Archive for category: Press Releases

UF’s College of Education had to look no further than its own academic leadership team to find its next head of academic affairs.

After an internal, faculty-led search, Dean Catherine Emihovich has named Tom Dana as associate dean for academic affairs, the college’s penultimate executive post. Dana currently directs the college’s School of Teaching and Learning (STL).

His new appointment takes effect July 1 with the start of the 2007-08 academic year. Dana will succeed Jeri Benson, who recently announced her retirement. Dana and Benson will work closely between now and July to smooth the leadership transition.

Dana will continue to direct Teaching and Learning until assuming his new position. Details of the search for his replacement as STL director have not been finalized.

Tom Dana

Emihovich said Dana’s proven leadership skills and experience suit him well for his new responsibilities as associate dean.

“Dr. Dana has served on the college’s NCATE (National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education) and FLDOE (Florida Department of Education) accreditation team since the last site visits in 2003,” Emihovich said. “With the next site visits occurring in 2009, Tom’s experience is sure to help us succeed in the current program review cycle.”

Dana is a self-described “technology and data geek”, which should come in handy while overseeing the college’s Instructional and Informational Technology Office—part of his new job description.

After arriving at UF from Penn State in 2003, he helped create a financial plan and the infrastructure for the college’s burgeoning distance education program, which Emihovich says “is allowing our college to meet the advanced degree needs of working education professionals.”

As head of academic affairs, Dana also will serve on the college’s and university’s curriculum committees.

“Recruiting, retaining, supporting and rewarding excellent faculty has been one of my highest priorities as director of the School of Teaching and Learning, and I will carry that philosophy over to my new position as we strive to maintain an intellectually stimulating College of Education,” Dana said.

While teaching at Penn State, from 1998-2003, Dana held an endowed professorship and coordinated teacher education at Penn State.  He has a doctorate in science education from Florida State University, and B.S. and master’s degrees in science from State University of New York-Oswego.

VOL. 3, ISSUE 3

Nov. 15 , 2007

You’re reading coE-News, an electronic newsletter produced monthly during the academic year by the College of Education News & Publications Office to keep faculty and staff up-to-date on college news and activities. Click here to download a PDF version of this edition. You will need a PDF reader to view this document.

GOT NEWS? We want to hear it. Submit individual or unit news and calendar events of collegewide interest to news@coe.ufl.edu for publication consideration. All submissions must be in writing or via e-mail and must include contact information for follow-up questions.

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IN THIS ISSUE:

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DEAN’S MESSAGE

Leadership for change. Virtual environments. Real accomplishment.
The public is just beginning to understand that computer games and virtual environments are good for your brain. As Dean Catherine Emihovich reminds us, visionary faculty at UF understood this a long time ago. COE is now way ahead of the game where virtual learning is concerned … And, oh yes, our inaugural annual report is hot off the presses. (more)

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TOP STORIES

UF launches major initiative to end teacher shortage in mathematics, science
With up to $2.4 million in funding from two non-profit organizations, COE is teaming up with the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences on a new program that will revamp UF’s science education and mathematics education programs – and recruit fresh faces into the field in hopes of ending Florida’s critical shortage of qualified science and math teachers. (more)

U.S. should emulate Canadian research funding system, UF professor says
Canada is sometimes considered “America’s cute little brother,” says Assistant Professor Pilar Mendoza – but the U.S. would do well to look north of the border for tips on how to fund research. Earlier this month, Mendoza presented and published a policy brief outlining the reasons why Canada’s “national network” model is being adopted by other countries. (more)

College publishes inaugural annual report
The COE Office of News & Publications has published the college’s inaugural annual report, for FY2006-07. The report, titled “Leadership in Changing the Face of Education,” highlights key faculty and student activities and accomplishments over the past year that address some of today’s most critical issues and concerns in education. The 16-page, fold-out publication features a combination of bulleted highlights of the college’s major accomplishments for the year, lists and charts of key statistics and data, articles on key initiatives and “engaged scholarship” activities, a donor honor roll, a list of faculty research awards, and a message from Dean Emihovich. The first copies off the press were immediately sent to education college deans and graduate studies coordinators across the nation—in time for them to review the report before submitting their peer survey ratings of education colleges to the U.S. News & World Report for that magazine’s annual rankings of “America’s Best Graduate Schools.” U.S. News publishes the yearly rankings each May. Other key audiences receiving the report include the COE’s own academic departments, state education leaders, top donor prospects and funding sources, UF Trustees, top Department of Education officials, and top UF administrators. A PDF version of the annual report is available online at: 2006-07 Annual Report (PDF).

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NEWS AND NOTICES

Win Thanksgiving meal, support first-generation college students in CROP raffle
The College Reach-Out Program is holding a raffle to raise funds for the Spring Break College Tour, which brings high school students – students who could become the first person in their family to attend college – for introductory visits to college campuses during high schools’ Spring Break. You can enter the raffle by buying one ticket for $1 or five tickets for $4. One lucky winner will receive the makings of a free Thanksgiving meal, including turkey, stuffing, canned goods and baked goods. To get your tickets, stop by the CROP office at G-415 on or before Nov. 20.

Save the Cans
This can is bright. He’s shiny. He’s full of good things. Don’t let this can go bad. (more)

Humanities speaker series to address literacy instruction
To some people, linguistics may seem like an academic, theoretical field of study. But not to teachers, who deal every day with tasks that raise fundamental questions about the nature of language – tasks like grading grammar or teaching new vocabulary. In January, COE will team up with UF’s Department of Linguistics and its Department of Romance Languages to bring to campus three speakers who can shed light on linguistics issues of interest to educators. Speakers include University of Michigan linguistics professor Diane Larsen-Freeman; Ontario Institute for Studies in Education professor Jim Cummins and University of Minnesota professor Elaine Tarone. For more information, contact Assistant Professor Maria Coady at mcoady@coe.ufl.edu.

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RESEARCH

New federally-funded UF study to examine how colleges prepare teachers for English language learners
A new study by three University of Florida education professors could cause a nationwide change in the way colleges prepare teachers to deal with students who speak English as a second language. (more)

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FACULTY/STAFF HONORS/APPOINTMENTS

Dean appointed to board of Florida Fund for Minority Teachers
Dean Catherine Emihovich has been appointed as Chair of the Board of Directors for the Florida Fund for Minority Teachers, Inc. Also known as FFMT, the Fund was created by the Legislature in 1999 to attract minority students into the teaching profession and award scholarships to qualified teacher education students. FFMT is headquartered here at Norman Hall, in the Office of Recruitment, Retention and Minority Affairs.

Dixon named officer of international counseling honor society
Assistant Professor Andrea Dixon has been elected to a three-year term as secretary of Chi Sigma Iota, the international honor society for professional counselors. Dixon also serves, with Assistant Scholar Kitty Fallon, as co-faculty advisor to the UF Beta Chapter of CSI.

Transition Center lands award
UF’s Transition Center was honored with an Award of Appreciation from the National Division on Career Development and Transition for its work in helping the Florida DCDT host its 14th annual international conference in Orlando. The three-day conference brought more than 700 professionals and scholars to the Sunshine State to discuss and share their research on the transition from school to adult life for students with disabilities. Associate Professor Jeanne Repetto, director of the Transition Center, also served as a presenter at the conference.

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PUBLICATIONS/PRESENTATIONS

Gagnon speaks at International Conference on Behavioral Disorders
Assistant Professor Joseph Gagnon presented two papers at the recent International Conference on Behavioral Disorders. He spoke on “Combining explicit and constructivist instructional approaches in secondary mathematics” and “Empirically-based mathematics instruction for secondary students with EBD” at the conference, held in Dallas in October.

Five COE students present at History of Education Society
Five graduate students from the School of Teaching & Learning participated in the History of Education Society annual meeting from Oct. 25-28, 2007 in Cleveland, Ohio. Andrew Grunzke, Donald Boyd, and Patrick Ryan each presented papers in a panel titled, “Media, Morality, and Meaning: New Perspectives on Literacy in Early to Mid-20th Century America.”

• Grunzke’s paper, “Serial Killers: Librarians, Children, and Books in Series, 1876-1930,” examined systematic efforts to shield American youth from literature deemed harmful to them by a growing corps of professional librarians.
• Boyd’s paper, “ Front Porch Literacy: The Evolution of Reading in Eastern Kentucky, 1936-1943,” investigated the changing tastes and motivations for reading in a historically isolated region.
• Ryan’s paper, “Representations of Classroom Learning in 1950s Television and Film,” analyzed popular depictions of schoolteachers and their pedagogy in the postwar-era United States.

Amy C. Martinelli and Robert Dahlgren each presented papers as part of a panel titled, “The Struggle for Civil Liberties and Rights: Florida and Mississippi.”

• Martinelli’s paper, “A Moderate Calm? Florida’s Struggle for Segregation, 1955-1961,” examined the Sunshine State’s immediate responses to the Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education decision.
• Dahlgren’s paper, “Red Scare in the Sunshine State: Anti-Communism and Academic Freedom in Florida Public Schools, 1945-1960,” discussed the systematic attempts to address suspected radicalism among K-12 teachers in the context of the Cold War.

All five students researched and wrote their papers as part of courses, theses, or dissertations in the social foundations of education program under the guidance of Associate Professor Sevan Terzian, who chaired both of the panel sessions at the History of Education Society conference.

Dixon presents at ACES, indigenous counseling conference
Counselor education Assistant Professor Andrea Dixon presented “Multiculturally competent school counseling through a social justice perspective: Training implications for counselor educators” and “Integrating the universalistic and cultural relativistic approaches for socially responsible counseling: Can they coexist?” at the annual conference of the Association of Counselor Education and Supervision Annual Conference in Columbus, Ohio in October. Earlier in the year, she spoke on the topic “Multiculturally competent school counseling through a social justice perspective: Training implications for counselor educators” at the Indigenous Voices in Social Work: Not Lost in Translation conference in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Publications

Denney, M. K., Itkonen, T., & Okamoto, Y. (2007). Early intervention systems of care for Latino families and their young children with special needs: Salient themes and guiding implications. Infants & Young Children, 20(4), 326-335.

Dixon, A. L. (2007). Mattering in the later years: Older adults’ experiences of mattering to others, purpose in life, depression, and wellness. Adultspan: Theory, Research, & Practice, 6, 83-95.

Dixon Rayle, A. L., & Chung, K. (2007). Revisiting college students’ mattering: Social support, academic stress, and the mattering experience. Journal for College Student Retention: Research, Theory, and Practice, 9(1), 21-37.

Dixon Rayle, A. L., & Adams, J. R. (2007). An exploration of 21st century school counselors’ daily comprehensive school counseling program work activities. Journal of School Counseling, 5(8), at https://education.ufl.edu/news/files/2011/01/v5n8.pdf.

Dixon Rayle, A. L., & Hartwig Moorhead, H. J., Green, J., Griffin, C. A., & Ozimeck, B. (2007). Adolescent girl-to-girl bullying: Wellness-based interventions for school counselors. Journal of School Counseling, 5(6), at https://education.ufl.edu/news/files/2011/01/v5n6.pdf.

