits and observations, conversations with teachers and the principal, and development of a lesson or unit plan. The format was an intense one-week workshop, meeting for six hours each day and co-taught by two university faculty and a school-based coordinator, instead of a quarter-long course meeting once or twice a week for two hours or less with a single instructor. Students reacted very favorably to the course format and location. Detailed analysis of the curriculum and future plans are described.

Few topics have garnered more attention in preservice teacher training and educational reform than student diversity and its influence on learning. However, the actual degree of cognitive diversity has yet to be considered regarding instructional implications for advanced learners. We used four data sets (three state-level and one national) from diverse contexts to evaluate how many students perform above grade level in English Language Arts and mathematics. Results revealed that among American elementary and middle school students, 20% to 49% in English Language Arts and 14% to 37% in mathematics scored 1 year or more above grade level. We address what these findings imply for K-12 schools, grouping decisions, and educational policies that strive to foster advanced abilities.

This article addresses the identity claims of part-time faculty at three types of higher education institutions. Using culture theory and professional identity theory, the article documents that part-time faculty members across institutions have a divided sense of identity. On the one hand, they perceive themselves as professionals based on their position in the classroom and their commitment to teaching. On the other hand, part-timers reflected the ambiguity of their professional status in the social and cultural context of their departments and institutions. The dynamics of either positive or negative self-perceptions as professionals were based on their personal stories, career stage, and career goals.