At 09:13 AM 8/18/00 -0700, you wrote:
>
>Your invocation of Aaron Cicourel brought these issues to the table
>for me in a very concrete way. In any presentation of our work, it
>was inevitable that Aaron would point out that we did not have sufficient
>data linking our micro-focused phenomena to the "macro-focused"
>phenomena and their role in constructing the micro-phemena.
>
>I see the solution only in teamwork, in the creations of teams of
>people who can, collectively, more or less "surround" the study
>of developmental dynamics at at lest three analytic levels.
Pardon the potential naivete' of my question, but what evidence do we have
that the effect of these after school program/activities are in fact
helping participants' school adaptation (vis a vis, grades, test scores,
persistence, motivation etc).
It seems to me that studying change over time as related to participation
in after school activity settings, (that in a sense, might be
conceptualized as competing with whatever it is middle class kids generally
have available to them after school), is important.
Much of the risk for low SES kids is constructed in school by the
multivaried literacy demands placed on students that require mediation,
spiraling, scaffolding after school ....
In a sense, schools, via projects and homework, probe the delivery capacity
of students' after school AS's (personnel, scripts , goals,task demands,
values etc. still my favorite chat unit).
It would seem that after school programs such as the 5th contribute however
incompletely to the support system required in the school based AS.
They would seem to preserve or protect some of Head Start's potential
effect(s) (that seems to work at least until school's organization of
curricula/macro institutionally- timed task demands, up the ante.
So I wonder, where might one look for evidence that there might be changes
during and after participation (particularly where participation in after
school AS's has some fidelity???
My hunch is that such studies are rare and inconclusive and an even lower
priority than Head Start, where only recently there has been a push to
study effects over time.
But hopefully I am wrong..
pedro
"There are two things that prepare ..(us) for hell.
The first is a sense of self-importance, and the
second is craving for the good opinion of others"
Baba
Pedro R. Portes, Ph.D
Professor of Educational
& Counseling Psychology
(502 852-0630/ fax 0629)
http://www.louisville.edu/~prport01
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