This study from October of 2014 looked at students from different economic standings and school districts within the Los Angeles county. The study uses the Early Care and Education (ECE) landscape in order to find the best possible solutions for kids in early education and early development. By using early education programs like ECE, the people of the study wanted to see if there was am increase in cognitive, physical, language and social development. Using past knowledge, it was determined that kids that participate in these after school education programs were able to gain an additional third of a school year of knowledge. This would range from all subject, including social studies and science. When the study was actually conducted, the people who ran the study saw an increase in the different type of developmental skills with those who had a low economic status and were of color. This group of students saw the biggest increase in learning and thus were able to vastly improve their developmental skills. The study also notes that the increase in developmental skills can see further increases due to their professional development system. This system teaches teachers how to effectively educate younger students, which could help further increase the data. This study further helps me understand the LA county area by looking at different educational improvement opportunities. By using the data given in this study, I can further improve my knowledge about the surrounding area. With the partnership with First 5 LA, the study makes sure not to exclude any districts, so this study is also good for equal representation.

Brownson, Kim Pattillo. “The Early Care and Education Landscape of Los Angeles County”. First Five La: Los Angeles. 2014.

One of the main school counties in the Los Angeles county is the LAUSD. In this district alone, there are about 745,000 students enrolled to go to school in the district. The real disappointing statistic is that a third of these students will not graduate high school. This statistic is way too high and there needs to be a fix to lower the statistics. And given that the average graduation rate for the Los Angeles county is 79.3%, the LAUSD needs to improve the way they teach students. Along with the graduation rate, the California Department of Education estimated that 90.9% of students are apart of an ethnic group. In this study, Denise Huang and others from UCLA looked at the BEST program, an after school program, to see if drop out rates would decrease for students who participate in BEST. What the results showed was that students who were apart of the BEST program saw better academic achievement, positive attitudes, and better relationships towards one or both parental figures. They concluded that the BEST program and other programs like BEST are a good way for kids to be involved in extracurricular activities while also doing better in school. This article is important for my topic because it talks about ways to fix the dropout rate in Southern California schools. There have been many different methods,  but maybe there is a clear solution. While the BEST program showed that it can do positives for the community, it cannot help everyone, which is where we as a society want to reach: getting equal education for every student.

For this research proposal, the study specifically revolves around Ecuador, as the country and many others located in Latin America were subject to social spending cuts. To help improve these cuts, the country went through a total economic reform. Every sector made improvements after the reform except for the educational system. However, due to the failure to improve the educational system, Ecuador as a country lost their ability to expand  economic growth and lost the ability to compete with other people for skilled jobs. This proposal wants to find the detriments of economic performance in Ecuador, along with looking at the importance of education for economic development. Along with this, the researchers hypothesize that Ecuador would need both access and quality in education in order to improve social well being and economic growth.

Before talking about the data, the study talks about some possible issues that could occur. The first problem that could occur is that there is bias due to limited variables. For example, this study did not take parental influence as a factor for the results. The other problems that were mentioned were bias due to inconsistent measurements, a lack of specification of the dependent variable, and the sample selection that could be used did not include children who have never been to school or those who repeat a grade. These issues could have a significant impact on the results due to the fact that the entire country of Ecuador is not equally represented.

There are two different types of data methods that could be used for this study. The first type of collection is through two different surveys. One survey would look at the living standards of those that go to school. They would get the questions though data from the ministry of education. The other survey looks at performance on standardized tests and tries to find out about education production. In terms of the other data collection method, the study would look at statistics about the unemployment rate to look for labor productivity. All of these method would help the researchers see if their hypothesis would be right.

https://www.iss.nl/fileadmin/ASSETS/iss/Student_profiles/PhD/PhD_foto_s_pdf_s/Education_Policies_in_Ecuador.pdf

In this chapter of the book Teaching with Poverty in Mind, the author try and see if there are any factors that actually do correlate with academic performance in elementary school all the way up to high school. One theory that the author looks at is with genes and DNA. The author explains that about 30-50 percent of DNA is being taken up by behavioral genetics, while the other portion is is made up with environmental factors at work. These environmental factors could be anything in the world from where one lives and grows up to the type of relationships that a person could have with people. To go along with this point, the author uses the mnemonic device EACH to explain the risks that children face when dealing with poverty. Individually, they stand for emotional and social challenges, acute and chronic stressors, cognitive lags, and health and safety issues. All together, EACH represents a unique problem with academic success and it is important to understand so that students in poverty could have a better chance at success.

