Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Scott Seider, Brianna Diaz

Description: This mixed methods, longitudinal study considered the developing awareness of racism of adolescents of color over four years of high school. Latent growth models were fit to consider participating adolescents’ (n = 643) developing awareness of racism over five waves of surveys. Additionally, four waves of interviews with a sub-set of adolescents (n = 70) were analyzed to consider participants’ understandings of the effects of racism. Participating adolescents demonstrated significant, linear growth in their awareness of interpersonal and systemic forms of racism between middle and late adolescence. Participating adolescents also most frequently cited examples of racism in the systemic domain of power, and their invocation of examples of systemic racism grew more frequent as they advanced through high school.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Jon M. Wargo

Description: Taking MacDougall’s (2006) central thesis–image-making and video-production should be considered more than ‘surrogate seeing’–as impetus for inquiry, this paper uses first-person perspective video data to read play as narrative placemaking in immersive game design. Moving “beyond the board” (Garcia, 2019) and away from the screen, it utilizes two theoretical apparatuses across a common data set (video recordings of five adult players ‘learning to escape’ across a series of escape rooms) to ask: How, when analyzed through two divergent analytic methods, is game play understood as narrative placemaking?

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Lauri Johnson

Description: This paper focuses on three White activists (Rachel Davis DuBois, Harry G. Boyte, and Al Lingo) in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the late 1960s and their involvement in interracial dialogues through Operation Dialogue. Operation Dialogue’s stated aim was to engage White working class Southerners as foot soldiers in the Civil Rights movement. Drawing from Davis DuBois’ autobiographical writings, speeches by Harry G. Boyte, oral histories with Boyte family members and Al Lingo, and the extensive organizational files of SCLC, I detail the challenges of establishing interracial dialogues in the context of a Black Southern Civil Rights organization and explore how White activists’ perspectives on White privilege and anti-Black racism were influenced in the process.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Noman Khanani

Description: Multiple imputation is widely-used to address missing data in quantitative research, particularly with education data. One limitation is the imputation of implausible values that fall outside of the acceptable range for a given continuous variable. With education data, this can be problematic when test scores generated through imputation are beyond the test scale, potentially biasing analyses. Predictive mean matching (PMM) has emerged in recent years as a potential solution to preserving the distribution of imputed variables. Few studies in education have used PMM, however, and its utility has not been thoroughly investigated. Using multiple diagnostic tests, we compare PMM with other traditional approaches to imputation using educational data from a public school district implementing an integrated student support intervention.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Larry H. Ludlow, Theresa O'Keefe, Olivia Szendey, Ella Anghel, Henry Braun, Burt Howell, Christina Matz-Costa

Description: The development of meaning and purpose in life are objectives at the core of a Boston College education. Given their abstract nature, it is challenging to measure an individual’s sense of purpose. Consequently, Ludlow et al. (2020) applied a novel form of assessment consisting of Rasch-Guttman scenario scales to measure the purpose dimensions of meaningfulness, goal orientation, and beyond-the-self (the BC-Living a Life of Meaning and Purpose portfolio). The scenarios defining those dimensions incorporate the facets of clarity, effort, and frequency in depicting young adults’ lived-experiences. Using a cross-sectional undergraduate sample representing the first four years of college (N = 661), this paper extends the original work by incorporating the facet of “horizon” in the measurement of purpose in life.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Larry Ludlow, Katherine Reynolds, Maria Baez Cruz, Wen-Chia Claire Chang

Description: Rasch/Guttman Scenario (RGS) scales produce scores that map onto interpretable descriptions of individuals at different levels of hierarchically progressive constructs. The unique scenario item format provides actionable and rich content-relevant feedback about (a) respondent status, (b) intervention design, and (c) longitudinal change on a construct. This article presents a seven-step methodological framework for the development of RGS scales. We also reflect on plausible challenges that may arise in the applications of RGS scale development and propose future research directions for the methodology.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Eunhye Cho, Haylea Hubacz, Gabrielle Oliveira