White, N. J., & Dixon Rayle, A. L. (2007). Strong teens: A school-based small group experience for African American males. Journal for Specialists in Group Work: Special Issue: Group Work in K-12 Schools, 32, 178-189.

Leite, W. L. (2007). A Comparison of Latent Growth Models for Constructs Measured by Multiple Items. Structural Equation Modeling. 14(4), 581-610.

Student Publications

Laframenta, J. (2007) Ability Grouping: Is this the preferred tool for the middle school classroom? Journal of the New England League of Middle Schools. 18(1), 18-21.

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P.K. YONGE NEWS

PKY Players to present The Illusion
The P.K. Yonge Players will proudly present their production of The Illusion Nov. 16-17 at 7 p.m. in the P.K. Yonge Performing Arts Center.  Filled with sword fights and sorcery, trysts and teases, this is a tale you don’t want to miss. Tickets cost $5 for PKY students and faculty, and $7 for the general public.  The PKY box office will be open 2-6 p.m. through Nov. 16.

Football heroes return to PKY…60 years later
National championships don’t happen just every day… not even at UF. That’s why PKY faculty, staff and students were so proud to see members of the school’s 1947-48 football team return to campus. Sixty years ago, these men led P.K. Yonge to a national co-championship in football – last month, they were the stars of the show at P.K. Yonge’s Homecoming festivities. Pictured here are: (seated, from left)1947-48 Coach Bob Gilbert, Team Captain John Neller, Tom Evans, Current PKY Athletic Director John Clifford;  (standing, from left) Bill Gager, Warner Weseman, Orlo Shultz, Bob Beaty, Rhesa Bostick, Retired PKY Coach Bobby Hawkins.

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IN THE NEWS

A recent sampling of “media hits” from the College of Education:

Associated Press – Dean Catherine Emihovich and Professor Tom Dana, Director, STL (10/15/07)
The Associated Press and several other news outlets covered the Nov. 14 announcement of the creation of FloridaTeach, a new UF program intended to end Florida’s shortage of qualified math and science teachers. In the 24 hours since the announcement, stories about the program have appeared in the following outlets: WJHG (Panama City), CNN Money, MSN Money, The South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Ft. Lauderdale), WFTS (Tampa), WPMI (Mobile, AL), The Houston Chronicle, The Independent Florida Alligator, Forbes.com, CondeNast Portfolio.com, The Tallahassee Democrat, Euro2Day (Greece), The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, The Fort Wayne (IN) Journal-Gazette, The Florida Times-Union, The Miami Herald, Jacksonville Business Journal and several other publications.

Chronicle of Higher Education – Professor Linda Serra Hagedorn, Chair, EAP (10/26/07)
In an article titled “Rural Community Colleges are the Land-Grant Institutions of the New Century,” University of Alabama Professor Stephen Katsinas outlined the potential, and the shortcomings, of rural community colleges as a path to higher education for millions of people. Citing Hagedorn’s comprehensive study of Los Angeles community colleges as a model, he called for a similar study of community colleges in small towns.

University Business – COE News and Publications Office (10/01/07)
The magazine’s October 2007 issue included an article on college publications and the question of whether these should be published in print or online. The article cited the COE alumni magazine, Education Times, and its online supplement, ETExtras, as a good example of a blend between online and print approaches.

Miami Herald—Associate Professor Kara Dawson, STL (10/18/07)
Dawson was quoted in a story on computerized whiteboards in the classroom. Dawson noted that the potential education benefits of the new technology could be lost if teachers use interactive whiteboards in the same ways they used old-fashioned blackboards.

Montreal Gazzette – Associate Professor Sevan Terzian (11/13/07)
Terzian was interviewed regarding his research on the role of “school spirit” in the K-12 educational environment.

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CALENDAR

NOV. 16

Grand Guard – UF alumni 50-year reunion
(contact: jmount@coe.ufl.edu or (352) 392-0728, ext: 250)

NOV. 22–23

Thanksgiving Holiday

DEC. 5

Last day of fall classes

DEC. 14

Fall Advanced Degree Commencement Ceremony
3:30 p.m., Stephen C. O’Connell Center

DEC. 14

Distinguished Educators Dinner
7 p.m. Reitz Union
(contact: jmount@coe.ufl.edu or (352) 392-0728, ext: 250)

DEC. 15

Education Commencement
2 p.m., Stephen C. O’Connell Center

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QUICK LINKS

UF: www.ufl.edu
College of Education: education.ufl.edu
coE-News: Publications
Education Times magazine: Publications

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coE-News is produced by:
College of Education, University of Florida
Dean’s Office/News & Publications
Dean: Catherine Emihovich (cemihovich@coe.ufl.edu)
Director: Larry Lansford (llansford@coe.ufl.edu)
Editor: Tim Lockette (Lockette@coe.ufl.edu)

Correspondents:
Wendy Norman, Copy Editor
Marta Pollitt, P.K. Yonge (mpollitt@pky.ufl.edu)

Dean
Catherine Emihovich

I’m pleased to announce that the Office of News and Publications has finished the 2006 – 2007 annual report for the College of Education. This new publication format highlights major college initiatives, faculty/student awards, and donor gifts in a very media-friendly and compact way. We will be distributing this report to college administrators across the country, since data for the next set of US News & World Report rankings of best graduate schools are now being compiled. While many of us may deplore this endless quest for increased rankings, we can’t afford to ignore their importance in showcasing our work and increasing student recruitment.

The overriding theme of this report is leadership for change, a necessity in a world where change is constant and institutions that don’t rapidly adapt find themselves at a serious competitive disadvantage. I have always been struck by the paradox that higher education is the place where 21st century knowledge is produced, yet the operational processes and procedures are very much rooted in an institutional structure inherited from the 19th century. The same paradox holds true at the K-12 level; we educate children to adapt to a modern global environment, yet classrooms and teaching practices are still remarkably similar to those found in schools at the beginning of this century.

What will radically change practices across the educational spectrum is the increased use of Web-based technologies to deliver high-quality instruction in multiple modes to a wide variety of learners. These changes have not been overlooked in our college: Faculty are taking a national leadership role in the field of educational technology and virtual schooling, and are pioneering innovative models of professional development through our online job-embedded master’s degree program, and the LEAD (Leadership in Educational Administration Doctorate) doctoral program. Rick Ferdig, an associate professor in the School of Teaching and Learning, recently returned from a conference sponsored by the National Council of Online Learning (NACOL) and reported that many people widely regard the University of Florida as a “virtual school powerhouse.”

Expanding our presence in this area depends critically upon having appropriate space and the most up-to-date technology. For these reasons, building the new educational technology annex to Norman Hall, which will be called the Experiential Learning Complex (ELC), is the primary goal for our UF Capital Campaign. The ELC will serve the entire campus as a place where faculty and students can experiment with virtual teaching techniques, and will provide space for fully equipped immersive classrooms and research offices where cognitive studies of the effects of technology on learning will be conducted. Students will be able to create virtual worlds in which they can test ideas and concepts, or practice tasks in a qualitatively different medium not unlike the worlds currently found in interactive games. Although educators have been slow to embrace the concept of ‘serious gaming,’ teaching today’s youth who have grown up with computers requires an entirely new approach to instruction. If we succeed in establishing this new complex, the image of schooling that has stubbornly persisted for over 100 years will be radically and fundamentally altered consistent with the way today’s students prefer to learn through media. Yesterday – the little red schoolhouse; tomorrow – the school of the mind. The educational possibilities are limited only by our imagination of the future.   

— Dean Catherine Emihovich

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — To stay afloat as a world economic power, the United States must radically change its model for funding scientific research, says a University of Florida professor who studies higher education issues.

Mendoza

Canada’s “national networks” model of research funding – which links businesses, government agencies and interest groups in nationwide partnerships – appears to do a much better job of supporting fundamental research and educating graduate students, said Assistant Professor Pilar Mendoza, of UF’s College of Education.

“Here we have a country that is often regarded as America’s cute little brother, and they are actually doing great in terms of research and development,” Mendoza said. “Canada’s approach has become a model for other countries, and we should consider adopting it here.”

Mendoza conducted her study as part of a fellowship with the Lumina Foundation for Education and the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), which published her findings in a policy brief earlier this month. She will present this brief at ASHE’s national conference in Louisville, Ky., held Nov. 7-10. Mendoza has also published findings from the study in The Journal of Higher Education and Institute for Higher Education Law and Governance Monographs.

International comparisons between university systems come naturally to Mendoza, who grew up in Colombia, South America, married a Canadian and has friends and family in Great Britain. Her connections gave her a unique perspective on the United Kingdom’s 2005 move to scrap its Faraday Partnership program – a research funding system based closely on the American model – and make a radical change to the Canadian approach.

Canada’s federal government establishes “national networks” to address scientific problems of public concern – networks that are funded by the national government, with membership open to research institutions, businesses, non-profit organizations and individual researchers at no cost. Members sometimes collaborate on multidisciplinary research projects, but they also share the results of members’ own independent projects through conferences, newsletters and other network-sponsored venues.

By contrast, the United States follows a “research center” model – with federal funds typically going to faculty to build partnerships primarily with companies interested in the research topic. Federal grants are given out in five-year blocks, and centers are expected to find private or state funding sources – usually in the form of membership fees — by the end of the grant period.

“The Canadian approach strongly reflects their national spirit, which is much more focused on cooperation and positive social outcomes,” Mendoza said. “The American approach is much more focused on immediate economic results.”

Even so, Mendoza says, Canada’s national networks seem to be producing competent social and economic outcomes.

Because Canada’s networks are less focused on specific applied problems, Mendoza said, they are much more likely to conduct research on fundamental scientific problems, as opposed to specific technological applications. While industry has a reputation for being focused on applied research, Mendoza said, industry leaders actually crave – and desperately need – the fundamental research that has traditionally been done by universities.

“Industries come to the academic world because their products fail and they need to understand the fundamental reasons why,” she said. “They come because they need fundamental research to stay competitive with other businesses, and they come because they need to recruit students with a strong grounding in fundamental research.”

The education of graduate students is another place where the Canadian system outshines the American approach, Mendoza said. National networks give graduate students a chance to develop contacts at a wide variety of research institutions, and open to a number of research paths. In American research centers, Mendoza said, graduate students are often limited to contact with a few businesses – and feel strong pressure to produce applied research useful to those businesses.

The quality of the graduate student experience is more significant than many people realize, Mendoza said. In technology-related fields such as science and engineering, the U.S. is already falling behind other countries in its production of master’s and Ph.D. graduates.

“If the U.S. doesn’t do something now, things will be very different 30 years from now,” she said. “Canada seems to be improving its performance in the sciences, but the United States is not doing so well.”

Canada’s national networks have benefits that go beyond the issue of global economic competitiveness, Mendoza notes. Because they draw on a wider variety of academic sources, Mendoza said, national networks tend to have a more socially-conscious approach to research.

