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Addressing college readiness through a positive deviance framework
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Content
Running head: COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 1
Addressing College Readiness through a Positive Deviance Framework
Christie A. Rainey
University of Southern California
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 2
Table of Contents
Abstract ............................................................................................................................... 4
Chapter 1: Introduction ...................................................................................................... 5
Statement of the Problem ...................................................................................... 10
Purpose of the Study ............................................................................................. 10
Definition of Terms............................................................................................... 12
Delimitations ......................................................................................................... 13
Limitations ............................................................................................................ 14
Significance of the Study ...................................................................................... 15
Chapter 2: Literature Review ........................................................................................... 19
College Readiness ................................................................................................. 19
Positive Deviance.................................................................................................. 40
Study Framework .................................................................................................. 51
Chapter 3: Methodology .................................................................................................. 55
Theoretical Framework ......................................................................................... 56
Sample................................................................................................................... 56
School-Related Data Sources ................................................................................ 64
Instruments/Measures ........................................................................................... 64
Data Collection Procedures ................................................................................... 65
Data Analysis ........................................................................................................ 67
Ethical Considerations .......................................................................................... 69
Chapter 4: Results ............................................................................................................ 71
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 3
Challenges Faced by Students Preparing for College ........................................... 71
Strategies Used to Achieve College Readiness .................................................... 88
School Efforts to Support College Readiness ..................................................... 118
Chapter Summary ............................................................................................... 126
Chapter 5: Discussion and Implications for Practice ..................................................... 127
Study Framework Revisited ................................................................................ 128
Implications for Practice ..................................................................................... 129
Study Challenges and Limitations ...................................................................... 142
Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 143
References ....................................................................................................................... 145
Appendix A: Information Sheet ..................................................................................... 153
Appendix B: General Recruitment Letter ...................................................................... 155
Appendix C: Student Interview Guide ........................................................................... 156
Appendix D: School Staff Interview Guide ................................................................... 157
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 4
Abstract
This exploratory study utilized a positive deviance theoretical framework to unveil the
challenges faced by students preparing for college, as well as the strategies used to
address these challenges and develop college readiness. To accomplish this, twelve
interviews were conducted with seven recent high school graduates and five school staff
members. Results revealed challenges tied to limited knowledge, family context,
community distractions, and access to academic resources. Additionally, students
leveraged numerous strategies, including focusing on school, self-regulating their
learning, and developing support systems. School staff emphasized the importance of
establishing high expectations and rigorous, consistent curriculum for students, sharing
college knowledge, and increasing family involvement. These findings have significant
implications for practice, revealing specific strategies that students can be explicitly
taught (e.g., learning and self-regulatory strategies) and approaches that can be taken by
school staff to support students’ college readiness efforts (e.g., strengthening the existing
curriculum and developing support systems for students and their families).
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 5
Chapter 1: Introduction
In recent years, the necessity of helping students developing college readiness—
defined as the amount of preparation needed in order to enroll and succeed in a credit-
bearing general education class at a higher education institution (Conley, 2007)—has
become increasingly more significant. Nearly 73 percent of growing occupations will
require a college degree (Dohm & Shniper, 2007); yet, few students are leaving high
school ready for college. In fact, American College Testing (ACT, 2011) recently
estimated that only 25 percent of students are college-ready in the four major subject
areas (English, reading, mathematics, and science) based on performance on the ACT
exam. Similarly, Greene and Winters (2005) reported that approximately 34 percent
leave high school qualified to attend a minimally selective college. These low levels of
college readiness are reflected in the remediation rates for mathematics, reading, and
writing, as approximately 42 percent of freshmen entering the community colleges and
20 percent of freshman entering public four-year universities require some form of
remediation (Barnes & Slate, 2010).
Los Angeles County, in particular, demonstrates low rates of college readiness.
According to the California Department of Education, in 2010-2011, approximately 51.3
percent of high school graduates in Los Angeles County schools completed the
University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) coursework
requirements (also referred to as the A-G requirements) with a grade of C or better.
