UCLA School of Education and Information Studies

Children are one of the most affected groups during the Syrian Civil War. They feel the trauma of the war and death of people that they loved, and now, they are suffering from many problems (Gomleksiz & Aslan, 2018). More than half a million Syrian refugee students are not enrolled in school in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon (Culbertson & Constant, 2015). If they are lucky enough to attend school, many education problems are waiting for them such as adapting to a new educational culture, classroom environment, curriculum and language problems. Before these problems are solved, many of them are expected to engage in the classroom and be graded on the same level as native students (Emin, 2016). To provide a better and fairer learning environment in classrooms, comparative studies on refugee education across national contexts should be conducted (Ficarra, 2017). Since Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan struggle with similar issues, a comparative study about the fairness problems such as expectations of academic achievement, school discipline and other forms of inequity that Syrian refugee students experience in classroom can potentially offer solutions to these problems facing educators and policy-makers. Accordingly, this literature review will be conducted to compare studies about these areas. This literature review investigates the following question: How is the equality between refugees and native students especially in mixed classes provided during assessments of students’ academic achievement in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon?A big gap is found related to this research question in the literature. Major problems that should be solved to create equality in the mixed classes in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon have been determined such as financial, political, and educational issues in this literature review.  

As science becomes more dependent upon digital data, the need for data curation and for data digital libraries becomes more urgent. Questions remain about what researchers consider to be their data, their criteria for selecting and trusting data, and their orientation to data challenges. This paper reports findings from the first 18 months of research on astronomy data practices from the Data Conservancy. Initial findings suggest that issues for data production, use, preservation, and sharing revolve around factors that rarely are accommodated in use cases for digital library system design including trust in data, funding structures, communication channels, and perceptions of scientific value.

This article presents and validates a clustering-based method for creating cultural ontologies for community-oriented information systems. The introduced semiautomated approach merges distributed annotation techniques, or subjective assessments of similarities between cultural categories, with established clustering methods to produce cognate ontologies. This approach is validated against a locally authentic ethnographic method, involving direct work with communities for the design of fluid ontologies. The evaluation is conducted with of a set of Native American communities located in San Diego County (CA, US). The principal aim of this research is to discover whether distributing the annotation process among isolated respondents would enable ontology hierarchies to be created that are similar to those that are crafted according to collaborative ethnographic processes, found to be effective in generating continuous usage across several studies. Our findings suggest that the proposed semiautomated solution best optimizes among issues of interoperability and scalability, deemphasized in the fluid ontology approach, and sustainable usage.

Since the late 1970s, feminist media scholars have used the term “symbolic annihilation” to denote how strong women characters are absent, grossly under-represented, maligned, or trivialized by mainstream television programming, news outlets, and magazine coverage. In the wake of this absence, minoritized communities fail to see themselves or their place in the world. In archival studies, the concept of symbolic annihilation has recently has been used to describe the affective impact on the South Asian American community of being excluded, silenced or misrepresented in mainstream archival collections.  The proposed paper builds on and expands this research by examining the affective impact of both exclusion and representation in archives on members of communities that have coalesced around and been marginalized because of ethnic, racial, gender, sexual, and/or political identities. Based on more than a dozen in-depth qualitative interviews with practitioners at several independent community archives in Southern California—including those representing LGBTQ communities and communities of color—our research explores how symbolic annihilation operates and the affect it produces among archives users. We argue that independent, identity-based community archives can counter the symbolic annihilation of mainstream collections by providing avenues for minoritized communities to meaningfully represent themselves. We propose the term representational belonging to describe the ways in which such organizations enable people to have the power and authority to establish and enact their presence in ways that are complex, meaningful, substantive, and positive.

As science becomes more dependent upon digital data, the need for data curation and for data digital libraries becomes more urgent. Questions remain about what researchers consider to be their data, their criteria for selecting and trusting data, and their orientation to data challenges. This paper reports findings from the first 18 months of research on astronomy data practices from the Data Conservancy. Initial findings suggest that issues for data production, use, preservation, and sharing revolve around factors that rarely are accommodated in use cases for digital library system design including trust in data, funding structures, communication channels, and perceptions of scientific value.

This study follows 40 children who were participants in a randomized controlled early intervention trial (Kasari et al.) from early childhood (2-5 years of age) to elementary school age (8-10 years). To fully utilize the available longitudinal data, the general linear mixed model was the primary analytical approach. The growth trajectories of joint attention skills (pointing, coordinated joint looking, and showing) and expressive language outcomes in these children were estimated based on five time points during the measurement period. The children were grouped by diagnosis at the last follow-up (autism, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), no diagnosis) and by their original treatment group assignment (joint attention, symbolic play, control), and differences between these groups were evaluated. Results showed that joint attention skills of coordinated joint looking and showing increased over time, and pointing to share interest increased over the first year measured and decreased thereafter. These trajectories were influenced by both original treatment assignment and diagnostic status at follow-up. In addition, a cross-lagged panel analysis revealed a causal relationship between early pointing and later language development. This study highlights the longitudinal and developmental importance of measures of early core deficits in autism, and suggests that both treatment and ASD symptomatology may influence growth in these skills over time.

Using cross-classified multilevel modeling, this study attempted to improve our understanding of the group-level conditional effects of student–faculty interaction by examining the function of academic majors in explaining the effects of student–faculty interaction on students’ academic self-concept. The study utilized data on 11,202 undergraduate students who completed both the 2003 Freshman Survey and the 2007 College Senior Survey at 95 baccalaureate institutions nationwide. The results show that the strength of the relationship between having been a guest in a professor’s home and students’ academic self-concept varies by academic major. Findings also suggest that some aspects of departmental climate, such as a racially more diverse student body and greater faculty accessibility, can possibly magnify the beneficial effects of student–faculty interaction. The study discusses the theoretical and practical implications of the findings.