The Archer-Ragsdale Arizona Chapter (ARAC), paying tribute to Tuskegee Airmen, is accepting applications for two scholarships. The William A. Campbell Memorial Scholarship, named after Col. Campbell, offers up to two $1,500 scholarships to STEM-bound high school seniors. Applicants must have a minimum 2.7 GPA and submit a 500-word essay by May 31.

The Ashby-Herring Scholarship, named after original Tuskegee Airmen, awards two $1,500 scholarships to African American high school seniors with a GPA of 3.0 or higher and financial need. The deadline for the Ashby-Herring Scholarship is May 1.

Diana Gregory, ARAC Scholarship Committee coordinator, expressed pride in facilitating higher education through these scholarships, encouraging eligible seniors to apply promptly. For more information, contact rtoli@cox.net for the William A. Campbell Memorial Scholarship and scholarship@azfoundation.org for the Ashby-Herring Scholarship.

https://www.azfoundation.org/

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Newswise — A new study sheds light on the vital role of communication and expertise within organizations, revealing their impact on group performance. Researchers examined how individuals become part of communication networks and the effect of selection processes on group performance. The study found that people who communicated more during training were more likely to be chosen as a central member of the network. In addition, teams that chose their central member performed as well as and often better than teams whose central member was randomly assigned.

The study, by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and Clark University, is published in Frontiers in Psychology.

“The people in network positions and the processes by which they arrive at those positions play a significant role in determining team performance,” says Linda Argote, Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, who coauthored the study.  “For centralized network positions which require occupants to transfer information to other members of the network, it is critical to have good communication skills.”

Communication networks serve as the conduits for knowledge exchange, and central members in a network are often responsible for gathering and sharing that information. Researchers drew on studies on communication networks as well as the Carnegie research perspective, which studies the ways organizations gain efficiency through learning, developing routines and structures, and exchanging knowledge.

To test whether group members who choose the occupants of network positions select themselves and others that best suit skill requirements of the position, the authors compared the performance of groups whose members received their choice of who occupied which network position to the performance of groups whose members did not. They conducted a lab study that involved nearly 125 university students. They had two experimental conditions: in one condition, members received their choice of who occupied the central position; in the other condition, members did not receive their choice.

Allowing group members to choose who occupies which network positions enabled teams to optimize their position assignments based on individuals’ skills and expertise (e.g., organization, delegation), which boosted groups’ performance. Team members were more likely to choose individuals who communicated frequently and those who appeared to have task-related expertise to occupy the central network position. Teams receiving their choice of central member performed better than teams not receiving their choice or teams in which members were randomly assigned to the position. 

Among the study’s limitations, the authors note that they investigated the effects of choice as they pertained to network positions in a single network structure, not whether groups performed differently when they could choose their network structures.

“The Carnegie perspective speaks to formal and informal communication structures in organizations but not about the processes through which workers come to occupy network positions,” explains Jerry Guo, Assistant Professor of Strategy at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, who led the study. “We extended this perspective by showing that the process through which individuals come to occupy network positions affects the performance of networks. In this way, we contribute to an understanding of how the development of a network, not just its structure, influences performance.”

The study was funded by the Center for Organizational Learning, Innovation and Knowledge at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon, the National Science Foundation, and the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management. 

Source: Carnegie Mellon University

Impacts Are Largest Among Students Who Were Lowest Achieving Prior to Participation

Newswise — Washington, October 24, 2023—Participating in policy debate programs in middle and high school is associated with improvements in English language arts (ELA) achievement and increases in the likelihood that students graduate from high school and enroll in postsecondary education, according to new research. The study was published today in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association. It was conducted by Beth Schueler from the University of Virginia and Katherine Larned from Harvard University.

Video: Study co-author Beth Schueler discusses major findings and implications

Policy debate is an interscholastic, competitive, extracurricular activity in which teams of students engage in structured argumentation about public policy issues. Participants focus on a single resolution for the entire academic year, which requires them to learn about one policy area in depth.

Typically, extracurricular debate programs are disproportionately found in private and high-income public schools. However, this study was conducted in the context of the Boston Public Schools, where the Boston Debate League, a nonprofit, serves a student population that is majority low income and students of color.

The study relied on data from the Boston Debate League, Boston Public Schools, and the National Student Clearinghouse for students enrolled in Boston Public Schools during the 2007–08 to 2017–18 school years. It included the 3,515 students who participated in the Boston Debate League over that time.

“We found that debate was linked to improvements not only in overall ELA achievement but specifically in those ELA competencies requiring critical thinking skills,” said Schueler, assistant professor of education and public policy at the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development. “The impact was almost entirely concentrated among reading subskills that involve more analysis and argumentation.”

The impacts were substantial, translating to roughly 68 percent of the learning in ELA that typically takes place over the course of the ninth-grade year. The gains were largest among students who were lowest performing at baseline, suggesting that policy debate does not need to be reserved for high-achieving students.

The authors also examined effects on high school graduation and postsecondary enrollment, finding positive impacts driven by increased enrollment in four-year colleges and universities.

“These results provide policymakers a rare promising program for reducing inequality in reading achievement, analytical thinking skills, and educational attainment among middle and high school students,” said Larned, a fellow and doctoral student in the education policy and program evaluation program at Harvard University. “Debate programs are cost-effective relative to other high-profile interventions and therefore have great potential for scalability.”

The authors pointed out that researchers have uncovered very few interventions that generate impacts of this magnitude for secondary school students, especially on literacy outcomes. School leaders looking to boost ELA outcomes could look to this type of extracurricular activity for supporting older students in learning.

“Policy debate appears to be a rare strategy for improving literacy skills among middle and high school students,” said Schueler. “It helps to demonstrate that secondary school is not ‘too late’ to support student progress in reading.”

There are likely implications for teachers working in traditional classrooms. Some professional development programs have been designed to help teachers infuse key principles of debate pedagogy into regular classrooms. The authors suggested that researchers should explore the effectiveness of these programs to help uncover the extent to which debate would generalize to students who do not opt for the extracurricular activity.

The authors also recommended that future research should examine the relative effectiveness of different extracurricular activities, as well as further assess policy debate’s impact on critical thinking, argumentation skills, and other competencies needed for academic and civic participation, such as social perspective taking, media literacy, ability to distinguish fact from opinion, and engagement with the policy process.

Study citation: Schueler, B., & Larned, K. (2023). Interscholastic policy debate promotes critical thinking and college-going: Evidence from Boston Public Schools. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. Prepublished October 24, 2023. http://doi.org/10.3102/01623737231200234

Source:  Mount Sinai Health System