Given that the cohort graduation rate was around 71.5 percent for all students that year, at
best only about 37 percent of students graduated having met these requirements.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 6
Further still, there is evidence that an achievement gap exists when comparing
college readiness rates of African Americans and Latinos to European Americans.
Approximately 40 percent of European American students graduate from high school
college-ready; whereas, only 23 percent of African-American students and 20 percent of
Latino students graduate college-ready (Greene & Winters, 2005). In 2010-2011, the
California Department of Education (CDE) numbers, available on the Education Data
Partnership (Ed-Data) website, reflected a similar gap in college readiness for Los
Angeles County schools, as defined by the completion of A-G coursework, although in
recent years the magnitude of this gap has been decreasing (http://www.ed-data.k12.ca.
us/App_Resx/EdDataClassic/fsTwoPanel.aspx?#!bottom=/_layouts/EdDataClassic/Acco
untability/performancereports.asp?reportNumber=1&tab=3&level=05&fyr=1011&count
y=19&district=00000&school=#graduateswithuc/csucourses). Overall, these statistics
suggest that students are leaving high school underprepared for postsecondary endeavors,
which has significant implications for their long-term educational success. Additionally,
although there have been slight increases in college-going rates among underrepresented
ethnic groups, these gains have not translated into higher graduation rates for these
groups (Roderick, Nagaoka, & Coca, 2009).
Several recommendations have been made and initiatives launched to address the
issue of college readiness. One approach has been to define the competencies expected
of students upon entering into a postsecondary institution. Indeed, representatives of the
California Community Colleges (CCC) and the UC and CSU systems prepared a
document describing academic literacy expected of entering students (ICAS, 2002).
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 7
Others have suggested a focus on building K-16 partnerships with the purpose of aligning
K-12 standards and the standards of postsecondary institutions, thus ensuring that the
curriculum adequately prepares students (e.g., Reid & Moore, 2008). Formative
assessment may also play a key role in ensuring college readiness, and interventions such
as the Early Assessment Program (EAP) have been used to redirect students so that they
graduate with the appropriate requirements (Gewertz, 2011).
Although these interventions are in place, a major issue continues to plague
college readiness efforts—difficulty in assessing whether students have learned the core
academic skills, content knowledge, and self-regulatory strategies necessary to be
successful in college. For example, in order to graduate, students are required to take the
California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE). However, a major problem arises in that
the CAHSEE assesses lower levels of content knowledge (e.g., tenth-grade English),
which is not in alignment with what students are expected know when they are
graduating ready for college (e.g., having successfully completed twelfth-grade
coursework). Similarly, the California Standards Test (CST) is only administered to
students through the eleventh grade. Moreover, neither the CAHSEE nor the CST taps
into other cognitive and metacognitive skills that students need in order to be successful
in the university setting (e.g., self-regulatory strategies).
In another attempt at redress, efforts were made to increase course requirements
(Conley, 2007). In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education
suggested that students’ academic underperformance could be attributed to their course-
taking patterns. Consequently, secondary educational institutions began implementing
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 8
more stringent curricular and graduation requirements; from 1982 to 1998, the average
number of required credits increased from 2.6 to 3.5 for mathematics and 2.2 to 3.2
credits for science (National Science Board, 2004). These increases in course
requirements, however, did not necessarily lead to increases in college readiness (Conley,
2007). One explanation for this is that school and individual context tied to attitudes and
perceptions—e.g., low expectations or standards—have a significant influence on student
academic performance, but are not addressed by this approach. Additionally, the
National Science Board (2004) suggested that it is the quality, not quantity, of
coursework that impacts students’ performance. Research indicated that involvement in
more advanced coursework was associated with gains in achievement, rather than
engagement in a greater number of lower-level courses.
