The last study, completed by Russell Rumberger at the University of California Santa Barbara, approaches the topic of high school dropout rates from two different frameworks. Unlike the previous studies, this study addresses the topic of dropouts both from the individual and from the institutional level. These levels are addressed through the two different frameworks. The first framework is based on individual perspective and focuses on the individual factors associated with dropping out such as student engagement, student achievement and student’s background. He shows us that each of these factors play a role in this dropout trend and demonstrates this to us through previously acquired data.

The second framework is from the institutional perspective. “While the first framework can provide a way to understand dropping out from an individual perspective, individual attitudes and behaviors are shaped by the institutional settings where people live.” He gives examples of institutional factors such as family factors, school factors and community and peer related factors. This second framework is more closely related to my research project than the latter because it focuses on the surrounding environmental and institutional such as family, school and community factors[3]. For example, He points out specifically “Research has consistently found that socioeconomic status, most commonly measured by parental education and income, is a powerful predictor of school achievement and dropout behavior.” He describes how each one of the factors connects with the dropout rate, but what he is missing is the large-scale correlation. In this study he states all of the many factors and their connections with this topic, but they have not run all of these factors together to see in fact how strong these correlations actually are. I would also critique this study in that in relation to today’s data it is almost 20 years old. Though this study was likely relevant around the time of its publication, there is a possibility that the data has shifted, causing it to be less accurate.

This research was particularly interesting because it pointed out not only the impact on the indviduals who dropped out but also the individuals effect on the economy as well. “dropouts cost the nation money in other ways as well. Research demonstrates that dropouts are also more likely to have health problems, engage in criminal activities, and become dependent on welfare and other government programs than high school graduates.” We tend to ignore the the outside effects that dropping out of high school has on society, but in fact it does effect much more than just the individual.

http://escholarship.org/uc/item/58p2c3wp#page-1

In the united states today, an alarming amount of high school students drop out of school every year. Each student has their own individual reasons for dropping out, but what are the contributing factors to these reasons? What pushes them over the edge? The Bill and Melinda gates foundation collected survey data through focus groups in a project in 2006 that aimed to discover some of the factors, which push students out of schools. The objective of their project was to, “paint a more in-depth picture of whom these young people are, why they dropped out of high school, and what might have helped them complete their high school education. We wanted to give their stories and insights a voice, and to offer our own views on next steps, in the hope that this report could be a further wake-up call to educators, policymakers, other leaders, and the public to summon the national will to address the high school dropout epidemic.”

Rather than producing a spreadsheet of data, through this method they compiled their data into a series of different answer categories. They provide percentages within the different responses but other than that, the data is not number based. Interestingly enough, 47% of students said that they dropped out of school because they simply were uninterested in the classes being taught. Another factor of interest was parent involvement. There were a section of questions devoted to the parent’s involvement in the student’s academic lives both while they were thriving in school and when they were struggling. They discovered that only 59% of students said that their parents were involved in their education. 68% of Students whose parents weren’t involved in their education said that only when their parents discovered that their child was on the verge of leaving school did they become involved. They addressed other factors in this study as well from the students from attendance records, to teacher effectives and collective motivation. Overall 74% of students said that if they could go back and change it that would have graduated high school. Most importantly, this study shows us the personal side to the struggle of making through high school which many students face each year. It shows us that even though the majority of them do have large life and carrier aspirations, circumstances in their lives and inadequate responses to those circumstances has led to them dropping out.

This is a very well put together study, which addresses the topic of dropping out from an individual perspective. Rather than collecting the numbers, they instead make this study more about the students and their feelings about what caused them personally to leave school before graduation. Though this study does a good job of hearing the students perspective, it leaves a large hole in the demographic and environmental factors that also most likely played a roll in their failure to complete school.

http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED513444.pdf

The project proposal I came across was one that answered the question: From finishing school to feminist academy: the impact of changing social constructions of gender on education in a private girls school in western Australia 1945-97. This proposal was published on the University of Western Australia’s website under their graduate school of education and is written by a women named Karen Marais. The aim of this particular project is to investigate the way that the social construction of gender changed over time and how it effected the experience offered by an independent Christian girls school. She describes in her abstract how this study is set against a background of significant change in western Australian education, and that the main focus of this study is to examine the impact of gender on the education given to girls enrolled in private school. She proceeds her abstract with a section called her rational for the study in which she integrates, background, a statement of purpose, her central question along with 9 sub questions, and the significance of the study. She discloses to us that the reason this study is significant is because it will make a theoretical contribution to the study of gender in schools in western Australia and that The significance of the study is that “it should provide the richness of a case study scenario to underpin the impact of the social construction of gender and class on the type of education offered to girls from 1945 to 1990.”