“Where an American center might focus on the biology of a new genetically-engineered crop,” Mendoza said. “A Canadian network is more likely to employ researchers in the social sciences, to explore the social and ethical implications of a new technology.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT:

SOURCES
Pilar Mendoza, University of Florida College of Education
(413)210-8146

WRITER / MEDIA RELATIONS
Tim Lockette, Information Specialist
UF College of Education, News & Publications
(352) 392-0726, ext. 274

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The size of the school district often determines whether students are punished under zero tolerance policies and given another chance for an education, a new University of Florida study finds.

In Florida, larger school districts are more likely than smaller ones to have mandatory expulsion policies for students who bring guns to schools and to impose mandatory suspension for the possession of knives and drugs, as well as bullying, said Brian Schoonover, who completed the research for his doctoral dissertation in education at UF.

“Children are increasingly being sent to judges and jails for offenses that traditionally were dealt with in the principal’s office and after-school detentions,” said Schoonover, who is scheduled to present his findings Tuesday at the National Conference for Safe Schools and Communities in Washington, D.C. “Thirty years ago it would have been unusual to see a child handcuffed by a police officer. Today it is part of a growing trend that is commonly referred to as the ‘schoolhouse-to-jailhouse track’ or the ‘school-to-prison pipeline.’”

Perhaps the biggest disparity between the different sized districts is that more than half of the state’s small districts – 53 percent – have no alternative educational setting for students who are expelled, compared to only 3 percent of large districts, Schoonover said.

“These are children who are no longer being given the opportunity to continue their education,” he said. “When these kids get kicked out of school and have nowhere to go, they are at risk for breaking into homes and vandalizing neighborhoods while people are at work.”

A mandatory 365-day expulsion is required under zero tolerance policies that became effective with 1994 passage of the federal Gun-Free Schools Act, Schoonover said. Because Florida school districts respect each other’s expulsions, expelled students have no classroom to attend unless their parents can afford to send them to a private school that will take them, he said.

Parents generally support zero tolerance policies as a way to rid schools of students who bring guns, knives and drugs to class, until the time their child is caught committing an offense, which may be unintentional, he said.

Currently, all 50 states have zero tolerance policies mentioned in their state laws, but Texas is the only state that requires schools to investigate intent before expelling a student from school for a violation, Schoonover said. “Zero tolerance policies, originally meant to keep guns out of schools, have evolved into a series of broad, all-encompassing policies that in extreme cases expel students as young as 5 years old for having temper tantrums or bringing a toy ax to their classroom Halloween party,” he said.

Of the 26,990 school-related referrals to the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice during the 2004-05 school year, 76 percent were for misdemeanor offenses such as disorderly conduct, trespassing or assault and battery, which includes fights, he said.

It raises the question of whether students, some of whom are quite young, are best disciplined by youth resource officers who take them to detention centers or principals and teachers who instruct them how to change their behavior at school, he said.
 
Schoonover analyzed student conduct codes from Florida’s 67 county public school districts, classifying the 33 districts with more than 15,000 students as large and the 34 with fewer than 15,000 students as small.

He found that all of Florida’s large districts had mandatory expulsion policies for possession of a gun, compared with 85 percent of small districts. Differences were more pronounced for knives, with 88 percent of large districts having mandatory suspension policies, compared with 47 percent of small districts.

Next to guns, policies citing drugs were the most common, with 88 percent of large districts and 74 percent of small districts having mandatory suspension. Bullying was far less common, with only 27 percent of large districts and 15 percent of small districts requiring suspension for students who engage in such behavior, he said.

“As a researcher and a parent, I am anxious for schools to revise their codes of conduct to make them more useful in helping schools to deal with and change inappropriate behavior, rather than abandoning these students to the possibility of even worse behavior in our communities,” said Reece L. Peterson, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln special education professor who directed the “Safe and Responsive Schools” federal violence prevention project.

Oct. 25, 2007
Writer: Cathy Keen, 352-392-0186, ckeen@ufl.edu
Source:  Brian Schoonover, 904-540-3459, drbrianschoonover@gmail.com
 

By LARRY LANSFORD, APR
UF College of Education

Just a few seconds after the shuttle Atlantis thundered from its launch pad at 7:38 EDT on June 8, I continued clicking the shutter button on my Canon digital SLR as the spacecraft soared into orbit with its cargo of seven crew members. I found myself mentally willing the Atlantis higher-higher-higher through my camera viewfinder as it climbed closer to the most dangerous point in its ascent—when the solid rocket boosters separate from the orbiter.

The pivotal separation would come more than two minutes—or about 40 camera clicks—after liftoff, sparking a brief outburst of cheers and applause from the throngs of media and NASA News Center staffers and volunteers who watched or covered the historic event from the prime vantage point of the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) Press Site. The Press Site, barely three miles from the seaside launch pad, is the closest viewing site available for shuttle launches.

As a former reporter, I was surprised at how moved I became at the moment of liftoff. I morphed emotionally from professionally detached observer to sentimental slob. I felt relief—that shuttle mission “STS-117” seemed to go off without a hitch; I experienced pangs of patriotism that I’d not felt since 9-11; and I was bursting with bust-my-buttons pride, not only in the U.S. space program, but also in the small—and I mean VERY small—role I played in this historic event.

Larry at shuttlecraft Atlantis launch pad, 7:30 AM, morning of launch, with contingent of international media.

I staked my claim to this prime launch-viewing spot by working as a KSC Press Site “event volunteer,” made possible through an arrangement between NASA Public Affairs and the Florida Public Relations Association, of which I am a member. The idea was to enlist genuine public relations pros from FPRA chapters as Press Site volunteers to assist in managing the massive throngs of media during launches, which sometimes draw more than 1,000 reporters and cameramen. For the Atlantis mission, NASA sent e-mails a couple months in advance to FPRA’s 1,500 state members soliciting interested applicants. More than 100 members applied and as one of the first to respond (within T-plus 4 minutes), I was fortunate enough to be selected—and to witness the textbook launch of Atlantis.

NASA veteran staffers and a cadre of retired-employee volunteers on hand were describing it as the most picture-perfect launch they’d observed in quite some time. Later examination of post-launch video footage revealed that some foam did come off the ship’s external fuel tank during blastoff, but it posed no threat to the orbiter. I joined the parade of reporters and NASA staffers marching back into the NASA News Center. Our jobs weren’t finished. A post-launch press conference would follow within the hour, and reporters got a head start on the frenetic filing of news reports from the rows of computer work stations set up for the worldwide media corps. I silently mocked myself for feeling like I actually played a meaningful role in the launch. Nothing could be further from the truth. But the NASA News Center staff made us four FPRA volunteers feel like we were a big help in managing the 450 or so reporters who covered the event.

My volunteering stint started on a Wednesday, two days before Friday’s scheduled launch. Orlando FPRA volunteer Bill Randolph was already on his third day, and this was his fifth launch—so he served as my mentor and “commander” (as I dubbed him) of our volunteer crew. Two other FPRA volunteers—from the Space Coast and Orlando chapters—would join us on launch day. Bill introduced me to Pat Christian of NASA Media Services, who headed up the volunteer crew, gave me a quick tour of the NASA News Center building and grounds, and quickly put me to work at the media information desk. A capsule (space pun intended) summary of our responsibilities included manning the phones, posting the day’s media events and steering reporters and camera crews to the appropriate NASA staffer or media bus stop, accompanying reporters to astronaut interviews and escorting all international media between the news center and the off-site Media Badge ID Station, located a couple of miles outside the Kennedy Space Center entrance check-point. Since 9-11, no international media are allowed on the KSC complex without official escort; credentialed domestic media can drive onto KSC grounds in their own vehicles and park in the news center parking lot. All media require proof of press credentials and media badges.)

I had prime, head-on view (behind NASA pool videographer) of shuttle crew members leaving their astronaut quarters to board the NASA RV transporter that would take them to the launch pad—about 3.5 hours before liftoff. Several hundred photographers and NASA staff attended the “astronaut walk-out.”

Below, I’ll adopt my blog-filing persona to convey some snapshot observations from my three days as shuttle launch News Center volunteer:

Volunteer Day One (Wednesday, T-minus 2 days before launch):

• Following fellow volunteer Bill Randolph’s guided tour of the news center, I spent most of morning familiarizing myself with the NASA/Shuttle info notebook at the Media Info Desk, all the while answering phones (from media and the public) and pointing incoming media to the check-in office. The “Volunteers’ Bible” (my term for the priceless notebook) was chock full of fact sheets and bulleted lists both on the Atlantis launch and the 116 shuttle launches preceding it. It included a phone directory of all key NASA staffers, and maps of the space center complex. (Sample notebook factoid: The massive “Crawler” Transporter, used to roll the shuttlecraft to the launch pad, has a leveling system designed to keep the top of the space shuttle vertical while negotiating the 5 percent grade leading to the top of the launch pad.)
• After lunch in the break room with other NASA staffers, I made my first media-bus runs picking up international media at the badge ID station, first while shadowing “Cmdr. Bill” and then “flying solo.” I had to display corresponding ID numbers on my News Center ID badge and a large “NASA Media Bus” placard to check-point security guards as we entered and left the KSC grounds. Every few runs they’d pull the bus over and check the media credentials of all media-passengers aboard.
• We volunteers were pretty much left to our own devices at the media desk. NASA staffer Pat Christian was across the room if needed, and I’m sure the presence of five-launch veteran volunteer Bill Randolph was a factor. A couple retired NASA old-timers (as they called themselves) were usually on hand, too, including the retired head of NASA public affairs. Bill had compiled an orientation notebook for “rookie” media center volunteers, listing the best deals on nearby motels, what to wear (dress casual, preferably with polo shirt and decent pants like the NASA staffers wear), the type of duties to expect and other practical information nuggets. NASA truly relied on us FPRA volunteers to use our PR experience and savvy in handling the (usually) routine stuff so they can focus on the “big-picture” issues.
• Manny Virata, KSC media logistics operations manager—the veritable “ringmaster” of the shuttle launch media circus—gave Bill and me a personal, behind-the-scenes tour of the 3-mile-radius “restricted blast area” encircling Launch Pad 39A, including the shuttle landing runway, air traffic control tower and the astronaut family viewing area. The blast area includes portions of a scenic national wildlife refuge that is home to more than 500 species of wildlife and lush green foliage. We also passed by the neon-green, armored tanks poised for launch pad rescue if needed, and the delta-tailed Gulfstream jets the shuttle pilots use to train for actual “spaceplane” flight.
• My first workday ended at about 6:30 p.m., and I enjoyed the new (to me) scenery of the 13-mile trip south to the three-star Best Western-Cocoa Beach hotel, where my wife and I stayed on our four-night visit.

Volunteer Day 2 (Thursday, T-minus 1 day before launch):

Since I toured the blast area on Day 1, I bypassed the 6:30 a.m. remote camera set-up. That’s when the media bus takes the pool photographers and TV camera crews—from the major media outlets such as Associated Press, Reuters, CNN and the network television news programs—into the restricted blast area to set up their remote-controlled equipment at camera observation sites closer to Launch Pad 39A.