This chapter provided useful information that could help me formulate theories of my own when it comes to graduation rate based on socioeconomic status. Poverty affects many students nationwide, but the educational system is having a hard time cooperating with these students to give them a better chance at succeeding. One fact that I noticed from this chapter is that the author stated that although understanding the concepts of EACH could help many students, it won’t help all students. The author points out that not all children in poverty experience the same behavioral changes, so educators need to be creative in trying to understand these kids and the lives that they have to live with. Overall, I feel that this article made some good points and definitely gave me a more scientific point of view as the chapter looked at behavioral development, something that the other articles have lacked.

Jensen, Eric. “Teaching With Poverty In Mind”. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, (2009): 13-46.

In this article, the study looks at the dropout rates by looking at first graders to find any early signs. In the study, there were 1,242 black students that went to school in an urban neighborhood. In this community, dropout rates were very high, so the people in the study wanted to find any correlation. In the study, the researchers looked at school performance in the first grade, along with family background, family environment, and educational hopes at the time. They compared these factors to see if any pattern related to dropout rates in high school or just any major educational problems. In order to do this study, the researchers decided to take longitudinal data so that they can continually get the data overtime from the same 1,242 individuals that started the study.When the researchers collected the data for the final time, they found school files from 1,101 of the 1,242 that started the study. The researchers also took out all the people that moved and or died in the given time. Of the remaining students, it was calculated that 57% of males and 44.8% of females had dropped out. One of the underlying reasons was that some families struggled to get the kids to school due to economic constrictions. Overall, there was a link to socioeconomic status and dropout rate in this particular district.

This study could be beneficial because it answers the main question that I am researching. However, it only looks at one community in an urban area. I might want to look at more areas, both urban and rural, to see how this data relates to others that are similar. This study was beneficial for my learning and is another source that I could use later on.

Ensminger, Margaret E., and Anita L. Slusarcick. “Paths to High School Graduation or Dropout: A Longitudinal Study of a First-Grade Cohort.” Sociology of Education, vol. 65, no. 2 (1992): 95–113

In the article Measures of Social and Emotional Skills for Children and Young People: A Systematic Review, the authors are trying to see the different skills that children and young people have using a systematic review. The authors describe the different social and emotional skills, which could be seen as a combination of social and emotional intelligence, emotional literacy, and social and emotional competence. The authors then began to set up the systematic review process, which contained six stages. Stage one and two relate to the identification of different measures, which could be terms or key words that have to do with social or emotional skills. Stage three resulted in reading a specific abstract and then creating a inclusion and exclusion criteria based off what the authors could use. Stages four and five resulted in the finding of more articles and filtering them out to only use the most needed material. The last stage, stage six, is the final examination of all the final measures. There were some limitations to the systematic process, with one limitation being that there are many different interpretations to social and emotional skills, so agreeing of a common definition can be difficult. However, the most important part of the study is finding the precise keywords and the precise question to get the specific results needed for the study. This article shows many emotional and social skills that could be relevant to looking at graduation rate, as some skills could be linked to success in school.

Humphrey, Neil, Afroditi Kalambouka, Michael Wigelsworth, Ann Lendrum, Jessica Deighton, and Uganda Wolpert. “Measures of Social and Emotional Skills for Children and Young People: A Systematic Review.” Educational and Psychological Measurement Volume 71 no. 4 (2011):617-637.

I decided to look at the article “Response Styles and the Rural-Urbal Divide” because it provided information about response styles based on sociodemographic characteristics. This has to do with the topic I am dealing with which has to do with high school graduation rates based off of socioeconomic status. In this study, the researchers traveled to the country of Guyana, which is a country in the Caribbean that is currently developing. In this country, they have determined that age, gender and education will effect the different response styles that each local will give to a series of questions that were on a scale from one to five. Before the researches conducted the study, they hypothesized that ARS, which means that one gives an agreement response, and ERS, which means to give an answer at either end of the spectrum, would be lower in urban areas compared to rural areas. This would mean that the people in rural areas would be more likely to agree to something that is false. In their findings, they found that their hypothesis was correct. However, they stated that there are findings where their hypothesis would be wrong if conducted in another country. This study was fascinating because I can relate it to work on my topic. Based on the amount of education one has, students might be able to form opinions and participate in arguments if they are educated on the subject matter. Overall, the source gave much detail and is an interesting study.

Thomas, Troy D., Abts, Koen, and Weyden, Patrick Vander. “Response Styles and the Rural-Urban Divide” Educational and Psychological Measurement Issue 74, no. 1 (2014): 97-115