Description: Recent research has revealed how English can be disproportionately privileged in dual-language spaces. This study documents how the notion of language status is negotiated between Portuguese and English in a dual language classroom. Drawing on ethnographic and interview methods, this study demonstrates how language status must be considered in relation to the status afforded to students themselves. We document particular pressures teachers felt to cater to the needs of English-dominant students and pressure from English-dominant parents. In this milieu, however, we also document the agency of Portuguese-dominant children, as they take on novel roles as brokers of cultural and linguistic knowledge to renegotiate language status dynamics and redistribute opportunities for language development.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Katrina Borowiec, Deoksoon Kim, Lizhou (Jo) Wang, Julie Kim

Description: Many courses have transitioned online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The isolation of learning online can negatively interfere with students’ well-being. Moreover, many faculty are relatively new to this modality of instruction and may not have effective strategies for building community online. The present study employs a multiple case study design to identify how faculty successfully fostered students’ sense of community online, using data from 37 individual interviews with faculty across disciplines and accompanying course artifacts and evaluations. Our results suggest that purposeful design for “social presence” between instructor and students; creating opportunities for student-student engagement; and fostering a supportive environment are critical to creating a sense of community online.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Meghan Coughlan, David Miele, Marina Vasilyeva

Description: The present symposium examines a novel set of motivational processes that may underly the well-established associations between motivational variables (e.g., expectancies, values, and goals) and broad academic outcomes of interest to STEM educators and policymakers (e.g., standardized test performance, course grades, and career aspirations). Specifically, the presenters will focus on how motivational and cognitive factors predict various ‘intermediate’ outcomes, such as initial career plans, class participation, knowledge transfer, and task preferences. The samples in their studies draw from a broad range of age groups, including elementary school, middle school, and college. By better understanding the motivational processes at work in different STEM contexts at different ages, researchers will be well-positioned to design the next generation of STEM intervention studies.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Stanton Wortham

Description: Many educational philosophies emphasize human development beyond the acquisition of knowledge and skills. In response to the narrow focus on content standards that has dominated recent educational policies, the U.S. has recently seen a remarkable proliferation of philosophies and practices that focus on comprehensive student well-being. Amidst this bewildering array of heterogeneous approaches, we need a clearer view of what learning outcomes should guide our educational endeavors today. How can we make sense of the various movements such that scholars, policymakers and educators can adopt thoughtful, effective approaches to developing whole students beyond just basic skills? This panel explores the assumptions behind and prospects for these movements, bringing together experts on moral education, civic values, purpose, and indigenous education.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Marisa Segel, Mariana Becker, Gabrielle Oliveira

Description: The phrase ready to learn has been widely used and researched by scholars, policy makers and practitioners (Abry et al., 2015; Bierman et al., 2008; Blair, 2002; Blair & Razza, 2007; Jarret & Coba-Rodriguez, 2019; Mann et al., 2017). School readiness, as a construct, has referred to the basic skills that children need to transition to elementary school. However, there is no consensus on which basic skills students should possess upon school entry, and even less for bilingual learners (Snow, 2006). This study investigated how fifteen staff members conceptualized the school readiness of U.S. born and Brazilian kindergarteners and first graders in an urban bilingual program. Findings revealed that staff members, including Brazilian personnel, characterized their Brazilian immigrant students as affectionate and culturally rich but not as academically ready to learn due to lack of parental involvement and behavioral immaturity. Conversely, non-Brazilian students were heralded as academically prepared due to their upbringing. This presentation contends that fixed notions of school readiness can reinforce deficit narratives and justify school climates with lowered academic expectations for immigrant children.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Eunhye Cho, Haylea Hubacz, Gabrielle Oliveira

Description: Dual language education programs have become increasingly popular among elementary schools across the country. These programs are touted to represent a promise of a more equitable education for children whose parents are immigrants or whose first languages are not English. Schools across the United States are starting dual language programs and recruiting teachers that have credentials to teach in these newly developed classes. However, less attention has been paid to how parents and teachers react when a new bilingual program is implemented in their schools and classrooms. In this article, we address the perceptions of teachers and parents of a newly established dual language program where the majority of students were of Brazilian origin and spoke Portuguese. We ask: How do teachers and parents perceive the potential impacts of a new dual language program in their school? When are the perspectives on the potential impacts of a dual language program similar or different between parents and teachers? We found that while Brazilian parents were hopeful about the new dual language program, teachers did not feel the addition of the program would make a difference for Brazilian students. This study is significant because it contributes to the understudied topic of Brazilian immigrant students in the United States and the perceptions of parents and teachers of a newly implemented dual language program.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Cristina Hunter, Audrey Friedman, Myra Rosen-Reynoso

