The Ecology of College Readiness E-Book

Karen D. Arnold

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Serie: J-B ASHE-ERIC Report Series (AEHE)
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 226

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Despite extensive research, policies, and practical efforts toimprove college readiness in the United States, a large proportionof low-income students remain unprepared to enter and succeed inhigher education. This issue draws on the human ecology theory of UrieBronfenbrenner (1917-2005) to offer a fresh perspective thataccounts for the complexity of the interacting personal,organizational, and societal factors in play. Ecological principlesshift the focus to individual differences in the ways that studentsengage environments and to the connections across students'immediate settings and relationships. Viewing college readiness within an ecological system alsoreveals how the settings where development occurs are in turnshaped by more distant environments. The aspirations and behaviorsthat affect students' college preparation originate inopportunities, resources, and hazards beyond their immediateenvironments. The ecological lens illuminates the need forcoordinated, comprehensive efforts that affect students across thevarious levels of their environment and provides a framework foradvancing college readiness research, policy, and educationalpractice. This is the 5th issue of the 38th volume of the Jossey-Bassseries ASHE Higher Education Report. Each monographis the definitive analysis of a tough higher education issue, basedon thorough research of pertinent literature and institutionalexperiences. Topics are identified by a national survey. Notedpractitioners and scholars are then commissioned to write thereports, with experts providing critical reviews of each manuscriptbefore publication.

Leseprobe

Contents

Executive Summary

Foreword

Acknowledgments

The Case for a Comprehensive Model of College Readiness

The Complexity of College Readiness

Quasi-Ecological Approaches to College Readiness

The Next Generation of College Readiness Research

Method and Organization

The Human Ecology Framework

Principles of Development in Ecological Systems

Environmental Contexts

Environmental Interactions: A Fully Ecological Model

Individual: The Attributes of College Readiness

Resource Characteristics

Force Characteristics

Demand Characteristics

The Individual in an Ecological Context

Microsystem: The Direct Experience of Students

Academic Preparation in Schools

Out-of-School Microsystems

Direct Experience in an Ecological Context

Mesosystem: A Network of Overlapping Relationships

Cultural Capital and the Mesosystem

Social Capital and Mesosystem Connectors

College and High School Integration

Overlapping Relationships in the Ecological Context

Exosystem: The Site of Systemic and Structural Changes

Precollege Intervention Programs

School Reform

Role of States

Role of Federal Government

Role of Foundations and Nonprofit Organizations

Systems and Structures in Ecological Context

Macrosystem: The Arena of Culture and Ideology

Foundational Beliefs

Language, Subculture, and Theory

Culture and Ideology in the Ecological Context

Chronosystem: The Role of Time in College Readiness

Cohort and Era

Sequence and Timing

Developmental Change

The Role of Time in Ecological Context

The Ecological View of College Readiness

The Ecology of College Readiness

Using an Ecological Approach in Research and Evaluation

Implications for Policy

Implications for Practice

Moving Toward an Ecological Approach to College Readiness

References

Name Index

Subject Index

About the Authors

The Ecology of College Readiness

Karen D. Arnold, Elissa C. Lu, Kelli J. Armstrong

ASHE Higher Education Report: Volume 38, Number 5

Kelly Ward, Lisa E. Wolf-Wendel, Series Editors

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Advisory Board

The ASHE Higher Education Report Series is sponsored by the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), which provides an editorial advisory board of ASHE members.

Ben Baez

Florida International University

Amy Bergerson

University of Utah

Edna Chun

University of North Carolina Greensboro

Susan K. Gardner

University of Maine

MaryBeth Gasman

University of Pennsylvania

Karri Holley

University of Alabama

Adrianna Kezar

University of Southern California

Kevin Kinser

SUNY – Albany

Dina Maramba

Binghamton University

Robert Palmer

Binghamton University

Barbara Tobolowsky

University of Texas at Arlington

Susan Twombly

University of Kansas

Marybeth Walpole

Rowan University

Rachelle Winkle-Wagner

University of Nebraska – Lincol

Executive Summary

Despite broad agreement that postsecondary education is increasingly necessary for individual and national well-being, there is a pronounced and widening socioeconomic gap in college access and success in the United States. The leading cause for this gap is a lack of college readiness: the multidimensional set of skills, traits, habits, and knowledge that students need to enter and succeed in college. Despite extensive research, policy, and practice efforts to improve college readiness, the problem has proven intractable because of the complexity of the interacting personal, organizational, and societal factors in play.