From that we learn that the format of this study is a case study taking place in a historical context, with a postmodern conceptual framework. Her data gathering methods were the studying of documents, of archived material on this subject and of semi structured in-depth interviews, all quantitative data, all with the intent of broadening the knowledge of the changing gendered expectations in and after schooling. After thoroughly describing her conceptual framework, Ms. Marais reviews all of the literature, which relates to her topic. Though there is lots of literature published surrounding this topic, she specifies that the framework of this project is premised on the social construction of gender and how it effects the education which girls receive. Because this study deals with qualitative data instead of quantitative data, the data analysis method is interpretivist. This means the researcher is no longer a neutral bystander to the data like with quantitative data, but rather becomes an observer and interpreter of human condition. If completed this study will provide “a multi- vocal and multi-generational representation of “lived” experiences of girls and women”

Throughout the last half of the proposal she delves deeper into each on of the sections. She describes her research methods, her data collection methods, how she will recruit people to participate in her study, the interview questions she will ask, and how she will analyze each piece of data. She also makes sure to discuss the limitations to her study, the ethical concerns connected, a time line for her study and lastly the budget she will need to complete it. She includes 4 pages of references as well, bringing the grand total page count to 30 pages.

This is a very well put together and thought out proposal, which I think would be a very successful project if attempted. She was very through and detailed, especially in her literature review, making sure to address all of the different related literature and how it related to her topic. There was nothing to my knowledge that was left unsaid regarding this topic.

http://www.education.uwa.edu.au/students/research/?a=75328

In the education system today, there is a growing problem surrounding the suspension and expulsion rate, especially in high-density socioeconomically disadvantaged areas around the United States. These suspension and expulsion rates then tend to then be related to truancy, and poor performance in school, which then tends to lead to juvenile delinquency. Craig J. Forsyth, Holly Howat, Lai K. Pei, York A. Forsyth, Gary Asmus and Billy R. Stokes conducted a study in Louisiana to investigate patterns in school discipline infractions that lead to suspension and expulsion specifically focusing on the differences between the four racial/ethnic groups. The researchers goals were to answer these five questions. First what is the pattern of suspensions and expulsions among racial/ethnic groups in Louisiana public schools during the 2008–2009 school year? Second, what types of infractions result in suspensions and expulsions in Louisiana public schools during the 2008–2009 school year? Third, What infraction patterns exist among racial/ethnic groups in Louisiana public schools during the 2008–2009 school year? Fourth, what specific infractions tend to result in suspensions and expulsions in Louisiana public schools during the 2008–2009 school year? Lastly, what differences between racial/ethnic groups are noted among the specific infractions that tend to result in suspensions and expulsions in Louisiana public schools during the 2008–2009 school year?

To conduct this research project, they took sample data from all of the K-12 public schools in the Louisiana department of education (excluding private schools) and examined the enrollment and disciplinary rates for the 2008 2009 school year. They distributed this sample by gender and race, the largest groups being the males and the African Americans. According to the Louisiana Department of Education, student discipline infractions are divided into eight categories, which are disobedience, safety, substance abuse, vandalism, theft, violence, truancy and miscellaneous. With these eight categories of discipline they took data from the department education and created 3 additional tables containing the suspension and expulsion rates by race/ethnicity, discipline infraction by race/ethnicity and the specific disciplinary infraction by race and ethnicity. Analyzing the charts, African Americans have the highest suspension/expulsion percentage with a 69% of the total infractions. On the table that breaks down the specific infraction category by race/ethnicity African Americans also have the highest amount of infractions with 229,443 of the 330,210 total infractions by all race/ethnicity’s.

This research project didn’t come to as concrete of a conclusion as I would’ve expected. One conclusion that was drawn from this research though was that African American students had higher rates of disciplinary infractions and or suspensions and expulsions than any other race. But interestingly enough, they claim that “Any analysis, which compares discipline infractions and/or criminal offenses by students of different races/ethnicities should not accept a literal interpretation of the numbers.” Knowing that there are many more factors involved than just the ones represented in the data, tells me that there needs to be more research conducted in order to be able to fully understand this topic and its causes and correlations.

http://www.mdpi.com/2075-471X/2/1/20/htm

In the United States today, there is a growing issue surrounding the field of special education. More and more it is seen that once a student has been placed in special education, their likelihood of being successful in their adult life significantly decrease, especially for those in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas. Whether these two factors have any real relationship or not was taken up and studied by Ashley chesmore Suh-Ruu Ou, and Arthur J. Reynolds. Their goal was to answer two research questions. First, Is childhood placement in special education associated with educational attainment, incarceration, substance misuse and depression in adulthood? Second if there is an association between childhood placement in special education and adult outcomes is it mediated by academic achievement?

To answers these questions, They took a sample of 1,377 low-income minority children, 16 percent of which had some sort of special education between grades 1 through 8. They collected their data through surveys from the child, parent and teacher, school records and other available data. They wanted to test to see if special education had any relationship with depression, incarceration, and substance abuse. They cataloged data on all of those topics, also adding demographic factors of the children and their special education placement and educational attainment. They coded a majority of the data dichotomously using 0 and 1 for each individual answer. Once they collected all of their data they used logistic regression to analyze the dichotomous outcomes and multiple linear regressions to analyze the continuous outcomes.