Access to college preparatory coursework is another approach that has been
emphasized in the literature and in particular within LAUSD (which has the largest
enrollment of all the districts in Los Angeles County). Specifically, in LAUSD, efforts
have been made to ensure student access to coursework that satisfy the specific UC/CSU
A-G requirements. Despite these efforts, low levels of college readiness persist both
within the district (approximately 54.1 percent of the 62.4 percent of students who
graduate) and in the county as a whole. The influence of these efforts on Los Angeles
County’s overall number and proportion of graduates that completed the A-G
requirements is displayed in Table 1.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 9
Table 1
Los Angeles County Graduates with UC/CSU Required Courses
Academic
Year
Total Number of
Graduates
Total Number of
Graduates with
UC/CSU Courses
Percentage of
Graduates with
UC/CSU Courses
2000-2001 78,330 30,254 38.6%
2005-2006 85,009 33,028 38.9%
2010-2011 92,580 52,363 51.3%
Note. Data were retrieved from the Ed-Data system: http://www.ed-
data.k12.ca.us/App_Resx/EdDataClassic/fsTwoPanel.aspx?#!bottom=/_layouts/EdDataC
lassic/Accountability/performancereports.asp?reportNumber=1&tab=3&level=05&fyr=1
011&county=19&district=00000&school=#graduateswithuc/csucourses
These numbers show an increase of nearly 13 percent over the past ten years, with around
half of Los Angeles County high school graduates completing the UC/CSU coursework.
In some school districts, the data reveal a more prominent disparity. For example,
Compton Unified School District had a cohort graduation rate of about 57.8 percent in
2010-2011. Of the students who graduated, only 5.9 percent completed the UC/CSU
coursework (http://www.ed-data.k12.ca.us/App_Resx/EdDataClassic/fsTwoPanel.aspx
?#!bottom=/_layouts/EdDataClassic/Accountability/PerformanceReports.asp?tab=3&leve
l=06&ReportNumber=1&County=19&fyr=1011&District=73437#graduateswithuccsuco
urses). Thus, college readiness, particularly in Los Angeles County schools, continues to
be a pervasive, intractable problem.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 10
Statement of the Problem
College readiness is a persistent issue for schools within Los Angeles County.
This issue is exacerbated by the inadequacies of current approaches to assessing and
developing students’ college readiness, as well as limited knowledge regarding specific
strategies that can be used by students and others within the school community to
improve college readiness outcomes. Furthermore, the existing approaches have been
primarily focused on deficits, with attention to personal and situational/environmental
factors that negatively impact readiness, with very little attention to the specific
behavioral strategies that may facilitate students’ successes. Because college readiness
has implications for both the short- and long-term outcomes of students, strategies for
addressing this issue must be identified.
Purpose of the Study
Although the relationship between various college readiness indicators (e.g.,
achievement test scores, high school grades, high school curriculum, academic content
knowledge, and access to college knowledge) and its relationship to college attendance
was highlighted in the extant literature (e.g., Conley, 2007; ICAS, 2002; Reid & Moore,
2008), there was very little research on the specific strategies that students, teachers,
administrators, and others in the school context may use to help facilitate students’
college readiness. The purpose of this study was to identify the behaviors and strategies
of students who successfully completed college preparatory curriculum (e.g., UC/CSU
A-G requirements) and the school staff who supported these students, in a Southeast Los
Angeles high school that serves ethnic groups underrepresented in higher education.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 11
The positive deviance approach was used as the underlying theoretical framework
for the study. According to Pascale, Sternin and Sternin (2010), the positive deviance
approach utilizes asset-based inquiry, through which the community identifies individuals
or groups engaging in uncommon strategies that have enabled them to be more successful
than what is typically found in the community, given similar access to contextual
resources. The approach is particularly useful for intractable social issues for which a
technical solution does not exist and no other effective solutions have been identified.
Therefore, the issue of college readiness in Los Angeles fits the criteria for utilizing the
positive deviance approach, as the problem persists despite existing efforts to address it.
Within the context of the college readiness issue, the positive deviance approach
is useful for directing focus to the successful behaviors and strategies of students who
completed college readiness requirements, as well as the behaviors and strategies of those
who influence these students (e.g., teachers and counselors). In a typical positive
deviance inquiry, this would be accomplished utilizing qualitative techniques through
which the community drives inquiry, identifying both the problems and the solutions
based on their engagement in the process. This type of research supports sustainable
community change and improves student outcomes by generating knowledge about
successful behaviors and strategies, which informs the development and design of
interventions (Pascale et al., 2010). Thus, a positive deviance inquiry exploring college
readiness reveals the tangible behaviors used by individuals working to successfully
establish and/or support college readiness.
