CalFresh benefits can help college students make ends meet while attending college, but not all eligible students apply. One contributing factor may be that students are not aware they are eligible. Therefore, outreach efforts informing them of their eligibility could help increase take-up rates. To test this, we designed and conducted two…

Regardless of entry point, nearly all potential speech-language pathologists (SLPs) in the United States (US) share the experience of navigating the arduous application process for graduate school. For students of color, especially first-generation students, this application process can serve to cause them to question whether they belong in the…

"USC Digital Voltaire," a digital, multimodal critical edition of autograph letters, aims to combine the traditional scope of humanities inquiry with the affordances and methodologies of digital scholarship, and to support scholarly inquiry at all levels, beyond the disciplines associated with Voltaire and the Enlightenment. Digital…

Because presidents hold unique and important powerful roles that influence the formation of organizational identities and cultures, we used critical discourse analysis of 80 presidents' letters to analyze presidents' messages to their campuses and to uncover their discourses and assumptions surrounding Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals…

To be effective social justice leaders, school leaders need to gain critical understandings of their positionality and racial privilege and be prepared to engage in difficult conversations with others. This study examines how a peer-to-peer letter exchange assignment in a doctoral course allowed educational leadership doctoral students (N = 27) to…

This study is part of a larger project to reassemble the historical presence of Spanish in what has always been complex multilingual ecologies of language use, policy, and ideology in California. In order to re-establish the place of Spanish, language educators and linguists need to rethink Spanish and Spanglish beyond English-centric memory.…

This qualitative design based research study examined the Connected Learning theoretical framework coupled with academic language scaffolds for Long Term English Learners (LTELs) in a secondary public school setting. The participants of this study were students that have been in the United States for more than six years and have yet to be…

To introduce their examination of the social production of segregated space and power relations in Oxnard, California from 1934 to 1954, the authors utilize portions of a letter written by Alice Shaffer, April 21, 1938, to the Oxnard School Board of Trustees. Shaffer outlines the seemingly shared concerns of her neighbors about a disruption of the…

Using an experimental study design (N = 41), we examined whether participation in an informal writing assignment, specifically writing a letter to a friend about course content, improved exam scores in an undergraduate child development course. Findings indicated that participating in the writing assignment significantly improved scores on an exam…

While many researchers have sought to identify pedagogical strategies to create a sense of connectedness in online courses, few have investigated e-mail correspondence between student and instructor. The current study addressed this issue and found students' sense of connectedness to be strongly correlated to feedback on assignments, instructor…

The processing of abbreviations in reading was examined with an eye movement experiment. Abbreviations were of 2 distinct types: acronyms (abbreviations that can be read with the normal grapheme-phoneme correspondence [GPC] rules, such as NASA) and initialisms (abbreviations in which the GPCs are letter names, such as NCAA). Parafoveal and foveal…

Background: School-based body mass index (BMI) or body composition screening is increasing, but little is known about the process of parent notification. Since 2001, California has required annual screening of body composition via the FITNESSGRAM, with optional notification. This study sought to identify the prevalence of parental notification…

In this article the authors explore a language and literacy community mapping project carried out by public school teachers in southern California. They chronicle the knowledge produced by teachers about the depth and diversity of language and literacy resources present in the neighborhoods surrounding their various urban school sites. (Contains 6…

Uses John Sutter's letters to illustrate the complex local forces affecting Nisenan Indians in post Gold Rush California: tribal disintegration, the lure of wage labor in town, racism, Sutter's designs to keep Indians as peons, and a compliant Indian superintendent who agreed to remove "troublesome" Indians. Contains 50 references. (SV)

On Wednesday, April 18, 1906, an earthquake, measuring 7.8 on the Richter magnitude scale and lasting 48 seconds, erupted along the San Andreas fault with a flash point originating in the San Francisco Bay area. The force of the earthquake tore apart buildings and roads, causing water and gas mains to twist and break. The resulting effects of the…