The conclusions produced from the data did show very strong relationships between special education and the factors in questions. For example children who were placed in special education between grades 4 and 8 were 100% more likely to be incarcerated than those not placed in special education. Similarly, special education students between grades 1 and 8 were 69% more likely to abuse substances during their adult life. But the relationship I found most shocking was that students placed in special education between grades 4 and 8 were 133% more likely to end up depressed in their adult life. All of these are rather disturbing numbers that might make us reconsider how our system of special education is structured.

This research was over all well done, my only critique being the size of their sample. They included such a small sample that it is hard to say that these numbers reflect the entire population of special education students. I would be interested to see what the numbers would look like if the study were to be done and included more school districts of different socioeconomic and racial populations.

Chesmore, A. A., Ou, S., & Reynolds, A. J. (2016). Childhood Placement in Special Education and Adult Well-Being. The Journal of Special Education, 50(2), 109-120. doi:10.1177/0022466915624413

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0022466915624413

In the United States it has been shown that males have dominated the faculties of American universities in the fields of mathematics, engineering and science. Many research projects have been conducted to study this phenomenon, attempting to determine if gender actually affects intelligence. Many studies have demonstrated that females preform at higher levels when it comes to subjects requiring phonological sequencing and males preform better in analog imaging. But when it comes to gifted students, are the discrepancies still the same? That is what Paula Olszewski-kubilius and Seon-young Lee wanted to test. They did this by exploring “Gender and Other Group Differences in Performance on Off Level tests: Changes in the 21^st Century and taking organizational data from the off level test scores from 257, 829 gifted students between the years of 2000 and 2008. Of those students 111,796 took the SAT, 94,054 took the ACT and 51,976 took the EXPLORE. Their participants were 52.2 % male and 47.8% female, all between the ages of 4^th to 8^th grade. In their study, socioeconomic and racial status of the participants were also assessed, in an attempt to see the effects those factors had on the performance of the students. The study focused on three questions, the main question being “Are there differences between the scores of male and female students on the math portion of the SAT, ACT and EXPLORE tests and the importance of these differences?” They analyzed their data using  the method SPSS 16.0. For the SAT scores, specifically, they discovered that over all males averaged higher in the math portion while the females averaged higher in the reading portion.

While the study appears to be well done, there were many terms I did not understand and no explanation as to what they were. Nonetheless they were very thorough with their research and gathered a rather large sample size in an attempt to represent a decent portion of the gifted population. One fact that I found very interesting was that true to their stereotypes, Asian students over all scored the highest mean scores on the math and reading tests.

Olszewski-Kubilius, P., & Lee, S. (2010). Gender and Other Group Differences in Performance on Off-Level Tests: Changes in the 21st Century. Gifted Child Quarterly, 55(1), 54-73. doi:10.1177/0016986210382574

Today, in the United States, juvenile delinquency is a rising problem, especially among those with disabilities. The rate of recidivism among these youth is becoming a large problem as well, and those with disabilities are exceptionally vulnerable. This study looks into the different patterns of recidivism among disabled, incarcerated youth and different components associated with it. This particular study dealt with 5,435 juveniles with disabilities. They collected their data from the records of the family court intake, in South Carolina department of juvenile justice. They split up the subjects into 3 different subgroups using the latent class analysis model. Each group had different combination or organizational data such as gender, ethnicity (either Caucasian or African American) family income, age at first referral (into the juvenile justice system) first referral offense severity, family delinquency and drug use. The three separate sub groups could be summarized as follows: subgroup 1 were the economically disadvantaged but with fewer problems in family delinquency and drug use, subgroup 2 were the economically better off group with relatively equal racial distributions and subgroup 3 were the African American males who have more families with delinquency history. After the collection, and analysis of their data, researchers concluded that sub group 3 had the highest percentage of juveniles returning to the juvenile justice system. One of their pattern discoveries associated with this find was that group belonging predicted the likelihood of recidivism.

This research was very well preformed. The researchers included many separate factors that have been known to cause recidivism and used prior knowledge and research surrounding this topic to help create a solid project. The most interesting statistic that I learned while reading this study was that while only 8.2% of students in schools have disabilities, disabled students make up 47.7% of the juveniles justice system. That is a horrifying number and tells us that something needs to change in the handling of juvenile delinquency, especially surrounding disabled youth.

Zhang, D., Hsu, H., Katsiyannis, A., Barrett, D. E., & Ju, S. (2011). Adolescents with Disabilities in the Juvenile Justice System: Patterns of Recidivism. Exceptional Children, 77(3), 283-298. doi:10.1177/001440291107700302