From this asset-based perspective, the current study sought to address the
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 12
following research questions:
1. What were the challenges faced by students who achieved college readiness
and the school staff who supported these students on their path?
2. What were the behaviors and strategies of these positive deviants?
3. How did positive deviants utilize these strategies and behaviors to facilitate
success?
Definition of Terms
There are a number of terms that will be referenced in the study. These terms are
defined as follows:
AB 540 Students: Students whose immigration status was undocumented and
consequently were unable to qualify for traditional forms of federal financial aid.
College Readiness: The completion of A-G coursework or comparable college
preparatory curriculum that meets the admission requirements for entry into the
UC, CSU, or other selective university system. Completion was assessed
indirectly, through the identification of students accepted into the UC system.
Cultural Capital: College knowledge that is transmitted within groups of closely
interconnected people, particularly in families.
English Language Learner: Students who did not learn English as their first
primary language.
First Generation Students: Students who were the first within their families to
attend college.
Positive Deviance: This term is defined based on the work of Pascale, Sternin,
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 13
and Sternin (2010) as “the observation that in every community or organization,
there are a few individuals or groups who have found uncommon practices and
behaviors that enable them to achieve better solutions to problems” than others
within the community “who face the same challenges and barriers” (p. 183).
Thus, in this study, positive deviance was the observation that there are students
engaging in practices and behaviors that enable them to graduate college-ready.
Positive Deviant: Individuals who “demonstrate[d] special or uncommon
behaviors and strategies that enable[d] [them] to overcome a problem without
special resources” (Pascale et al., 2008, p. 183). Consequently, in this study,
positive deviants were individuals who engaged in practices that enabled them to
achieve college readiness or helped others to become college-ready.
Underrepresented Student: This refers to a student belonging to an ethnic group
underrepresented in higher education—specifically, African American, Latino,
Native American, and/or Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander subgroups. These
ethnic group categories were delimited in accordance with the definitions
provided by the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. Representation
was evaluated in terms of the proportion of students attending higher education
institutions, relative to their total population. This category of student does not
include Asian Americans, who are overrepresented in higher education.
Delimitations
This study focused on exploring the strategies of positive deviants who graduated
from a Southeast Los Angeles high school that primarily serves communities
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 14
underrepresented in higher education. The definitions of college readiness, for the
purpose of identifying positive deviant students, were utilized in accordance with what
has been defined within Los Angeles County high schools. The sample of student
positive deviants were limited to recent high school graduates who have completed
college preparatory curriculum requirements (as evidenced by their acceptance to one of
the UC schools).
Limitations
There were several limitations to this study. Because research was conducted at a
single point in time, this study was not able to evaluate how individual strategies have
changed over time. This study assumed that participation in college preparatory or A-G
coursework adequately prepared students for college, as there were very few other
indicators available to identify college-ready students that did not require accessing
individual student records (which would have created student information privacy
issues). However, participation in college preparatory or A-G coursework did not
necessarily result in students demonstrating college readiness. Interviews were the
primary method of data collection which means that there may be biases in terms of self-
report. Sampling was purposeful, to identify the widest array of strategies possible.
However, the strategies identified may not be representative of all college-ready positive
deviants within the broader educational community. Finally, although the behaviors of
positive deviants were identified, no conclusions can be drawn to indicate that those
specific behaviors were attributable to the positive deviants’ successes.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 15
Significance of the Study
College readiness has important impacts for the individual, as well as for the
immediate community and broader society. Individual outcomes are hindered by lack of
college readiness, which in turn deprives the community of resources that this individual
may otherwise have brought (e.g., knowledge, skills, and economic and social capital
resources). These individual outcomes are also tied to broader economic outcomes.