• I spent more time today on the international media bus than at the press information desk. Media came as far away as China, Spain, Italy and Germany, and I enjoyed my conversations with them on the bus ride about their trip, whether they’d covered previous missions (many had), and the media outlets they worked for. A few remembered my name throughout the week and sought me out later for farewell handshakes and even a hug or two after the launch. While a few reporters got a bit pushy at times—jockeying for seats on the media bus, prime picture-taking positions and primo interviews with top NASA staffers and astronaut—there seemed to be a mutual respect between the press and the NASA News staffers. Many have shared the experience of multiple shuttle launches and, for some, even the dark memories of the 1986 Challenger and the 2003 Discovery shuttle disasters. I saw members in both camps cheer after the successful blastoff of Atlantis, and I would guess there were shameless tears shed on both sides of the press room when two earlier shuttle missions ended prematurely in tragedy.

And we have liftoff… Photo shot from Kennedy Space Center Press Site, a little over 3 miles from launch pad.

I felt I made my greatest impact in mid-afternoon on Day 2, when I pointed out to “ringmaster” Manny that a decision to start the international media bus runs to and from the media check-in station at 8 a.m. the next morning would mean the foreign press corps would miss the 7 a.m. media bus trip to Launch Pad 39A. That would be their first and only unobstructed, close-up view of the Atlantis standing solo on the launch pad—the shuttlecraft having been disconnected the previous night from permanent ground-support equipment encircling the orbiter. Manny immediately got on his cell phone and arranged to have the buses start their circuitous route at 6:30 the next morning. I’m sure the NASA news crew would have realized the scheduling snafu soon enough, but perhaps my actions saved at least a little embarrassment or temporary ill will between the global press corps and the NASA News Center team. At the very least, perhaps it helped justify NASA’s decision to use genuine public relations professionals as volunteers on the Media Desk.

• I enjoyed watching how the press corps members interacted with each other and with the NASA staff. Many in both camps knew each other from previous launches, and there was plenty of good-natured ribbing and sharing of media “war” stories. A couple newspaper reporters complained about having to “do it all” in this era of multimedia coverage, with their media conglomerate employers expecting them to file video stories or blog entries along with their newspaper accounts. One reporter chimed in facetiously, “yeah, and how much did they increase your salary?” A sideways nod and a scowl were the only response he got, or needed.
• The News Center closed early at 4:30 Thursday afternoon with the knowledge that a long day lay ahead on Friday—launch day.

Volunteer Day 3 (Friday, launch day):

• Friday morning started with the “camera wipe-down and battery check” around 6:15. A NASA News Center van took the pool photographers and TV camera crews back into the restricted blast zone to check the batteries and clear the morning condensation from the lenses of their remote-controlled cameras they’d set up the previous day. Then, at 7, following a “K-9 sniffer” security check of the camera bags and equipment, a media bus took photographers, reporters and NASA volunteers as far as the barb-wired fence surrounding the Atlantis, poised for liftoff a mere 100 yards further up the launch pad incline. What a magnificent flying machine! After a 20-minute photo session, Launch Pad 39A had to be vacated and cleared for security check by 8 a.m. sharp.
• Two additional FPRA volunteers joined Bill and me for launch day. Working the press desk, we coordinated media interviews with four or five astronauts throughout the day and split bus duty. The Atlantis crew members were snug in their astronaut quarters a mile or so away, so NASA was offering interviews with astronauts who would be flying future shuttle missions. Some reporters complained that these astronauts hadn’t actually experienced true space flight, so their comments would be based solely on second-hand knowledge and simulated space travel while training. A valid point, but the astronauts were all articulate, accommodating and personable and carried themselves well, from what I saw.
• Another Kodak (or Canon EOS) moment was the “Astronaut Walkout”, as the day’s “Media Events” schedule called it. About T-minus 4 hours from liftoff, the seven Atlantis crew members would walk out of the astronaut quarters and board a shiny NASA RV for the ride to the launch pad. I had a prime, front-row spot among 200 news media and NASA staffers from surrounding buildings who had gathered to cheer the astronauts on their departure.
• Precisely at 7:38 EDT, right on schedule, the Atlantis roared into the early-evening sky above a billowing cloud of smoke and steam. The awe-inspiring launch would have been the perfect ending to my adventure, but my 15-hour volunteer workday was not over yet. For the reporters, there were stories to file from their computer work stations inside the News Center. Within an hour, there would be a post-launch news conference once the top NASA and shuttle mission officials could make their way over from Mission Control Center. And finally, we would escort weary members of the international press corps back to their rental cars at the media check-in station, where they would head to Orlando Airport and home, for some halfway around the world.

Windblown remnants of the shuttlecraft’s contrail paint the early-evening sky above the NASA News Center complex about 30 minutes after launch.

For me, dead-tired hadn’t felt so good in a long time. The shuttle launching has been the highlight of my summer so far. I was so immersed in the experience, that my three-day stint zoomed by like, well, a rocket, yet the lingering afterglow made it seem like I’d been away for a month once I returned to work the following Monday back in News and Publications at the UF College of Education in Gainesville.

Mission STS-117, while not flawless, was a success, with the Atlantis crew delivering and installing a new set of electricity-generating solar panels and a 35,000-pound structural truss to the International Space Station. They also swapped out American crew members and solved a serious breakdown of Russian computers on the space station that threatened to close down the orbiting outpost. The two-week mission of Atlantis was followed by another successful launch Aug. 8 of the space shuttle Endeavour.

NASA plans about 12 more shuttle flights before the end of the shuttle program in 2010. Through my volunteer experience, I not only got to view a shuttle launch from the closest possible vantage point, but I also was able to observe how a first-class public relations outfit like NASA’s and the Kennedy Space Center’s has handled nearly 120 missions since the first operational test flight in 1981. It’s mind-boggling to consider staging multiple special events—the magnitude of a space shuttle launch—in a year’s time with each drawing hundreds of media representatives from around the globe to your place of employment. And doing this year after year for nearly three decades!

How does the NASA News Center team do it? Well, for the past five launches, they’ve done it with just a little help from FPRA. I’m glad I could help.

Larry Lansford, APR, has worked since 2004 as director of news and publications at UF’s College of Education. He also is a past president of FPRA-Gainesville Chapter. He is a former newspaper reporter and has worked in media and public relations at the University of Florida for 22 years, sandwiched around a seven-year stint as a freelance writer and public relations consultant. He previously was director of public relations at UF’s College of Medicine.

Dean
Catherine Emihovich

If it’s October it must be autumn, but the weather is just now starting to catch up with the calendar. At this point, we all want relief with cooler night temperatures and drier days, but summer seems to be persistently hanging on. While we wait for the heat to dissipate on the weather side, it’s clear that faculty research accomplishments are still blazing.

Kudos to those faculty who had grants funded in August: Patricia Snyder, Lynda Hayes (PKY) and Rose Pringle, Fran Vandiver (PKY), and Kara Dawson and Cathy Cavanaugh. I encourage everyone to watch for the research bulletin the Office of Educational Research issues each month to keep up to date with all the latest research news, grant competitions, and announcements of successful proposals and new submissions. Later this month, the Office of News and Publications will roll out a new format for the College of Education Annual Report that will showcase various components of our college, faculty/student awards, exciting new initiatives, and donor gifts. Universities are quickly learning that in this media-saturated, attention-deficit world, you are only as good as the last publication touting your college’s record, and at UF we have the advantage of being able to back our claims with a solid track record of success.

Whether we will be able to keep pace with all the wonderful initiatives and projects in play, and take on new obligations, will depend in large measure on what happens with the state budget. Adequate funding for public education both at the preK – 12 and postsecondary levels is an issue that will dominate state policymakers’ discussions for many years to come, but we are now living with the reality of the impact of significant budget cuts. A difficult transition college faculty and staff need to make is to recognize that in the future, we will depend less and less on state appropriations, and more and more on revenue obtained from grants, corporate and foundation support, private donors, and distance/continuing education. In addition, the constantly changing forms of technology and the rapid advances in trans-disciplinary fields that did not even exist 10 years ago will require both faculty and staff, along with students, to master new knowledge and applications to stay competitive with other institutions at state and national levels that are facing the same challenges we do.

A very natural question people will ask is what actions can be taken now to mitigate the effects of budget cuts, and what future actions will we need to consider for moving the college moving forward in a positive and optimistic way? I noted in last month’s column that the Office of Educational Research is well prepared to assist faculty in seeking external funding. In this column, I encourage staff to think about ideas for cost savings, to find more efficient ways to accomplish certain tasks, and to suggest innovative practices. Rather surprisingly, sometimes very simple changes can result in large benefits. At the same time, I also encourage people to take as much advantage as possible of training programs on campus to enhance their skills. The economic downturn will not last forever, and people will want to position themselves to take advantage of new opportunities when they become available.

Despite all our fiscal challenges, we have a vibrant and active college, and people should not lose faith in our ability to prepare outstanding educators, conduct cutting-edge scholarship to influence policy and practice, serve the state with a focus on engaged scholarship, and establish collaborative partnerships with units across campus to expand the knowledge base in multidisciplinary areas. I close with one of my favorite quotes from Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing: “Whatever you must do, do it now; the conditions are always impossible.”

– Dean Catherine Emihovich

Concerned about math and science education in America? Want to know how the French school system is reacting to the riots in the Paris suburbs? Need to know how to prepare East Asian graduate students for study in your college?

These and other timely topics are addressed in the first issue of the Florida Journal of Education Administration and Policy, the University of Florida’s new outlet for scholarship on the issues affecting school leaders from pre-kindergarten to the university level. The official launch date of the first issue is Oct. 15.

Associate Editor Chris Mullin (left), editor Linda Hagedorn, and book review editor Ben Walker display the first issue of the Florida Journal of Educational Administration and Policy, UF’s new journal for scholarship on issues of concern to K-12 and college administrators.

An online, blind, peer-reviewed publication, the Journal is devoted to scholarship on a wide range of issues in education administration and policy, with a focus on information useful to practitioners in the field. The journal is edited by faculty and students of the Department of Education Administration and Policy at UF’s College of Education.

“It is called the Florida Journal, but this is a nod to UF tradition – not a statement about the limits of our geographic reach,” said Linda Serra Hagedorn, professor and chair of the department and editor of the Journal. “We intend to address issues beyond the state of Florida, and indeed our first issue is international in scope.”

UF’s Department of Education Administration and Policy has long been known as a leader in the development of the nation’s community college system, and is the school of choice for Florida’s finest K-12 and college administrators.

Hagedorn says the Journal was originally conceived as a way to broaden the publishing experience of the department’s students, many of whom are also full-time, practicing school leaders.

“I wanted to give our graduate students more experience with publishing and peer review,” Hagedorn said. “But the journal quickly grew beyond what we originally envisioned, with submissions from all over the world.”