Description: This study is an evaluation of a teacher training program that consists of induction, mentoring, professional development, graduate coursework and community living to prepare teachers to be effective educators in urban Catholic schools. Analysis of longitudinal data measuring students’ and teachers’ self-reported levels of faith, religiosity and grit; as well as, students’ scores on NWEA’s MAP assessment were conducted and comparisons between program and non-program teachers and their students were examined. When comparing teacher responses, we found differences in faith, religiosity and grit items across teachers and their students. We also found differences across students in faith items as well as MAP scores.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Marilyn Cochran-Smith (Chair and Paper Presenter), Reid Jewett Smtih, Marisa Olivo, Jeremy Alexander, Elizabeth Stringer Keefe (alum)

Description: This symposium presents findings from a study of teacher preparation at new graduate schools of education (nGSEs), a controversial “innovation” (Gastic, 2014; Zeichner, 2016) that has garnered attention from the media and private foundations. The acronym, nGSE, refers to the small, but growing phenomenon of new graduate schools that prepare and endorse teachers for certification and award master’s degrees, but are not formally affiliated with universities (Author, 2016). This symposium has three objectives: (1) to present multiple cross-case analyses of core aspects of nGSE teacher preparation; (2) to consider whether and how teacher preparation at nGSEs is changing the institutional field (Lincove, Osborne, Mills & Bellows, 2015; Scott, 2010); and, (3) to link analyses of teacher preparation at nGSEs, most of which are designed to prepare teachers for urban schools serving minoritized populations, to the pressing policy, political, and professional challenges of 2020 and beyond.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Heather Rowan-Kenyon, Mandy Savitz-Romer, Tara Nicola, Steph Carroll, Laura Hecht

Description: The purpose of our study is to examine the role of state leaders who support school counseling to increase our understanding of how these departments might optimize counseling practices to have a positive impact on students' college readiness. This study utilized qualitative interviews with 30 state leaders responsible for school counseling to capture ways in which they understand their role in supporting school counselor practices in their state. Findings include evidence of great inconsistency at the state level related to the purpose of this position. We also found that there are no accountability mechanisms for enacted school counseling policies.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Andrew Miller, Melodie Wyttenbach

Description: Catholic schools continue to close amid this decline in enrollment; the trend is most noticeable among parish-run elementary schools. One of the most common ways schools and dioceses have responded to this era has been for schools to shift their governance model away from the parish-based governance assuming this will ensure operational vitality. Yet there has been little independent research examining these shifts in governance, the ways practitioners make sense of these governance shifts, or the popular assumption connecting governance shifts to operational vitality. In this proposed paper, we review the literature on Catholic school governance shifts and analyze the perspectives of Catholic school stakeholders who participate in this trend.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Raquel Muñiz

Description: In June 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Trump administration unlawfully rescinded the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy. DACA deferred deportation for nearly 900,000 school- or college-age undocumented immigrants who contributed significantly to the U.S. The case presents an opportunity to analyze the values underpinning DACA and its’ overall narrative. Using Critical Race Theory and UndocuCrit, we examine the amici briefs submitted to the Court to illuminate similar/different values, interests, and perspectives when stakeholders tell the DACA story. Preliminary analyses reveal the briefs tell a narrow story of DACA, focusing, on legal formalism and the contributions of DACA recipients. Overall, recipients’ stories are underemphasized. We discuss the significance for research, policy, and practice.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Noman Khanani, Anastasia Raczek, Eric Dearing, Mary Walsh

Description: The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of an integrated student support intervention on student achievement . Previous studies of the intervention in a single school district have demonstrated significant positive impacts on various student outcomes, but the degree to which the intervention impact replicates in additional sites has not yet been analyzed. Specifically, we examine the impact of the intervention on math and English Language Arts achievement for third, fourth, and fifth graders across five schools that began implementing the intervention in a new site during the 2011/12 academic year. Our results support the replicability of the intervention’s positive impacts on student achievement.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Stanton Wortham, Samantha Ha, Drina Kei Yatsu, Stephanie Carroll