Individual Outcomes
When students who are unprepared for college begin their postsecondary
education, they are often required to take remedial courses to prepare them for degree-
applicable coursework. According to Merisotis and Phipps (2000), approximately 40
percent of freshman community college students needed math remediation and 20 percent
needed English remediation. At some schools, these remediation rates are much greater.
The outcomes for students who are required to participate in remedial courses are poorer,
as remediation is related to lower completion rates (Bound, Lovenheim, & Turner, 2007;
Calcagno, Crosta, Bailey, & Jenkins, 2006). These outcomes seem intuitive, for at a
practical level, if students are unable to pass college-level coursework, then they will not
be able to complete the degree requirements and could potentially face academic
probation and eventually dismissal from the college/university (depending on the
institution). There is also a serious financial aspect to having students complete remedial
courses, as these courses are taken at great cost to both the individual and the institution
but confer no credits toward degree completion (Olson, 2006). In contrast, students who
are prepared when they begin their postsecondary studies tend to have higher
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 16
postsecondary completion rates. Furthermore, postsecondary educational attainment is
associated with higher wages and earnings over the course of an individual’s lifetime, as
well as improved health outcomes, which may be tied to access to additional resources
(Goldberg & Smith, 2008).
Broader Societal Impacts
Individual outcomes directly impact the family and local community. Both
benefit from the increased income tied to postsecondary education, which contributes to
economic growth. Additionally, postsecondary educational attainment is seen as a means
for social mobility (Deary et al., 2005), attained through the building of cultural capital
(Barnes & Slate, 2010).
Individuals unprepared for college and unable to complete their degrees are less
employable, as the job market increasingly requires higher levels of education. In fact, as
mentioned previously, nearly three quarters of growing occupational fields will require
some form of postsecondary training (Dohm & Shniper, 2007). Moore, Slate, Edmonson,
Combs, Bustamante, and Onwuegbuzie (2010) reported that as postsecondary education
increases, workforce participation also increases and unemployment decreases. Higher
levels of unemployment in certain communities may negatively impact the economy, in
that fewer taxes are flowing into the economy from a variety of angles (e.g., income,
sales). Lower consumption of goods and resources may mean the loss of private
businesses that employ people, which also negatively impacts the economy because there
are fewer jobs for the same number of people (higher rates of unemployment).
According to Moore et al. (2010), college readiness reduces the amount of financial aid
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 17
distributed, since students are able to complete their programs in a timelier manner. They
also reasoned that individuals have poorer economic outcomes without college, and the
community loses economic benefits when an individual does not attend college.
The benefits of an education extend beyond economic factors. According to
Goldberg & Smith (2008), increased education is associated with reduced probability of
an individual committing a crime. Additionally, educational attainment is also tied to
better citizenship, particularly in the form of increased voting.
The college readiness gap and the disparity between students’ aspirations for
college and their actual attainment of that goal is another important consideration. As
mentioned previously, students in underrepresented groups are underperforming,
compared to their European American counterparts (Greene & Winters, 2005; Moore et
al., 2010). Barnes and Slate (2010) attributed the witnessed gaps to the greater amounts
of resources available to groups able to attain higher levels of college readiness and
complete postsecondary education. It is important to note that social and cultural capital
play a key role in this gap. Among those in higher socioeconomic statuses (SES),
cultural reproduction is more prevalent; whereas, cultural reproduction is much less
prevalent among lower SES counterparts. Thus, students belonging to lower SES
families may be at a disadvantage because of the diminished ability of lower SES
families to create cultural reproduction.
Organization of the Study
This manuscript is organized into five chapters. Chapter 1 provided an
introduction to the topic of college readiness and articulated the problem and its
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 18
significance in the current educational context. Chapter 2 discusses the definition of
college readiness, how it is assessed, the requisite skills to be college-ready, and the
factors that contribute to college readiness. Additionally, this chapter presents the
concept of positive deviance and the research that has been conducted utilizing this
approach. Chapter 3 details the methodology used in developing and implementing the
study. Chapter 4 describes the results of the qualitative analyses. Finally, Chapter 5
discusses the implications for research and practice.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 19
Chapter 2: Literature Review
The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the extant literature on college readiness,
including broad conceptions of college readiness and knowledge about the factors that
contribute to it. This chapter will also describe the positive deviance framework as a
non-traditional approach to exploring behaviors and strategies that can favorably impact
outcomes. Finally, the conceptual framework for the study, which integrates the existing
literature on college readiness and the positive deviance approach, will be presented.