Among the topics covered in the current issue:

• A look at Education Action Zones, a concept the French government is using to address social disparities in the wake of recent riots in Muslim neighborhoods.
• An analysis of efforts to bolster science and math education in the U.S., as seen through the lens of the National Science Foundation’s Math Science Partnership program.
• The “Ten Negative Commandments” – a look at community college policies that do more harm than good.
• A look at what colleges should do to help East Asian students deal with language issues in their first year in the U.S.

Contributors include education consultant Patricia Maloney,
Valerie Storey of Lynn University and various UF faculty and
students.

Book reviews will also be a major feature of the journal, Hagedorn said. The journal is aimed at the needs of the practicing school administrator, she said, and book reviews can help practitioners choose the works that are most useful to them.

“If you’re working in this field, you are probably too busy to read everything,” she said. “But you should read the FJEAP.”

The journal is available at: https://education.ufl.edu/Leadership/FJEAP/info.html.

Source
Rick Ferdig
Associate Professor
School of Teaching and Learning
(352) 392-9191 ext. 275
rferdig@coe.ufl.edu

or

AT&T Contact:
Don Sadler, AT&T   
(305)347-5320
ds4400@att.com

GAINESVILLE, Fla.— The University of Florida (UF) has announced some early results from a nationwide education study that suggests that online learning and state-led virtual schools can be as effective as live classroom teaching methods.

University of Florida education technology researcher Richard Ferdig (center) explains the virtual school study methods and results to UF Education Dean Catherine Emihovich (left) and Marshall Criser III of ATT Florida, during a tour Friday (Oct. 5) of the College of Education's computer lab. (Photo by Larry Lansford, UF College of Education)

The research resulted from a three-year $600,000 grant by the AT&T Foundation — the corporate philanthropy organization of AT&T Inc. Marshall Criser III, AT&T Florida president, today awarded UF education officials the second installment of the grant and toured the College of Education’s computer lab.

UF researchers are developing standardized methods for evaluating the effectiveness of online education for students. State-led virtual schools in nine Southeastern states, including the Orlando-based Florida Virtual School (FLVS), are participating in the study, and online schools in other states have been invited to join the study. 

“AT&T’s investment in the University of Florida’s online learning study will provide the tools to evaluate the success of new curriculum delivery methods,” Criser said. “These techniques, coupled with the use of new technologies, will bring educational opportunities to everyone regardless of where the classroom is located.”
UF and AT&T officials jointly announced the preliminary findings of the study in partnership with the virtual schools, which students reach from their home computers. UF researchers are now using their new evaluation tools to identify the best teaching practices and strategies for online instruction.

“Like some earlier studies, we’re finding that learning through online schooling is effective,” said Dr. Richard Ferdig, associate professor of education technology at UF’s College of Education. “But the UF study moves beyond that, focusing more on when and how online instruction works most effectively. Teachers are finding innovative ways to engage students online, and virtual schools are demonstrating that they can be at least as effective as traditional, face-to-face instruction.”

As a result of the latest installment of this grant, UF will increase the number of participating state-led virtual schools. UF has also hired seven doctoral and master’s education students to assist in teaching and collecting and analyzing data from the additional participating schools. Researchers are currently reviewing data from virtual schools, including FLVS, in four of the largest participating states and will evaluate the remaining schools during the next two years.

UF’s in-state partnering school in the study — FLVS — was created by the Florida Legislature in 1997 as part of the state’s public education system. FLVS is the Internet-based school for some 35,000 middle school and high school students. “Our aim is to provide a comprehensive set of tools for regional virtual schools to improve the quality of online instruction and student performance,” Dr. Ferdig said. “The intent is not to replace live, face-to-face schooling but to provide access to reliable online education options for students with limited access.”

The researchers’ e-learning tool kit includes a new Web site, http://vs.education.ufl.edu/, that serves as a national clearinghouse for all teachers and schools involved in Internet-based education. Virtual schools afford researchers access to saved online data that can be used to compare the effectiveness of a variety of approaches to education, enrollment and student achievement.

West-Olatunji

During its annual meeting Aug. 3, the Association of Black Psychologists (ABPsi) presented COE Professor Cirecie West-Olatunji with one of its highest honors – the Community Service Award. Just back from a research and outreach trip to southern Africa (see story here ), West-Olatunji traveled to Houston to receive the award, which honors her work abroad as well as her post-Katrina recovery efforts in New Orleans and her extensive work with Florida Alternative Break – a program which allows UF students to spend their spring break on public-spirited projects. "This couldn't have come at a better time," West-Olatunji said. "Coming back from South Africa I was exhausted; when I heard I had been selected, I was honored and encouraged."

The UF Alliance is welcoming two recent COE graduates on board as full-time staff.

Archer-Banks

As the Alliance’s program coordinator, Diane Archer-Banks works with administrators, teachers and students to increase college access among marginalized students.
Formerly the academic program coordinator for the PACE Center for Girls of Alachua, Archer-Banks completed her Ph.D. at COE earlier this year. Her research interests include examining how the intersection of race and gender impacts students’ school experiences, teacher instruction and the curriculum.

Melendez

As a graduate student at UF, Diana Melendez served as the Alliance’s college readiness liaison – the host, guide and interpreter for hundreds of parents who brought their children to UF. This work, and her counseling work in the community, earned Melendez COE’s Outstanding Graduate Leadership Award when she graduated in May. Melendez can expand on her work now that she has a full-time appointment as a program coordinator for the Alliance.

Do boys really lag behind girls in reading achievement, and do girls really lag behind boys in math? Diana Joyce, a lecturer in UF’s Department of Educational Psychology, took another look at this bit of conventional wisdom. The results earned her the Psychological Corporation/National Association of School Psychologists’ inaugural Junior Faculty of the Year Award.

Joyce

Joyce analyzed 8,000 test scores from the Woodcock- Johnson Tests of Achievement, widely used in school evaluations to measure academic achievement. She wanted to use the large sample to take a closer look at widely accepted notions about race, gender and achievement in different academic subjects. With women now ahead of men in college enrollment, and major reforms going on in K-12 education, were the old assumptions about boys and girls still valid?

“Past studies had shown girls ahead in reading and there is always the contention that boys are generally ahead in math,” she said. “I wanted to see if that was still happening, and I wanted to break the results down by ethnicity.”

She found that, in this sample at least, the old trends generally held true. Girls performed better in reading and writing, while boys maintained a hold to their claim on better math scores in some narrow skill areas such as applied math problems. National scores indicate girls are actually gaining some ground  in math, but boys still generally performed better on some senior-level math aptitude tests.

“Probably the most significant finding was that the gender differences held true across ethnic groups, which would indicate that this is indeed a gendered issue,” Joyce said.

Joyce’s paper was  presented at NASP’s annual conference  held in New York in March . The Psychological Corporation’s judges compared the manuscript to others submitted by junior faculty from around the country, and awarded Joyce one a Junior Faculty of the Year honor – one of three given this year, the first time the award has been given.

Joyce said her study’s results don’t mean that boys are innately better at math, or girls at reading. The preponderance of boys in remedial reading classes may mean that early interventions for boys need to be improved, she said. Or boys may be turned off by a reading curriculum that is more attuned to girls’ interests, she said.

The reasons for girls’ post-secondary math performance are a little clearer. Studies clearly show that while girls, on average, get good grades in math classes, they sometimes don’t elect to take pre-requisite advanced math courses and are underrepresented in STEM career program enrollment. The reasons why are murky, but they’re something Joyce would like to study.

“I know that in interviews, girls often say they want a career that helps people,” said Joyce, who also works as a school psychologist at P.K. Yonge Developmental Research School, UF’s K-12 laboratory school.

“One hypothesis is that girls stay away from math and science classes because they don’t see them as disciplines that are people-oriented,” Joyce said. “We need to remind them that STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines are about more than building roads or bridges – these skills can be used, in fields like medicine, to help people in a direct way.”

When American academics travel to sub-Saharan Africa, the public often sees them as missionaries – sharing the advanced learning of the West with struggling people on a strife-torn continent. But when Professor Cirecie West-Olatunji and her students traveled to South Africa and Botswana this summer, it was clear the Americans were the ones who had the most to learn.

West-Olatunji

"There's a lot more counseling going on in South Africa than there is here in the United States," said West-Olatunji, a professor of counselor education. "They're doing a much better job of making counseling available to everyone."

West-Olatunji took a group of 16 counselor educators – students, faculty, and counselors already in practice – on a trip to the two African nations in June. One of the intentions of the trip was to give students hands-on experience with the "rapid deployment" counseling model West-Olatunji teaches in her courses.

"When counselors are called on to help in a place that has suffered a disaster, they need to be able to enter a community rapidly, develop rapport quickly, assess problems and provide interventions," she said.

Last year, her students got to put those skills into practice in New Orleans, where children and teachers were returning to school for the first time after Hurricane Katrina. This year, West-Olatunji's students got a different experience – a crash course in adapting to a very different culture on short notice.

The group spent 23 days in South Africa and Botswana, exploring and participating in those countries' counseling systems. South Africa and Botswana have community-based systems in which counseling services are delivered by local volunteers who are trained by professional counselors.

Community-based counseling was popular in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, but it gave way to a more "agency-based" model as increasing numbers of Americans sought counseling through government agencies and intervention programs in the workplace. These days, counselors in the U.S. resort to the use of the community model primarily in the wake of major disasters, when the need for counseling overwhelms the abilities of professional counselors.

Community counseling is still alive and well in Eastern Europe, South America and southern Africa, however, and West-Olatunji believes clients in developing countries are better off for it. In these places, she said, community counseling is making counseling services available to a much wider population than would be possible in an agency-based system – and with lay counselors who are actually quite skilled.

"Their ability to debrief and process their cases, for instance, is at the level of some of our best graduates," she said.

West-Olatunji's group brought with them a collection of textbooks for the counseling section of the University of Botswana's library. Geographically far-removed from the centers of research in Europe and the U.S., the university has a difficult time acquiring up-to-date material. By contacting publishers directly, West-Olatunji and her students secured more than $6,000 worth of new books for the library.

West-Olatunji hopes to establish an annual, five-week internship in Botswana. While most counseling graduates will go on to work in agency-like settings, West-Olatunji says she hopes some students will be able to open the door to more uses of community-based counseling here.

"Change doesn't have to involve big, uncomfortable moves," she said. "This is just another tool they can use to provide what the people need."

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — It is a familiar source of frustration for anyone who has studied in a university or community college: you desperately need a specific course, but the class is full by the time you get to register.

You may have been crowded out of that class by a “course shopper” – a student who repeatedly drops and adds classes right up to the last minute. According to a recent University of Florida study, more than one out of every three college-level students qualifies as a course shopper, and they are taking a toll on their colleges and fellow students.

“Administrators have historically considered course shopping a benign behavior,” said Linda Serra Hagedorn, a professor at UF’s College of Education and lead author on the study, which appeared in the July/August issue of The Journal of Higher Education. “We’re finding, however, that leaves empty seats in classrooms and students who can’t enroll in the courses they want.” 