Description: Though the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has widespread consequences for all sectors, its potential to disrupt higher education and exacerbate inequalities warrants a robust educational response. Educational practices and philosophies that attend to “whole” student development offer one such avenue for addressing the impact of COVID-19. In this qualitative research study, we explore how 37 faculty members fostered formative education—a distinctive Jesuit approach to teaching and learning that centers cura personalis or “care of the whole person”—in a crisis-induced online context. Key findings from this study suggest that in the midst of a global crisis, successful postsecondary educators utilize empathetic, reflective, and adaptive teaching approaches to effectively support holistic student development in online learning environments.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Discussant

Description: This symposium sits at the intersection of three related questions: What is "quality" teaching? How can it be defined and measured? How is it a useful teacher-education reform lever? We tackle those questions by bringing together researchers who are each examining teacher quality in their own country. The papers reveal how policy views of teaching are both universal and a unique product of any country's sociopolitical environment, teacher development systmes, and on-the-ground realities of its schools and communities. The papers additionally explore related aspects such as the role of 'grassroots' efforts to recapture the definition, the role that research plays in policy enactments of teacher quality, and how countries can use their teacher education systems to promote teacher quality.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Lori Ann C. Dunn

Description: Students with disabilities and striving readers require explicit instruction in reading comprehension to successfully navigate middle school. Based on the facets of transactional theory and dual coding theory, mixed methods embedded within a multiple case study design was used to explore learning elements of a screenplay to promote visualization in order to increase reading comprehension, in students with disabilities and striving readers. In a three-week intervention, seven middle school students learned to identify elements of a screenplay in various movies and in literature of increasing complexity using plot diagrams. Findings suggested students were able to identify and describe elements within the text structure. Responses indicated reading comprehension scores increased pre-post. Implications for reading comprehension are discussed.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Audrey Friedman, Kierstin Giunco, Myra Rosen-Reynoso, Cristina Hunter, and Charlie Cownie 

Description: This research explores the reflections of 31 novice teachers, enrolled in Urban Catholic Teacher Corps, a Jesuit university program in the northeast. This program supports the development and formation of novice teachers through graduate education, living in community, full-teaching responsibilities in an urban Catholic school, mentoring, coaching, and professional development. Teachers completed an online interview that elicited responses about what it means to lead a life of meaning and purpose and the factors that contribute to leading a life of meaning and purpose. Responses illustrated intentionality and planning with the aim of leading a life that was beyond-the self.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Audrey A. Friedman and John Schmitt

Description: Although a major goal of a liberal arts education is to foster development of persons who lead a life of meaning and purpose, limited research examines how college students perceive what it means to lead one. Qualitative analyses of data from 114, first-year college students indicate that the majority of students’ perceptions align with Damon, Menon, and Bronk’s (2003) definition: “a stable and generalized intention to accomplish something that is at once meaningful to the self and leads to productive engagement with some aspect of the world beyond the self” (p. 12). One-third of responses fall into the self-orientation category where security, employment, and the call to vocation, and faith were pervasive themes.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Elida Velez Laski, Marina Vasilyeva, Anna Ermakova (alum), Karina Halloran (alum)

Description: This paper presents the results of a study examining whether number of manipulatives used in arithmetic strategy instruction influences learning. First graders were randomly assigned to a condition for learning a decomposition strategy: single manipulative, multiple manipulatives, or control condition. Both intervention conditions produced a greater increase in mental use of decomposition than the control. There was no difference between the single- and multiple-manipulatives conditions in children’s mastery of strategy execution with manipulatives present. In contrast, the multiple-manipulatives condition led to greater generalization to mental calculation than the single-manipulative condition. Further, the findings indicated path-dependent transfer: children who mastered decomposition with multiple-manipulatives were more likely to generalize this knowledge to mental calculation than those who achieved mastery via practice with a single manipulative.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Deoksoon Kim, Kei Yatsu, Yan Li, Hehua Xu, Hubang Chen, Xinyue Thea He, & Yue Liu

