In an effort to meet the needs of low-income students, a collaborative effort between the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the Hoover City School system was initiated. The university and school system have collaborated for the past four years to change the nature of summer programs, both for students and teachers. This article describes…

Launched last year, the SciTech Summer Camp is a joint project being led by the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) and the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Awards Corp. (HENAAC). SciTech was created to get more Hispanic students into the so-called STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. SciTech…

This article discusses College Summit, a nonprofit effort centered around the premise that there is a sizable number of students who are more capable of college academics than their test scores and grade point averages suggest. Its four-day summer sessions are focused not on ramping up students' academic performance but in mining students'…

Although the importance of undergraduate research experiences in preparing students for graduate study and research careers is well documented, specific examination of program components is needed to assess the impact of these programs on underrepresented (UR) students. The Leadership Alliance, a consortium of leading PhD-granting and…

Recent decline of students pursuing engineering degree programs is a great concern for many higher education authorities including Federal and State governments. Existing programs in high schools have not yet produced the desired results. Consequently, a number of initiatives to remedy this situation have been proposed and implemented. One such…

This case study evaluated the significance of implementing an enrichment mathematics course during the summer to rising African American ninth graders entitled, "Geometry Honors Preview." In the past, 60 to 70 percent of African American students in this school district had withdrawn from Geometry Honors by the second academic quarter. This study…

This paper describes the PD program that was delivered during the first year of the study. The main goal of the intervention was to increase teachers' capability to teach positive rational number topics effectively. The program included a 3-day summer institute (18 hours per teacher), five 1-day seminars held during the school year (30 hours per…

In this Brief, the authors focus on partnerships between community colleges and high schools that may make it more likely for students to complete "three important milestones" on the road to college completion: (1) Enrollment in college; (2) College readiness at enrollment; and (3) Persistence in college. There is a broad range of goals and…

Recent attention to low student achievement in mathematics has brought attention at the national, state, and local level to the shortage of "Highly Qualified" mathematics teachers. However, current policy and practice fall short of ensuring that the most qualified--as in effective--mathematics teachers support the learning of the…

More than 30 years since Hannah Arendt's death in 1975 at the age of 69, her novel theory of the public realm continues to attract attention and debate. In this article, the author contributes to this discussion by drawing on Arendt's theory of public life to investigate the space of youth media production in relation to questions of democratic…

Common forms of testing of student understanding of science content can be misleading about their understanding of the nature of scientific thinking. Observational astronomy integrated with related ideas of force and motion is a rich context to explore the correlation between student content knowledge and student understanding of the scientific…

Despite the promise of technology in education, many practicing teachers are faced with multiple challenges of effectively integrating technology into their classroom instruction. Additionally, teachers who are successful incorporating educational technology into their instruction recognize that although technology tools have the potential to help…

Nationally, women are greatly under-represented in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) postsecondary majors. Intersect race, social class, and gender, and low-income girls of color enter technology fields at a lower rate than White middle-income females. The authors created an after-school and summer program, CompuGirls,…

This paper summarizes the findings from a K-6 professional development program that emphasized scientific inquiry and nature of science within the theme of scientific modeling. During the 2-week summer workshop and follow up school year workshops, the instruction modeled a 5-E learning cycle approach. Pre and posttesting measured teachers' views…

Much of the research on the social coping of students with gifts and talents has relied on a single administration of an instrument while the participants were attending a summer program. This study attempts to understand how attendance at a residential high school (academy) may affect academically gifted students over time. Students in two…