 

Linda Serra Hagedorn

Course shoppers are students who try to maximize their academic success by sampling courses prior to settling on a final schedule.  Some students “shop” in a cyclic manner by registering for a normal course load – but dropping any classes that look too tough after the first class session, or swapping those classes for courses that seem less challenging. The swapping process may continue until the end of the drop-add period.

Others, known as bulk shoppers, schedule a far larger course load than they intend to take. They then attend all the classes they’ve registered for, and drop the ones they like the least.

A veteran college administrator, Hagedorn has seen ample anecdotal evidence of the prevalence of course swapping. As the lead investigator of a project called TRUCCS (or Transfer and Retention of Urban Community College Students) Hagedorn and her colleagues found themselves uniquely well-positioned to examine course shopping’s true effects.

TRUCCS is a multiyear, comprehensive study of the college transcripts and educational outcomes of more than 5,000 students within the community college system in Los Angeles. While many studies have examined student transcripts or polled students on their backgrounds, plans, and academic habits, TRUCCS is one of the largest studies to look at transcripts and student questionnaires in tandem.

When investigators looked at course shopping among their sample, they found that 38 percent of students in the study engaged in at least some form of course shopping. Most of those were cyclic shoppers. About 7 percent of the entire study body qualified as bulk shoppers. And some students were “mixed-bag shoppers” who did a little of both.

It’s clear that bulk shopping does the most damage, Hagedorn said, but all kinds of course shoppers do damage to the higher education system by blocking out fellow students, causing needless work for administrators, and throwing a monkey wrench into class schedules.

“The cost is difficult to quantify, but when you have empty seats in a class and students who wish they could have taken that class, it’s clear that there is some waste involved,” Hagedorn said.

Course-shopping appears to hold broad appeal. The study found few variations in shopping behaviors between men and women or people of different ethnic backgrounds. Business majors were more likely than others to add and drop courses in bulk, and English and math courses were the ones most likely to be “shopped.”

The appeal is strongest among struggling students, who see course shopping as a way to make up for academic shortcomings, Hagedorn said. Still, the study suggests that stratagem may not work. The authors found that while occasional course shoppers showed a roughly average rate of course completion, frequent shoppers were more likely to have low grades and to drop out of school entirely.

Hagedorn and her co-authors offer a number of suggestions for reining in course shoppers. Schools could take a relatively hard line, instituting a “three strikes” policy that bans any student from dropping large numbers of classes for more than a few semesters. They could also employ less direct techniques such as requiring teachers to post a syllabus for each class online, which would help occasional shoppers avoid registering for courses they aren’t prepared to take.

“Dropping a course is very easy for a student,” Hagedorn said.  “It might benefit the students if colleges made the process more difficult.”

Written by: Alex Stern, COE Student Writer
               Tim Lockette, COE Staff Writer

For Patricia Snyder, being named the first occupant of the David Lawrence Jr. Endowed Chair of Early Childhood Studies at the University of Florida was a natural fit.

For pre-school children in Florida, Snyder’s selection to the $1.5 million teaching and research post means they now have a leading scholar in early education and care working on their behalf.

Snyder’s recent appointment places her in a prestigious professorship named for one of Florida’s most prominent advocates of the school-readiness movement, which focuses on smoothing the transition to school for young children who are likely to start school unprepared.

Patricia Snyder

UF created the endowed chair last year in the College of Education, hoping to attract a world-class scholar to lead collaborative, cross-disciplinary research and develop programs addressing the complex needs of children from before birth to entering kindergarten.

Snyder’s credentials seem the perfect match.  Her work and leadership in linking public and private sectors on behalf of early education and care spans nearly 30 years, most recently at the Center for Child Development at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (2005-07) and the Louisiana State University Health Science Center’s School of Allied Health Professions (1984-2005).

At LSU, she was the founder and first director of the state-designated Early Intervention Institute, where some 40 faculty and staff conducted interdisciplinary research, teaching and community service activities focused on early childhood development. The institute also served as the academic home for Journal of Early Intervention, a leading refereed scholarly journal in early childhood intervention that Snyder edits.

Snyder has a bachelor’s in speech-language pathology, a master’s in special education and a doctorate in early childhood special education from the University of New Orleans. She also completed a pre-doctoral fellowship at the FPG Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before starting her higher-education career in 1984 at LSU as an instructor and early-interventionist, she worked as a children’s speech and language therapist in community-based early childhood programs, at a high-risk, follow-up clinic for infants born prematurely, and as a preschool director and teacher of young children.
“I gained insight early in my professional career about the importance of linking health, education and social service systems to support and enhance child and family well-being,” Snyder said. “I was mentored by colleagues who stressed the importance of being ‘family-centered’ in interactions with children and families, long before this concept gained widespread recognition.”

Now Snyder is the consummate teacher and mentor, as evidenced by awards she received for those traits at the LSU Health Sciences Center. Her administrative experience in higher education includes serving as department chair, director of grants and research, and associate dean for research and graduate studies allied health professions.

She has served on numerous editorial boards of journals in early-childhood special education and has generated more than $11 million in research and training grants in her career, including several from federal funding agencies.

Her leadership experience in interdisciplinary research was a key factor in her selection, according to UF Education Dean Catherine Emihovich. Snyder also has led local policy boards and state interagency coordinating councils focused on integrating programs and services for young children. She was a governor’s appointee on Louisiana’s Children’s Cabinet Research Council.

“About a third of all children begin kindergarten already behind,” Emihovich said. “There is a growing recognition of the need for collaborative, policy-oriented approaches to fully address the complex needs of children from before birth to age 5. As the first occupant of the David Lawrence Chair, Dr. Snyder will help to bridge the existing research gap in early childhood development.”

Lawrence, an active UF alumnus and the namesake of Snyder’s new professorship, retired in 1999 as publisher of the Miami Herald. He now is president of the Early Childhood Initiative Foundation in Miami and joined the UF faculty in 2001 as the University Scholar for Early Childhood Development and Readiness. Some 80 individuals and children’s advocacy groups donated more than $1 million in 2006 to create the Lawrence endowed professorship at UF, with the state contributing another $500,000 under Florida’s matching gifts program.

Lawrence’s Miami foundation and UF were recently selected by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to share a $10 million grant to roll out a research-proven model of early childhood intervention—emphasizing intensive school and community involvement—in Miami public schools and then bring it to scale in other interested school systems in Florida and other states.

Snyder is expected to play a key role in that initiative, called Ready Schools Florida, along with her teaching and collaborative research leadership activities in the College of Education’s heightened emphasis on early childhood education and health.

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Writer:
  Larry Lansford (352-392-0726, ext. 266; llansford@coe.ufl.edu)

Susan P. Homan (BAE ’69. Ph.D. ’78), a University of Florida alumna and developer of a widely-used literacy intervention program, was honored with the UF College of Education’s Alumna Achievement Award at the college’s commencement on May 5, 2007.

Homan is a professor of literacy at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Her areas of expertise include adolescent struggling readers, emergent literacy and diagnosis. She has co-authored several books and published over 30 articles in the literacy education field.

Homan was one of the developers of Accelerated Literacy Learning, or ALL, an early intervention program for first-graders performing in the lowest 20th percentile. She is currently co-director of the program, which is in place in 11 Florida school districts.

She is the author or co-author of a number of books on teaching reading, and is co-creator of the Homan-Hewitt Reading Formula, which is used in reading programs nationally and internationally. Her most recent research documents the beneficial effects singing lessons may have on the academic outcomes of struggling readers.

Homan received her bachelor’s degree in elementary education from UF and a master’s in reading from the University of Central Florida. She returned to the UF to earn her Ph.D. in elementary education curriculum and instruction.

She has won many honors for her teaching and research, including the Marguerite Cogorno Radencich Award, given by the Florida Reading Association.

This May, 144 students at the UF College of Education graduated in the college's baccalaureate commencement. Many will return in Fall to complete master's degrees under the Proteach program.

This May, 144 College of Education seniors walked across the stage, grabbed their diplomas and become official college graduates. Most of these new Gator alums turned their tassels and turned right back to Norman Hall – to complete their master’s degrees through the ProTeach program.

It’s the perfect metaphor for the teacher’s life. You always finish the assignment, but you never stop learning.

In accordance with new UF policy, the College of Education held a commencement just for bachelor’s degree recipients at the Phillips Center for Performing Arts at the end of Spring semester. Many of those new graduates also attended UF’s graduate commencement in the Stephen C. O’Connell Center, where 238 COE students were awarded master’s, specialist and doctoral degrees.

Elizabeth Van Ella, a College of Education alumna and CEO of the firm VanElla, Inc., delivered the
keynote address at the COE Spring 2007 baccalaureate commencement.

Lifelong learning was a theme at both ceremonies. UF President Bernie Machen and COE Dean Catherine Emihovich honored five of the state’s elite K-12 teachers and administrators with UF Distinguished Educator Awards.

College of Education alumna and corporate CEO Elizabeth Van Ella addressed the senior graduates. Formerly a classroom teacher, world-traveling scholar and television reporter, Van Ella took over the investigative firm VanElla, Inc. after her husband died in 1991. Since then, the company has seen a five-fold increase in profits and has become a leader in the field of employee background checks.

In her speech, Van Ella attributed her success to the lifelong-learner attitude she acquired at the College of Education. She urged students never to back down from a challenge. “If I feared change, I would not be standing before you today, because my life would have stalled in a safer mode,” she said.

Jolande Morgan, who was honored with the 2007 Undergraduate Leadership Award at COE's Spring 2007 Commencement, proudly displays the award after the ceremony.

UF alumna Jane Myers – a leading expert on counseling and wellness issues for older people and professor of counselor education at the University of North Carolina Greensboro – took the stage to be honored with the college’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

University of South Florida Professor of Education Susan Homan was presented the COE Alumna Achievement Award for her work in early intervention for struggling readers.

Dean Emihovich also presented several graduating students with awards honoring their public service and research.

If you missed the events in May, you can see the video on the Internet. Go to https://education.ufl.eduhttps://education.ufl.edu/news/2006/10/16/ihe-gets-16-million-grant-help-community-colleges-improve-data-use7 for links to the video.

Talk about your long engagements

By Tim Lockette

For decades, a pair of portly, fuzzy alligators has been the most famous couple at the University of Florida. Everyone has seen Albert and Alberta on the sidelines, holding hands, bickering occasionally — but always united in their support of the team. It was no secret that they were seeing each other, but like so many college couples, they kept the status of their relationship pretty vague.

No longer. Albert has officially gotten down on bended knee to ask Alberta to be his wife.

LaPlant pops the question to Long at Florida Field. (Photos courtesy of Gainesville Sun)

CoE alumnus Brian LaPlant recently popped the question to his longtime girlfriend, UF alumnus Kourtney Long, in a picture-perfect proposal on the 50-yard line of Florida Field. Ben Hill Griffin Stadium was familiar territory for the couple, who spent their college years playing UF’s male and female alligator mascots.

“I knew the time was right, and I wanted to do it at a place that was special for both of us,” said LaPlant, who now teaches social studies at Mebane Middle School in Alachua, just north of Gainesville.