Description: This study explores the experience of two beginning teachers (one preservice and one first year teacher) creating digital stories. We also ask how digital story-making fostered their professional identity development as teachers. We use case study methods and visual grammar analysis, drawing on Unsworth’s systematic functional analysis and Serafini’s ideological perspective, to analyze the digital stories. The results show that the teachers found digital storymaking to be a positive experience, an opportunity to express their voices and facilitate reflection as a developing teacher. Both teachers also saw digital storytelling as a way to share with others and receive feedback about their work in a way that benefited the development of their professional identities as teachers.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Jon M. Wargo

Description: Reading user-generated procedural digital media as queer multimodal counter-storytelling, this paper challenges what lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) digital activism looks like by rerouting its definitions to include technical communication. In particular, it zeroes in on one queer young person to ask: How does antoniobtwo mobilize procedural beauty discourse and user-created video as queer activism? How does he use facets of counter-storytelling to engage LGBTQ+-oriented social action? What can participatory technical communication, and procedural digital media more specifically, teach us about LGBTQ+ youths’ digital participation?

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Gerardo L. Blanco

Description: Led by faculty and practitioners, this symposium will engage dialogue that centers (in)equity as a construct within research on the internationalization of higher education. We will explore how the process, concept, and construction of internationalization has power in defining which people, organizations, locations/ environments, processes, outcomes, and (research) agendas are centered or silenced when HEIs engage globally. Framed by an emergent equity-driven internationalization lens, our panelists will share how they have foregrounded (in)equity in the study of internationalized curriculum, international student access, and education abroad.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Sidney May, David Miele

Description: This symposium explores what students need to know about how motivation works (i.e., what metamotivational knowledge they must possess) in order to effectively regulate their motivation and achieve their academic goals. The presenters will discuss several aspects of students’ metamotivational knowledge that have only recently been explored (such as knowledge of task-motivation fit, beliefs about interest regulation, and strategic mindsets) and will demonstrate that some of these are predictive of important educational outcomes, such as course grades. By deepening our understanding of the role that metamotivational knowledge plays in students’ self-regulation and academic achievement, the symposium will suggest new avenues for the design of instructional practices and motivation interventions.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Noman Khanani, Anastasia Raczek, Eric Dearing, Mary Walsh

Description: The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of an integrated student support intervention on student achievement . Previous studies of the intervention in a single school district have demonstrated significant positive impacts on various student outcomes, but the degree to which the intervention impact replicates in additional sites has not yet been analyzed. Specifically, we examine the impact of the intervention on math and English Language Arts achievement for third, fourth, and fifth graders across five schools that began implementing the intervention in a new site during the 2011/12 academic year. Our results support the replicability of the intervention’s positive impacts on student achievement.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Emily F. Gates, Francisca Fils-Aime (alum)

Description: Pressing social problems and inequities call attention to the need for interventions that target root causes and change systems. A significant challenge facing system change efforts is the lack of systems-based evaluation theory and methods. To address this challenge, we conducted an instrumental case study of evaluation within an exemplary philanthropy engaged in system change work for over a decade. Research questions address how the foundation envisions, supports, and evaluates system change. Data collection included document review and group and individual interviews with staff members followed by iterative two cycles of descriptive coding and analysis. We present fifteen findings followed by implications for practice of and research on system change evaluation.

Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Henry Braun, Audrey A. Friedman, Ella Anghel, Myra Rosen-Reynoso, Larry H. Ludlow

Description: From elementary school onward, educators are instrumental in nurturing students’ well-being and their sense of purpose in life. This is especially important during adolescence. Consequently, educators must not only have a strong sense of purpose, but also possess virtues such as compassion and moral agency. This study explores these virtues among a group of 45 urban Catholic school teachers working in schools that partner with a university-affiliated teacher “third space” program. Analysis of self-administered scales measuring purpose and meaning in life, compassion, moral reasoning, and faith, found relatively high levels of purpose, compassion, and morality, as well as strong positive correlations between purpose, compassion, and religiosity. Implications for teacher preparation that can help support positive youth development are discussed.