College Readiness
While the topic of college readiness is widely discussed and presented as an
important and relevant issue in K-12 education, it is often difficult to pinpoint exactly
what it means for individuals to be college-ready. The purpose of this section is to
establish a definition of college readiness and the means by which college readiness can
be assessed. Additionally, this section will explore the content knowledge and skills
expected of students when they enter into postsecondary education. Finally, the factors
associated with students’ college readiness will be discussed.
Definition of College Readiness
Conley (2007) defined college readiness as “the level of preparation a student
needs to enroll and succeed—without remediation—in a credit-bearing general education
course at a postsecondary institution that offers a baccalaureate degree or transfer to a
baccalaureate program” (p. 5). Success was defined as the ability to complete entry-level
courses with a level of proficiency that allows the student to progress to the next course
in sequence or within the subject area. Thus, college readiness entails the ability to enroll
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 20
in non-remedial, degree-applicable or transferrable coursework, and complete the course
at a high enough level to move forward. ACT (2011) had a similar definition, and also
expanded the scope of the postsecondary institution to include trade and technical
schools.
College readiness is often assessed through the use of various performance
indicators. Table 2 briefly describes the most common measures of college readiness.
Table 2
Common Indicators of College Readiness
Indicator Description
High School
Coursework and Grades
Prescribed curriculum earned with a specific grade or higher
to meet the admission requirements of selective universities
High School Exit Exams Exams that assess whether students have met a certain level
of content knowledge prior to graduating from high school
Standardized Test
Scores
Performance on standardized tests, such as the California
Standards Test (CST) and National Assessment of
Educational Progress (NAEP), to indicate the current level of
content knowledge
Early Assessment
Program
CSU-developed assessment to help students identify areas
that require remediation so that the content knowledge and
skills can be developed prior to leaving high school
Common Core
Standards
Establishment and achievement of core content knowledge, as
agreed upon by numerous stakeholders nationally
College-Level Indicators First-year college performance (e.g., courses taken, grades
earned), as well as completion rates, that are post-hoc
indicators of whether the student entered college with a
sufficient level of preparedness
Achievement Test
Scores
Achievement tests, such as the SAT or ACT, which can be
used on its own and in conjunction with other factors as a
predictor of student academic performance in college
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 21
These indicators will be discussed in greater detail in the following sections.
High school coursework and grades. According to Conley (2007), one of the
most common approaches to assessing college readiness is to evaluate the coursework
taken and grades earned in high school. Course titles, perceived rigor or challenge level,
and grades are assessed by means of transcript analysis and other analytical tools.
High schools often have a prescribed set of coursework that students must
complete to earn their diploma. However, in addition to high school requirements, many
postsecondary institutions require that students complete coursework in accordance with
specific college preparatory curriculum. In particular, public universities in the state of
California have identified curriculum that students are required to complete prior to
admission into the UC or CSU systems—this curriculum is often referred to as the A-G
requirements. Table 3 describes high school graduation requirements for students in
California, as specified by the CDE, as well as the A-G requirements
(http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/gs/hs/hsgrtable.asp).
