Creating a Class

Stevens, Mitchell L.

doi:10.4159/9780674044036

Cited by 255 publications

(47 citation statements)

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“…The movement for test-optional evaluation protocols (8,9) has gained more momentum in light of the public health risks associated with in-person administration of the SAT and other standardized tests used in college admissions during the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic. To the extent that the elimination of standardized tests recalibrates the relative weight of other application materials, the basic terms of holistic review-the current standard of best practice for jointly considering standardized tests alongside qualitative components of applications (10)(11)(12)-require fresh scrutiny. The May 2021 decision by the University of California, a university system serving nearly 300,000 students that is a bellwether for national trends in higher education, to no longer consider standardized test scores compels a thorough reconsideration of the remaining components of admission files and how they relate to applicant characteristics such as socioeconomic status.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Essay content and style are strongly related to household income and SAT scores: Evidence from 60,000 undergraduate applications

et al. 2021

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There is substantial evidence of the relationship between household income and achievement on the standardized tests often required for college admissions, yet little comparable inquiry considers the essays typically required of applicants to selective U.S. colleges and universities. We used a corpus of 240,000 admission essays submitted by 60,000 applicants to the University of California in November 2016 to measure relationships between the content of admission essays, self-reported household income, and SAT scores. We quantified essay content using correlated topic modeling and essay style using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. We found that essay content and style had stronger correlations to self-reported household income than did SAT scores and that essays explained much of the variance in SAT scores. This analysis shows that essays encode similar information as the SAT and suggests that college admission protocols should attend to how social class is encoded in non-numerical components of applications.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Essay content and style are strongly related to household income and SAT scores: Evidence from 60,000 undergraduate applications

et al. 2021

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“…Our students/coresearchers and focus group participants had constructed a particular type of student that they would describe as 'typical' for the university (middle-upper class, white, non-disabled). Messages conveyed through the hidden curriculum often translate into perceptions of an 'implied' or 'ideal' higher education student (Stevens 2007;Chiu 2018, 2019;Ulriksen 2009), i.e., the projection of the student who is likely to thrive within a particular institutional culture.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This focus on the students has often given rise to concepts of an 'ideal' Chiu 2018, 2019) or 'implied' (Stevens 2007) student. Although such concepts are intended to support better understanding of success, difficulties and dropout rates (or act as 'a thinking tool to better understand the expectations and experiences of university students', Wong and Chiu 2019, 9), they can also reinforce preconceptions that can be unhelpful to students who do not (or perceive themselves not to) meet assumed expectations, for example, because of where they were born, the conditions of their lives, having a disability, identifying as members of a minority group etc.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As discussed, this is relevant to the concept of the 'implied' student (Stevens 2007;Ulriksen 2009) in that processes within higher education institutions are often implicitly modelled around a certain type of student, such as a young, white, able-bodied student, living away from home, without caring responsibilities or financial worries. The significance of this is that students who do not fit the implied model can feel marginalised or might not be readily able to infer and anticipate what they need to do to fit in and achieve in their studies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The ‘ideal’ higher education student: understanding the hidden curriculum to enable institutional change

Koutsouris

Mountford‐Zimdars

Dingwall

2021

Research in Post-Compulsory Education

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In England, more students from a wider range of backgrounds participate in higher education than in previous generations. This has led to a focus on how students from diverse backgrounds can fit better with existing higher education institutions. This is often framed in terms of 'deficits' that these students have to overcome to more closely resemble the 'implied' or 'ideal' students around which institutions are, often unconsciously, modelled. We flip this focus by thinking about how educational institutions can evolve in response to diverse students. We use the theoretical lens of the hidden curriculum to explore student perceptions of 'ideal' students. Findings are based on research with eight students as co-researchers and 24 further student participants in an academically selective English higher education institution. We find that there are many aspects of hidden or assumed practices within universities students encounter when first coming to higher education. Focusing specifically on learning environments and curricula, we found that ideas about an implied student were evident in the institution, that this mattered for the experience of learning -and that consciousness of hidden processes helps. We conclude by suggesting that instead of focusing on how to change students to fit institutions, institutions need to be open and adaptable to all students.

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“…While all groups possess valuable forms of capital (Carter, 2003;Yosso, 2005), it is the dominant group, and the capital it holds, that stands to be most rewarded by the education system and beyond. Unlike dominant groups who can readily dispense dominant resources (social, economic, and cultural) into grooming their children to pursue particular majors and attend particular colleges (see Lareau, 2003;Stevens, 2007), non-dominant students and families tend to rely primarily upon schools to provide the range of dominant capitals necessary for social mobility. However, despite a strong desire to increase opportunities for students, many non-dominant schools struggle to provide the dominant capitals they promise.…”

Section: Theoretical Framework Access To Stem Education As "Shadow Capital"mentioning

confidence: 99%

STEM for All: Student Identities and the Paradox of STEM Democratization

Cipollone

Stich²,

Weis

2020

Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education

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Background/Context Calls to increase participation in and access to STEM education have been loud and frequent. These democratizing efforts have targeted the aspirations and expectations of non-dominant students attending U.S. secondary schools, promising pathways to college and opportunities for social mobility, yet the results have been mixed. While some exemplars exist, recent research has identified a number of social and structural challenges that undermine the stated goals of policy initiatives and fail to yield positive student outcomes. Purpose Drawing upon the authors’ notion of shadow capital, an extension of Bourdieu's theoretical framework, and Holland, Lachincotte, Skinner, and Cain's theory of figured worlds, this article explores how high-achieving students from non-dominant backgrounds construct their academic identities amid limited STEM material and discursive structures in two urban, non-selective, public, STEM-focused schools. In so doing, we aim to extend and complicate the literature on STEM reform and its ability to provide opportunity and improve outcomes for non-dominant students. Research Design The findings reported herein are part of a larger ethnographic, longitudinal, and comparative study of eight non-selective, urban public high schools serving primarily economically and racially non-dominant students. Data consist of interviews with multiple stakeholders, sustained participant and non-participant observation, and document analysis. In this article we focus on two STEM-focused schools, STEM Academy and Broadway Science Academy (BSA), and primarily draw upon interview data given our emphasis on student identity development. Findings/Results As a result of a mismatch between the intention and outcome of STEM reform as it plays out in this study, each school provided students with shadow capital. Given the different school contexts, the effects of this shadow capital on students’ STEM identities vary across site. In the case of STEM Academy, students develop conflicted STEM identities amid the school's own conflicted institutional identity as both STEM-focused and college preparatory. In the case of BSA, students are provided opportunities that are seen as more “connected” to student-lived experiences, resulting in vocational pathways devoid of the elements that truly bridge home and school in ways that create opportunity, complicating students’ ability to actualize their college and career aspirations. Conclusions/Recommendations In order to create authentic and meaningful connected STEM opportunities that allow students to draw from their own stores of capital and nurture STEM identities, we need to reevaluate and re-envision the “good intentions” undergirding the democratization of education and ask whether efforts to democratize STEM are plausible within our deeply stratified system.

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Creating a Class

Cited by 255 publications

References 0 publications

Essay content and style are strongly related to household income and SAT scores: Evidence from 60,000 undergraduate applications

Essay content and style are strongly related to household income and SAT scores: Evidence from 60,000 undergraduate applications

The ‘ideal’ higher education student: understanding the hidden curriculum to enable institutional change

STEM for All: Student Identities and the Paradox of STEM Democratization

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