Dear Colleagues:
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Cynthia
Postsecondary Completion Moderator
Comments
Good afternoon,
It is a pleasure to be a new member to the LINCS community. I am the curriculum specialist for the Department of Labor Grant at Amarillo College. We work with 10 programs to ensure program alignment (industry standards, competencies, learning outcomes, etc.). Our goal is to have 70% completions by 2020. Currently, we have a multi-campus competition to develop the winning action plan to help make this happen...more on this as our project progresses.
I look forward reading more about everyone's work.
Regards,
Marissa
Greetings, Marissa!
Welcome to the Postsecondary Completion community! Wow, this sounds like a great project. We'd love to hear more about what makes a willing action plan when you get to that point.
Cynthia
I serve as the Vice President of Academic Programs at the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute, a national Indian community college located in Albuquerque, NM.
Hi Valerie:
I wonder if you could tell us about what makes a college a national Indian community college.
Cynthia
SIPI is federally funded and operated under the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE), U.S. Dept. of the Interior. We admit students who are members of federally recognized tribes throughout the U.S. In any given trimester we will enroll students from 60-70 different tribal nations from approximately 23 states. Students are primarily from the Navajo Nation, Pueblos in New Mexico, and Apache. We offer associate degrees.
Hi Valerie:
I got a chance to visit your college's website: Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute. The associate degree and certificates look really interesting. How do students typically find out about your institution or other SIPI institutions?
Cynthia
Hi,
I am a professor at the U of Delaware. With Dick Venezky, I developed and evaluated a curriculum for teaching decoding and spelling to adult basic education learners a few years ago, which is still available on LINCS (https://lincs.ed.gov/publications/making_sense). More recently, I have developed a curriculum for developmental writing in community colleges based on strategy instruction. Initial experimental results were very positive, so we got more funding to conduct a large experimental study across multiple community colleges. If you are interested in participating, let me know.
Charles "Skip" MacArthur
Hi, Skip -
Thanks for sharing your research with us. I see that your teachers' and administrators' guide includes a section on special considerations for "Non-native English Speakers. I'm curious if your work has suggestions, or considerations, for learners with language-based disabilities, such as Dyslexia? I notice that in the references section, you list Phases of word learning: Implications for instruction with delayed and disabled readers, as one of your resources. If you can share any thoughts on how the larger experimental study may address these learners' needs, it would be great to hear.
Thanks,
Mike Cruse
Disabilities in Adult Education Moderator
michaelcruse74@gmail.com
Thanks for your question, Mike. In our earlier research on instruction in decoding with ABE learners, about half of the native speaking learners reported that they had previously been identified with learning disabilities; it is probably that many others also had LD. The students with LD were generally the lowest performing in all areas of reading - decoding, spelling, vocabulary, and comprehension. We also found that the non-native learners, as a group, made significantly greater gains as a result of the instruction than the native-speaking group. One explanation of this finding is that the native learners had weak reading skills due to disability, while part of the poor performance of the non-native speakers was due to remaining difficulties with English. The message is that learners with LD will need more intensive instruction than our program provided. Teachers would need to carefully monitor progress and re-teach particular decoding/ spelling skills to those learners, or differentiate by using even more explicit methods. Of course, this is not a new message.
In our current basic writing research, we do not diagnose whether students have disabilities or differentiate instruction based on disability; we simply work with the writing skills and knowledge that students bring to the class. The instruction is designed for struggling writers, using methods that have been shown to work well with students who have disabilities and other struggling learners -- self-regulated strategy instruction. We work to mastery. We encourage instructors to provide extra instruction as needed to students to make sure that 1) they can explain and apply the strategies, 2) their writing has improved, and 3) they see themselves that their writing has improved -- this last is critical to motivation.
Skip