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 22
Table 3
High School Graduation and UC/CSU Admission (A-G) Course Requirements
High School
Subject Area
State Mandated
Requirements for
Graduation
UC Requirements for
Freshman Admissions
CSU Requirements for
Freshman Admissions
English Three years Four years of approved
courses
Four years of approved
courses
Mathematics Two years, including
Algebra I
Three years, including
algebra, geometry, and
intermediate algebra
Three years, including
algebra, geometry, and
intermediate algebra
Social Studies/
Science
Three years of
history/social studies,
including one year of
US history and
geography; one year of
world history, culture,
and geography; one
semester of American
government and civics,
and one semester of
economics
Two years of history/
social science,
including one year of
US history or one-half
year of US history and
one-half year of civics
or American
government; and one
year of world history,
cultures, and geography
Two years, including
one year of US history
or US history and
government, and one
year of another
approved social science
Science Two years, including
biological and physical
sciences
Two years with lab
required, chosen from
biology, chemistry, and
physics; three years
recommended
Two years, including
one year of biological
science and one year of
physical science with
lab
Foreign
Language
One year of either
visual and performing
arts, foreign language,
or career technical
education
Two years in same
language required; three
years recommended
Two years in same
language required
Visual and
Performing
Arts
One year of either
visual and performing
arts, foreign language,
or career technical
education
One year of visual and
performing arts chosen
from the following:
dance, drama/theater,
music, or visual art
One year of visual and
performing arts chosen
from the following:
dance, drama/theater,
music, or visual art
Physical
Education
Two years Not applicable Not applicable
Electives Not applicable One year One year
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 23
A comparison of the prescribed coursework revealed that high school students must
generally complete fewer requirements to graduate than what is needed to be granted
admission to the California public university systems. However, even when students
complete the additional admission requirements, students still may not meet the definition
of college readiness. For example, the CSU system reported that 49.3 percent of students
entering into their universities still require remediation
(http://www.asd.calstate.edu/remediation/10/Rem_Sys_fall2010.htm). Thus, graduation
from high school (with or without a college preparatory curriculum completed) is
insufficient by itself to judge whether or not a student is college-ready (Gewertz, 2011).
The disconnect between high school graduation, completion of college
preparatory coursework, and actual first-year course-taking outcomes is unsurprising. As
Conley (2007) explained, the requirements and expectations of students engaged in
college-level work are significantly different from what is expected of students in high
school. There are distinctions in terms of the student-teacher relationship, as well as the
interactions that take place among students. Courses progress at a much more rapid pace,
and students are expected to accomplish greater amounts of work in a shorter period of
time. Additionally, these courses provide more emphasis on critical thinking than
students may have encountered in the past. In college settings, students are expected to
have self-regulatory and metacognitive strategies that allow them to function as
independent learners. Thus, the differences between college and high school lie not just
in content knowledge, but in the types of learning strategies students must utilize in order
to be successful.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 24
Some suggested that high school rank and grades (e.g., GPA) may provide some
indication of how well one can expect a student to perform in college. However, the use
of these factors is an issue, as the meaning of these indicators may be inconsistent across
high schools (Porter & Polikoff, 2011). That is, it is difficult to determine what high
school GPA and rank mean because of the varying degrees of academic rigor in
curriculum across schools. Despite these issues, there is still some validity in terms of
using high school grades and coursework because these indicators have been found to be
predictive of both college-going rates and first-year college GPA. In general, greater
accuracy in terms of gauging content knowledge may be better served by using other
forms of assessment.
In addition, studies have proposed that a more rigorous curriculum is the key to
improving college readiness. For example, students’ participation in AP coursework has
been used as an indicator of readiness (Conley, 2007). Students who pass AP tests are
granted college-level credits when these scores are reported to the postsecondary
institution; thus, the implicit understanding of AP testing is that passage of the test is
equivalent to success in college-level coursework, and consequently indicates college
readiness. However, Conley (2007) noted that solely focusing on the completion of high
school requirements and modifying curriculum has been insufficient to address college
readiness. Because of the multifaceted nature of college readiness, any plan that is
designed to address the issue must address other aspects of preparedness, as well.
High school exit exams. High school exit exams have also been identified as
potential indicators of readiness (Roderick et al., 2009). In California, students must
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 25
complete the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE) in addition to the regular
high school curriculum in order to graduate. The CAHSEE
(http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/hs/overview.asp) was developed in an effort to improve
academic achievement and to ensure that students leave high school competent in the
areas of mathematics, reading, and writing, sufficient to support them in their
postsecondary efforts. All students attending high school in California must successfully
pass the CAHSEE to receive their high school diploma, although a few English language
learners and students with disabilities may be exempt from this requirement. The goal is
to ensure that students who require remediation to develop the desired skills are able to
receive support early in their high school careers, so that they can develop these skills
before the end of their senior year.
