This paper offers a comprehensive analysis of the information from the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) regarding adults with low literacy and numeracy proficiency. The paper first describes the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of these populations. Although, they are more likely than the rest of the population to exhibit certain…

Being "chronically absent" means missing 10 percent or more of total enrolled school days, including suspensions and both excused and unexcused absences. In the 2014-15 school year, 136,000, or 10 percent of K-12 students in New Jersey, were "chronically absent." This second Advocates for Children of New Jersey (ACNJ) statewide…

In the three essays in this thesis, I explore the effect of school discipline policies on the suspension of public-school students, in an urban setting. In the first essay, using aggregate data, I investigate the effect of zero-tolerance disciplinary polices on secondary-school students. Capitalizing on a natural experiment, I used a…

This paper represents a multimodal analysis of the paraverbal (prosodic and gesture) features of expressive female political speech in Latin America and Spain. The language corpus consisted of public speeches delivered by Spanish-speaking female politicians Eva Peron, Christina de Kirchner and Manuela Carmena. The article includes an overview of…

This study compared the effects of being in different tracks during the first 3 years of secondary education on student academic performance. A sample of a longitudinal cohort study in Flanders (3,205 students in 46 schools) was used to describe the learning gains for mathematics and reading comprehension. Four tracks were distinguished, with a…

Underrepresented college students are more likely than majority students to underperform and drop out of college. Perceptions of status relative to other students may play a key role in this process. The current study uses subjective social status (SSS) to predict underrepresented students' grade point average via their sense of academic…

This article centers on the discursive moves that two adolescent girls in rural Appalachia use to negotiate dominant discourses regarding Appalachian identity and language. The data is drawn from a year-long critical ethnographic teacher-researcher study in a senior English class located within a rural high school in the Appalachian region of the…

Translanguaging practices come into play in social interactions between bilinguals when they are making use of all their shared linguistic resources and blending their languages in natural ways. Stemming from these practices is translanguaging pedagogy, which is designed so that students in school-based additive bilingual programs can benefit from…

When students have the freedom to use digital media to create, communicate and disseminate messages, transgression occurs. In this paper, I situate in-school youth production in the context of pedagogical theories of participatory culture, art education, and digital and media literacy education. Using interviews with four experienced high school…

This study examines Puerto Rican bilinguals' attitudes towards five speech varieties (Spanish, English, Spanish with English lexical insertions, inter-sentential code-switching, and intra-sentential code-switching). While previous research on language attitudes in Puerto Rico has exclusively employed direct methods (i.e. interviews, surveys,…

Purpose: This article is concerned with the growing body of international evidence indicating that adolescents in contact with the youth justice system are likely to have severely compromised oral language skills, receptively and expressively. A smaller, but persuasive, literature also points to poor literacy skills in this population. Language…

Negotiating membership within a disciplinary community is as much an exercise in rhetorical facility as it is content expertise. Where individuals reside in the hierarchy of membership is determined by not only what they talk and write about, but how. Yet, there are many factors that can impact newcomers' acculturation into a disciplinary…

With more women of color (WOC) aspiring to study science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and healthcare (STEMH), colleges and universities serve as a critical environment for preparing and supporting successful transitions from earning a STEMH degree through participation in the STEMH workforce. I use a three-article format to examine the…

The Iowa Department of Education (Department) collects information on developmental education (Dev. Ed.) from Iowa's 15 community colleges on an annual basis. Dev. Ed. courses are offered in mathematics, reading, writing, English as a Second Language (ESL), and in other subject areas, such as financial literacy and skill building. These credits do…

The problem of a prepared workforce is perennial. Part of the challenge is one of supply and demand, as education systems attempt to produce graduates with the technical competencies required for the current jobs available. In the new service- and knowledge-based economy, however, soft skills are cited as a greater need by today's employers.…