The pair began dating in high school. When Long came to UF’s College of Pharmacy in 2000, she saw an ad for mascot tryouts in The Independent Florida Alligator and thought a stint as Alberta would be a hoot. Later, LaPlant transferred to UF from the University of North Florida in Jacksonville and joined the school’s mascot team to stay close to his true love.

Soon they were seeing the world together, through tiny eyeholes.

With Brian and Kourtney, the affection Albert and Alberta shared was genuine.

“As a mascot, you get to see a side of UF that most students never see,” LaPlant said. “We’ve been in the press box, we’ve met the players, and we’ve traveled to some of the biggest games.”

They also learned how to communicate through bulky mascot suits.

“When you want to say something to another mascot, you have give them a hug and press your face up to theirs,” Long said. “If you’re getting tired or feeling faint, you grab the other mascot’s hand.”

Perhaps there’s a lesson there for married couples everywhere.

Becoming a Gator – literally – has opened a lot of doors for LaPlant. Not everyone gets to perform a wedding proposal at midfield at The Swamp, but the powers that be simply could not say no to the school’s own mascots. A chance encounter with Gainesville Sun photographer Mike Weimar – whom LaPlant first met while working as Albert – led to front-page coverage of the proposal, and a follow-up story in the St. Petersburg Times.

LaPlant’s students loved their teacher’s 15 minutes of fame even more than he did.

“After the story ran, students kept bringing me clippings and saying they saw me in the paper,” he said. “If you need a copy, I have about 75 of them.”

LaPlant now teaches middle-school social studies in Alachua.

LaPlant even got an offer to play Thrash, the musclebound bird of prey who represents the Atlanta Flames hockey team. Yes, the job pays substantially more than a starting teacher’s salary (though there’s no bonus for holders of a master’s degree). And no, LaPlant never seriously considered the offer. To him, the awed silence of the “teachable moment” is better than the roar from the bleachers.

“When you lead thousands of people in a cheer, you definitely get a rush,” he said. “But it doesn’t last. When you help a seventh grader understand something he’ll remember for the rest of his life, you know you’ve done something that truly matters.”

VOL. 2, ISSUE 8

MAY 15 , 2007

You’re reading coE-News, an electronic newsletter produced monthly during the academic year by the College of Education News & Publications Office to keep faculty and staff up-to-date on college news and activities. Click here to download a PDF version of this edition. You will need a PDF reader to view this document.

GOT NEWS? We want to hear it. Submit individual or unit news and calendar events of collegewide interest to news@coe.ufl.edu for publication consideration. All submissions must be in writing or via e-mail and must include contact information for follow-up questions.

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IN THIS ISSUE:

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DEAN’S MESSAGE

Above us, only sky
Dean Catherine Emihovich looks back on the 2006-07 school year – and looks ahead to new faculty and new opportunities.

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TOP STORIES

Video of commencements available online
Did you miss this year’s Spring commencement ceremonies? Would you like to hear a few great speeches, or see a friend “walk” – without sitting through all the pomp and circumstance? The College of Education’s spring graduate and undergraduate commencements are both available for viewing online. Click here to see them.

Five top K-12 administrators feted at Distinguished Educators banquet
Five standout school administrators were honored with UF Distinguished Educator Awards at Spring Commencement, and in a banquet the night before the ceremony. To find out who was honored and why, click here.

COE honors educators, students for ‘public scholarship’ that benefits schools, community
The UF College of Education honored educators and students from UF and Alachua County public schools for their scholarly outreach activities April 25 in the annual Scholarship of Engagement Banquet.

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NEWS AND NOTICES

Collier County teachers gather for Inquiry Expo
Seventy-two Collier County teachers gathered in Immokalee April 26 to present their research in a Teacher Inquiry Expo, organized by the Lastinger Center. Organizers say the event proved to be very popular, with the Collier County school superintendent and many other district administrators in attendance this year. One third of the teachers who presented at the Immokalee event are now enrolled as UF graduate students.

Holocaust Institute returns to UF
Professor Linda Lamme, of the School of Teaching and Learning, will join UF history professor Geoffrey Giles to teach a Summer Holocaust Institute for Florida Teachers (SHIFT) June 11-15. The event is held every summer to help teachers effectively incorporate awareness of the Holocaust into their teaching. The Institute includes a field trip to the Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, talks by Holocaust survivors and presentations by teachers who integrate Holocaust education into their curriculum. Registration is online at the UF Center for Jewish Studies Web site: http://web.jst.ufl.edu/

Counselor Ed cleans up at homeless camp
Late spring is a busy time in a college town – but on April 21, a group of Counselor Education students took time out of their busy pre-finals schedule to help some of Gainesville’s overlooked residents. In one intense day of cleaning, students hauled 196 bags of garbage – totaling more than 3,000 pounds – out of one of the area’s homeless camps. Students also listened to camp members’ stories of struggle and survival.

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RESEARCH

UF study looks at preservice teachers’ Facebook entries
In colleges of education, nothing says “generation gap” quite like Facebook. Professors are flustered at the idea of preservice teachers posting intimate details of their lives on the Web. A new UF study took a closer look at the issue, surveying the Facebook sites of hundreds of prospective teachers.

COE professor to take ed tech to African nation
When you think of developing countries that are ripe for a boom in educational technology, Rwanda is probably one of the last places that come to mind. Associate Professor Rick Ferdig says the central African nation, best known for the ruinous conflicts it endured in the 1990s, is now eager to move into the 21st Century. Thanks to a grant from UF’s Center for African Studies, Ferdig is traveling to Rwanda to find ways information technology can be used to bring more educational opportunity to Rwandans.

Professor to study intervention programs for Detroit area
Associate Professor William Conwill is joining forces with the Oregon Social Learning Center (OSLC) to study the effects of a new counseling intervention being used by social service agencies in the Detroit area. In recent years, the mental health, juvenile justice and child welfare systems in Wayne County, Oregon, have been exploring the use of “Parent Management Training – the Oregon Model,” an intervention in which parents learn how to speak to their children in ways that are less likely to create divisions between parent and child. The system, also known as PMTO, is already in use by government agencies in Norway, Iceland and other countries. Conwill will work with OSLC scientist Marion Forgatch and her colleagues to investigate the effectiveness of PMTO in the economically-stressed Detroit area.

Professor hosts town hall meeting for Alachua County schools

Assistant Professor Cirecie West-Olatunji presented the results of a recent study at a town hall meeting for parents of Alachua County schoolchildren. West-Olatunji studied self-reports of effective parenting practices by parents of academically successful African American elementary school students. She and her collaborators, doctoral student Tiffany Sanders, master’s/specialist student Sejal Mehta and Assistant Professor Walter Leite, plan to put those results to use in creating a Parent Proficiencies Questionnaire to help school counselors provide counseling and training to parents whose behaviors do not correlate to academic success. The project was funded with a Tutt-Jones Memorial Research Grant from the African-American Success Foundation.

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FACULTY/STAFF HONORS/APPOINTMENTS

Vallance recognized for ‘superior accomplishment
Vickie Vallance, program assistant for the UF Alliance, has been honored with a Divisional UF Superior Accomplishment Award . The university-wide awards are given annually to staff members who make exceptional contributions to UF’s efficiency and economy and contribute to the quality of life provided to students and employees. Vallance was cited for going above and beyond her normal duties to help the Alliance in a time of transition. Among other things, Vallance, whose duties are primarily budget-related, took on additional duties as department secretary when that position was vacated twice.

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STUDENT HONORS/AWARDS

COE doctoral candidates honored with Multicultural Awards
Two College of Education students were among those honored for efforts to cross cultural divides when the University of Florida gave out its Multicultural Awards in March.

Three from COE among UF’s ‘Outstanding International Students’
Every April, UF honors some of its most impressive international and foreign-born students with its Outstanding International Student Awards. This year three graduate students from the College of Education made the list of award recipients.

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PUBLICATIONS/PRESENTATIONS

Professor to bring inclusion expertise to Eastern Europe, South America
Associate Professor Diane Ryndak has been invited to conduct a course on the inclusion of students with disabilities – in Poland. Ryndak will travel to the Eastern European country in September to prepare teachers and administrators who are developing inclusive services for the Polish school system. Poland is not the only international stop on Ryndak’s itinerary: this summer, she will present a paper to the Biannual Conference of the Division of International Special Education Services in Lima, Peru.

EAP chair presents at American Association of Community Colleges
Professor Linda Serra Hagedorn, chair of the Department of Educational Administration and Policy, made three presentations at the annual meeting of the American Association of Community Colleges in St. Petersburg April 13. Presentation topics included “New Visions for Research on Community College,” “Enhancing Data-Driven Decision-Making Processes: An Inside-Out Approach to Institutional Change,” and “Second College Choice; Transfer Paths of New College Students.”

Publications:

Wittmer, J. & Clark, M.A. (2007). Managing Your School Counseling Program: K-12 Developmental Strategies (3rd ed.). Educational Media Corporation: Minneapolis, MN.

Vogt, C. M., Hocevar, D., & Hagedorn, L.S. (2007).  A social cognitive construct validation: determining women and men’s success in engineering programs. Journal of Higher Education (78), 3, 337-364

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DISSERTATION DEFENSES

Students, faculty and staff are invited to attend the following dissertation defenses. Please RSVP if you plan to attend:

An Analysis of Zero Tolerance Policies in Florida School Districts
Doctoral candidate: Brian Schoonover
1 p.m. May 17, 290 Norman Hall
RSVP to: Jim Doud, jldoud@coe.ufl.edu

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P.K. YONGE NEWS

P.K. Yonge shines in FCAT – again
P.K. Yonge Developmental Research School has had another year of great results on the FCAT. The school logged its highest-ever average scores in third-grade mathematics, ranking in the 83rd percentile nationally, with 32 of the school’s 54 third-grade students scoring a Level 4 or Level 5 on math. PKY ranked second in the state in 10th-grade writing scores. As Principal Fran Vandiver told The Gainesville Sun, the strong FCAT showing “reinforces our philosophy that (the test) is not our curriculum, that if we do what we are supposed to be doing every day – teaching the whole child, keeping our whole program intact, providing a place where kids feel good about coming to school and giving what they need to do well – they are going to do well.”

Third championship for PKY
It isn’t just the Gators who are racking up multiple sports championships lately. On April 27, the Blue Wave boys’ track team won its third consecutive state championship. Congratulations to the team members and coaches on this rare accomplishment.

Research grant for literacy researchers
Congratulations to PKY University School Associate Professor Lynda Hayes and COE Associate Professor Nancy Waldron, who were awarded a $3,000 College Research Initiative Fund grant for their project titled “Summer Adventures in Literacy: Accelerating Achievement for Struggling Readers.”

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IN THE NEWS

A recent sampling of “media hits” from the College of Education, many of them resulting from press releases or media requests coordinated by COE News & Publications:

St. Augustine Record—Associate Professor Kara Dawson, STL (4/27/07)
Dawson was quoted in a story on the controversy over an elementary school that divided students into two separate classes – those for students who own laptops and those who do not.