The human ecology theory of Urie Bronfenbrenner (1917–2005) addresses calls for an integrative framework that accounts for and offers new ways of looking at the complexity of college readiness. An ecological framework encompasses the interacting forces of ideology and culture, social and organizational structure, time, and individual agency. Furthermore, this framework provides an analytical tool to identify gaps in the existing literature and points to opportunities for research, policy, and practice.

Bronfenbrenner’s ecology theory encompasses the many environments affecting students’ college readiness. The ecology of the individual student determines whether that student leaves high school with the necessary constellation of aspirations, dispositions, and academic and practical knowledge. The key element of academic preparation, like all other readiness traits, is an outcome of developmentally instigative characteristics by which individuals choose, shape, and respond to environments such as school and college readiness programs.

Although embodied in individuals, college readiness is formed in microsystems, the immediate settings in which students experience everyday life in direct interaction with people, activities, roles, and objects. Classrooms, programs, families, friends, teachers, counselors, and extracurricular activities are examples of microsystems for students. Positive development occurs when individuals encounter increasing complexity within their immediate settings and relationships.

Higher education aspirations and college readiness are affected by the intersecting orbits in which students are simultaneously involved. The mesosystem consists of interactions of overlapping relationships, messages, objects, and symbols in students’ immediate settings. Parental involvement in schools and dual enrollment in high school and college are examples of mesosytem interactions. The mesosystem is a crucial layer of the environment for college readiness because the totality of students’ experience determines their educational dispositions and behaviors.

The structural arrangements of society and its institutions are designed and modified in a level of the environment where students are not present but that affects their lives. The exosystem level is the only place where systemic change and improvement can occur. The architects of the exosystem include the stakeholders who make policy, direct resources, design programs and interventions, and determine the criteria for entrance and success in educational institutions. This level of the environment sets the ground rules for the opportunities, experiences, and environments that students encounter and determines how organizations, programs, and educational interventions embody these possibilities.

At the broadest level of the ecology, the macrosystem, culture and ideology frame both the overall structure of schooling and the patterns of opportunities and perceived possibilities for different students. The macrosystem influences the ways dominant cultural and subcultural ideas and practices affect everything from policy to higher education costs and individual aspirations.

Finally, the chronosystem refers to temporal elements of environmental change, such as sequential college readiness tasks, chronological age and cohort, and developmental growth. The intersection of an individual life and sociohistorical context is a key determinant of educational outcomes.

As a developmental systems model, ecological theory provides a way of addressing college readiness by focusing on multiple, integrated interactions of people, organizations, systems, culture, and time. In this model, environments are more than interactive: they are mutually constituting. Students develop the aspirations and behaviors that affect their academic preparation in light of the opportunities, resources, and hazards that originate beyond their immediate environments. At the same time, students play an important role in shaping their experience through the ways in which they engage and respond to their environments.

The ecological model has several large implications for improving college readiness through research, policy, and practice. Most fundamental, the many stakeholders in the arena of college access and success need to understand that efforts to improve student readiness involve an ecological system. Researchers, policymakers, organizational leaders, and program designers must attend to the interactions of multiple environments and simultaneous interventions that affect the operation and evaluation of any initiative. Policies and programs need to account for the interconnections among the multiple settings and tasks involved in college access and success. Teachers, counselors, school leaders, and program staff must design activities and tasks that promote student engagement in experiences of increasing complexity. Practitioners also need to understand how students differ in making use of classrooms and program activities according to individuals’ characteristic ways of engaging and responding to environments. No single policy, program, or intervention can influence all levels of a student’s ecology. The ecological lens implies the need to coordinate efforts that affect students across the environment of their lives, promote consonance across divergent settings, and connect the elements of college readiness.

The systemic structures supporting and surrounding the educational environments of economically and educationally challenged students are not currently designed to sustain a comprehensive model such as the ecological approach. K–12 educational systems in the United States have evolved independently from higher education institutions, and broad educational policies do not take into account individual students’ cultural contexts. The ecological model provides a framework for a comprehensive approach that reaches across student settings and offers a promising new perspective for understanding and promoting the development of college readiness strategies for all students and stakeholders.

Foreword

On this eve of the 2012 presidential election, with both major political parties offering solutions in their platforms for how to fix the problems that face American higher education, only one thing is clear: there is a problem that needs to be fixed. Indeed, when it comes to higher education, there are actually some points of agreement between the two major presidential parties: higher education is too expensive and the costs are rising too quickly; the pace and rate of graduation is too slow and too low; too many students are failing to meet their educational goals; and, for too long, higher education has not been held accountable for what students learn or if they are learning at all. The solutions offered, of course, differ. One party suggests that free market forces can fix what ails higher education, and the other suggests that some government intervention will provide solutions to the problem. We don’t yet know who will win the election (although by the time this is published, we will know). We do know that the microscope is on higher education, and it must respond affirmatively.

Higher education (and those who work there) has been eager to play the blame game with regard to its woes. If only states supported higher education at the level that they once did (or should do). If only K–12 education adequately prepared students for the rigors of college. If only K–12 were more equitable and offered all of its graduates a sufficient and adequate level of educational preparation. If only college students worked harder and were more motivated to learn. If only.

If these conditions were met, higher education would have an easier job of graduating students, of making sure that they learned the right amount and the right content, and that a college education was worth the price it cost. But the blame game isn’t working, and the problems that affect higher education, the K–12 system, and the individual student aren’t just going to go away. Higher education has to work with the cards it is dealt, and it has to deal with the academic preparation (or lack thereof) of its student body.

This monograph on college readiness by Karen Arnold, Elissa Lu, and Kelli Armstrong offers important information and perspectives to help higher education move beyond the blame game. It applies Urie Bronfenbrenner’s sociological theory to the problem of college readiness and offers frameworks for understanding the multiple systems at play without letting higher education off the hook for trying to fix the problem. The theoretical framework is particularly useful because it helps to frame the problem of college readiness as systemic and multifaceted and suggests that simple quick fixes will not be sufficient. However, it doesn’t leave us helplessly floundering in an unfixable system; rather, it helps to explain how the systems interlock and coordinate and provides some direction on what institutions of higher education can do.

Although this monograph focuses on explaining a theory and its use in research, it will be helpful to practitioners as well. Researchers, faculty members, graduate students, federal and state policymakers, and institutional leaders in both K–12 and higher education contexts will find this monograph to be of use. It is written for everyone interested in access to and success in higher education. There are a couple of other monographs in the series that overlap well with the topic and approach undertaken here. In particular, I recommend Amy Bergerson’s (2009) monograph on college choice and access, Rachelle Winkle-Wagner’s (2010) on cultural capital, Marybeth Walpole’s (2007) on low socioeconomic students, and David Arendale’s (2010) on remedial education. Each of these offers related but slightly different perspectives on this topic of college readiness.

No matter who wins the presidential race or what happens with regard to state and federal policy, higher education must figure this out. We have to better fulfill our promise of providing equitable and excellent postsecondary education. There is too much at stake to maintain the status quo.

Lisa E. Wolf-Wendel

Series Editor

Acknowledgments

We warmly thank the following individuals for their assistance in conceptualizing and carrying out this collaborative project:

Samantha Allen

Elizabeth Bracher

Paul Brown

Ben Castleman

Loretta Cedrone

Jill Claridge

Zachary Cole

Penny Hauser-Cram

Mario DeAnda

Kara Godwin

Jackie Lerner

Jennifer May

Ashley Moellinger

Esther Park

Kris Renn

Lynette Robinson

Pharlone Troussant

Marybeth Walpole

Katherine Lynk Wartman

Lisa Wolf-Wendel

The Case for a Comprehensive Model of College Readiness