AM 850– Professor Nancy Dana, STL (4/17/07)
Dana was quoted in a story about the Teaching Inquiry and Innovation Showcase hosted by the Center for School Improvement. The Showcase was also announced in the Gainesville Sun’s “Chalkboard” column.

Florida Times-Union—Professor and Chair James McLeskey, Special Education (5/7/07)
McLeskey was quoted in a story on Duval County’s efforts toward classroom inclusion of students with disabilities.

Gainesville Sun – Instructor Michelina McDonald, P.K. Yonge
The “Chalkboard” column noted McDonald’s receipt of a Toyota TAPESTRY grant for an innovative science teaching project.

A much-debated proposal to name the College of Education after former Governor John Ellis “Jeb” Bush was defeated in the Legislature in early May. The debate over the proposed naming was the subject of stories in a number of news outlets over the past month, including the Associated Press, The Gainesville Sun, The Independent Florida Alligator, The Palm Beach Post and The Lakeland Ledger.

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CALENDAR

JUNE 5-10

Constitutional Issues for Social Studies Methods Professors
UF Hilton Hotel and Conference Center
Contact: eyeager@coe.ufl.edu

JULY 19-29

Literacies of Hope: Making Meaning Across Boundaries
Beijing, PRC
Contact: Phone: (573) 884-8862 / (573) 882 -8394, Fax: (573) 884-2917, foxr@missouri.edu

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QUICK LINKS

UF: www.ufl.edu
College of Education: education.ufl.edu
coE-News: Publications
Education Times magazine: Publications

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coE-News is produced by:
College of Education, University of Florida
Dean’s Office/News & Publications
Dean: Catherine Emihovich (cemihovich@coe.ufl.edu)
Director: Larry Lansford (llansford@coe.ufl.edu)
Editor: Tim Lockette (Lockette@coe.ufl.edu)

Correspondents:
Alexander Stern, Student Writer
Marta Pollitt, P.K. Yonge (mpollitt@pky.ufl.edu)

Two College of Education students were among those honored for efforts to cross cultural divides when the University of Florida gave out its Multicultural Awards in March.

Katonya Bentley-Anderson, a doctoral candidate in Counselor Education, is the first of her family to attend college. Her hard work and excellent scholarship earned her a University of Florida Fellowship. Her experiences as an African-American growing up in the rural South have guided her to a number of areas socially-engaged research. Her research topics include counseling for veterans with poly-trauma injuries, treatment approaches for incarcerated people mental health issues, and the interplay between mental health and the pressures of being part of a marginalized group within American society.

Doctoral candidate Philip Poekert says helping teachers work effectively in high-poverty, culturally-diverse schools is the focus of his research – and his life’s work. Poekert is now working with under-served and under-resourced schools in east Gainesville, and has played a significant role in the Bright Futures project organized by Professor Buffy Bondy to provide educational opportunities in local public housing projects. He has presented research at a number of conferences including the AERA annual meeting in April.

In colleges of education, nothing says “generation gap” quite like Facebook.

Professors are flustered at the idea of preservice teachers posting intimate details of their lives on the Web. College students, raised on social networking sites, often don’t understand what the fuss is all about – when websites can be taken down or restricted to only a few users.

A new study by University of Florida College of Education researchers took a closer look at the issue, surveying the Facebook sites of hundreds of prospective teachers.

“After Facebook led to a couple of controversies in the local community – an online-bullying incident and a situation in which a parent saw some damaging pictures on a teaching intern’s website — we decided it was time to take a closer look at what is going on here,” said Associate Professor Kara Dawson, one of the authors of the study.

Facebook is one of a growing number of “social networking” websites that allow people, usually young adults, to post information about themselves, and link their sites to the similar profiles done by their friends and acquaintances. The Facebook profile has become the Generation-Y version of the business card, but the wealth of information available on the sites – and users’ tendency to post pictures of themselves in their most frolicsome moments – has professors worried about the impact these sites will have on their students’ careers.

Dawson, Associate Professor Rick Ferdig and education-technology graduate students Jade Coutts and Jeff Boyer analyzed the Facebook profiles of more than 300 elementary education majors. Among other things, they found that almost half of students with non-private accounts gave out the name of their apartment complex or dorm; three out of four listed their sexual orientation; 98 percent posted at least one photo of themselves and 73 percent had “photo albums” on the site.

Giving out so much personal information, particularly addresses, may be unwise from a personal safety perspective, Dawson said. It may be doubly ill-advised for teachers, who may be called on to advise younger students in safe use of the Web. On the other hand, Dawson notes, teachers should have some experience with social networking sites precisely because their students use them.

A generation ago, any elementary school teacher would have been horrified to find that someone had posted pictures of her drinking at a college party. Today it is the prospective teachers who are doing the publishing, and parents and principals who are horrified. Dawson said the UF survey shows that many preservice teachers do not fully understand the impact damaging pictures can have on their careers.

“Facebook users seem to understand social networking as evidenced by their dramatic adoption of this site,” Ferdig said. “However, they do not seem to understand the broader implications of networking outside of their group of friends.”

The average pre-service teacher in the study had 102 Facebook “friends” – people identified as links in the user’s network of acquaintances. Although it is unclear just how much Facebook serves to augment or replace users’ face-to-face social networks, Ferdig said the study highlighted undergraduates use of social networking tools to share important aspects of their daily lives.

Dawson added that it is clear that students are using the networks to build social capital. And it is clear that neither preservice teachers nor education professors are making proper use of that capital.

“We need to explore how to use this tool to increase our professional social capital, and we need to encourage prospective teachers to do the same,” she said.

The UF researchers expect to do follow-up studies looking at a variety of issues, including how users’ tagged photos give insight into identity development, how to encourage self-reflection by Facebook users, and why some prospective teachers do not have Facebook sites.

The authors presented the study at the annual conference of the Society for Information Technology in Education in San Antonio in March.

When you think of developing nations that are ripe for a boom in educational technology, Rwanda is probably one of the last places that come to mind.

But COE Associate Professor Rick Ferdig says the central African nation, best known for the ruinous conflicts it endured in the 1990s, is now eager to move into the 21st Century.

Thanks to a $5,000 grant from UF’s Center for African Studies, Ferdig will travel to Rwanda in May to find ways information technology can be used to bring more educational opportunity to Rwandans.

“This is my first visit to Rwanda, and I’m going to be surveying the ed tech landscape,” said Ferdig, whose teaching and research focuses on educational technology. “I’m going to be looking for the most effective ways to make an impact with information technology and distance learning.”

Why Rwanda? Ferdig’s project grew out of his involvement with a three-year project called International Leadership in Educational Technology (http://www.public.iastate.edu/~ilet/), which forged partnerships between the U.S. and several countries across Europe. The success of the project led ILET participants to look for ways they could bring inexpensive, versatile computing technologies to schools in Africa. Participants who knew the region well suggested Rwanda as the best place to start.

“They seem to have a certain desire for this, a willingness to grow and participate in a global society,” Ferdig said.

Ferdig expects to develop course content for the Kigali Institute of Education, one of a number of Rwandan institutions that have been striving to provide state-of-the-art information technology to teachers and students. He will also tour rural schools in search of ways information technology can improve student learning – even in an environment with little of the infrastructure usually associated with computing.

“This may be a good environment for handhelds or similar options,” Ferdig said.

Ferdig said he hopes to develop partnerships that will give UF students the chance to study, teach and do research in Rwanda. His goal is to partner with ILET and the UF Center for African Studies to take a group of students and faculty to Rwanda and Tanzania in Summer, 2008.

Those students will also learn to tread with a light foot. Modern media have helped accelerate the disintegration of many traditional cultures in Africa, Ferdig said, but he hopes to explore ways information technology can be used to preserve and honor Rwanda’s heritage – perhaps by creating digital archives of historical records or artifacts.

Ferdig is also using the grant to Africanize the content of educational technology courses.

“If you look at the content of many American ed tech courses, you see that its founded very much on European and American resources,” he said. “I’d like to find ways to bring in more content that reflects the global society more generally, and Africa specifically.”

People often think of science as a business of numbers. Researchers, they think, render experience into data that can be viewed objectively, dispassionately – and sometimes impersonally.

Not Mirka Koro-Ljungberg. As the College of Education’s resident expert on qualitative research, she teaches young scholars how to look beyond the numbers to the human element of science and to investigate social phenomena holistically.

“Science, as usual, deals in generalizable knowledge and aims for predictions,” said Koro-Ljungberg, an associate professor in the Department of Educational Psychology. “I’m much more interested in specifics and locality. Situated knowledge – the sort of knowledge you gain from hearing an in-depth description of someone’s life – can be very revealing and powerful.”

Qualitative research is an investigative technique and research approach often used in the social sciences. Qualitative researchers look closely at narratives and cultural artifacts to gain insights about things that are complex and can’t be easily measured. For instance, a wildlife researcher might study the memoirs of hunters throughout American history, looking for information on how bird populations have changed over time.

In education, the qualitative approach has proven to be a powerful tool for understanding the student experience and divining the reasons why some students succeed academically, while others opt out of the educational system.

Koro-Ljungberg got her start as a qualitative researcher in her native Finland, interviewing members of an elite scientific organization to find out what life experiences they had in common. According to Koro-Ljungberg, members of the Academy of Finland shared belief in creativity, a history of international study, lots of support from family members and close mentoring from older researchers.

“Mentoring was really the crucial issue,” she said. “Many of them reported mentoring that was very hands-on. For instance, if the younger researcher was applying for a grant, the mentor might go over the grant application line-by-line to make sure everything was right.”

Now Koro-Ljungberg is doing her own mentoring, serving as the “go-to” person for graduate students in the College of Education and across campus who want to learn qualitative methods. Her enthusiasm and active interactions with students during her lessons no doubt played a role in her selection as the college’s 2006 Graduate Teacher of the Year.

She is also co-principal investigator on a five-year, $2.3 million National Institutes of Mental Health study on the detection and treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.

In that study, Regina Bussing, a UF professor of child and adolescent psychiatry, and Koro-Ljungberg are following a cohort of students at high risk for ADHD and a matched group of low risk peers through their school careers, looking at the ways different students seek help and the ways they are treated when they do seek help. Among other things, they are searching for the reasons why white males are more likely to receive proper medical treatment for ADHD than girls or African American peers.

Koro-Ljungberg and Bussing’s outside-the-box thinking has already allowed the study to overcome major hurdles. Teens are often difficult to observe in long-term studies, because they don’t like to fill out forms or share their feelings in face-to-face interviews. The research team got over that hurdle by adopting a technology that made teens comfortable.

“We gave them cell phones and told them to call and leave a message every time they had a help-seeking event,” she said. “We came up with a really rich data set describing their problems in detail.”

A qualitative approach is vital in areas like ADHD research, Koro-Ljungberg said, because the patients and their families can often go unheard during the treatment process.

“With a more traditional approach, the voice of the individual can get lost,” she said. “The kids and families are the experts on their own experience, and they can provide an insight we can’t get anywhere else.”