There are two components to the CAHSEE—English language arts (ELA) and
mathematics. The ELA portion of the CAHSEE assesses vocabulary, decoding,
comprehension, and analysis of various forms of written text. The writing section of the
ELA portion addresses grammar, spelling, and other English language conventions, as
well as writing strategies. The mathematics portion assesses California mathematics
standards for the sixth and seventh grades, as well as Algebra 1, statistics, and geometry.
Students are first tested in their sophomore year in high school, and if they fail any part of
the CAHSEE, they may retake it up two times in their junior year and up to five times in
their senior year. To pass the CAHSEE, students must earn a scale score of 350 on both
sections of the test; or approximately 55 percent correct on the mathematics section and
60 percent correct on the ELA section (http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/hs/cefcahsee.asp).
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 26
The most prominent issue with using the CAHSEE to measure college readiness
is that the test does not assess the knowledge that students should have as they are
graduating in the twelfth grade (Ulluci & Spencer, 2009). Instead, it is assesses middle
school content standards (http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/hs/overview.asp), which is far
below what students need in order to succeed at the college level (ICAS, 2002). Because
of this, the CAHSEE has limited use as a means of assessing college readiness.
Standardized test scores. Each year, until eleventh grade, California students
are required to engage in standardized testing—specifically, students are required to
complete the California Standards Test (CST). The CST is a criterion-referenced
measure of achievement in English language arts, mathematics, history/social science,
and science (http://starsamplequestions.org/about.html). Based on their CST scores,
students are classified in each subject as advanced, proficient, basic, below basic, or far
below basic (http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/cefstar.asp). The target is for students to
function at or above proficient level.
As a college readiness measure, the CST is also insufficient for several reasons.
First, high school students complete their last CST while in eleventh grade; thus, at best
the CST alone assesses eleventh grade content standards, rather than the entirety of what
students have learned as part of their high school program. Additionally, while the CST
measures what students have achieved in meeting grade-level content standards, it does
not assess some of the other cognitive and non-cognitive skills and learning strategies
necessary for student success at the postsecondary level. Further still, Conley (2007)
suggested that interpreting successful performance on a state test is challenging because
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 27
inconsistencies from state to state exist. Of equal concern is the heavy emphasis of
standardized tests in measures of accountability, which may lead educators to narrow the
curriculum to only “teach to the test.”
Another standardized test that has recently gained attention is the National
Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP; http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/nr/). The
NAEP was developed by the US Department of Education as an approach to measuring
student achievement in a way that allows results to be compared both within the state and
across states. This has a great deal of potential for assessing college readiness, because it
allows for a standard way of measuring and comparing the achievement of students in
diverse settings. However, because there is less participation in this testing program, it
currently has limited use as a college readiness assessment tool.
Early assessment program. CDE, the State Board of Education, and CSU
collaborated to develop an Early Assessment Program (EAP) to help students assess their
readiness for mathematics and English at the college level (Gewertz, 2011). The goal of
the EAP is to provide students with the opportunity to address the areas in which they
need improvement while still in high school. As a result, this early warning system
ensures that students do not enter the CSU system requiring remediation
(http://www.calstate.edu/eap/index.shtml). The EAP testing takes place during a
student’s junior year of high school. Questions are added onto the CST, and students
may elect to take the EAP section with its additional questions and writing sample (one
45-minute essay). All of the EAP-relevant items are then scored into a special subset that
reflects the CSU standards.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 28
The EAP is useful as a tool for assessing college readiness because it actually
reflects what faculty at the CSU schools are looking for in terms of readiness with regard
to reading, writing, and logical reasoning. The EAP, which is based on the placement
tests given at the California State University, assesses specific types of knowledge—e.g.,
the ability to select and carry out strategies to solve problems for mathematics
(http://www.calstate.edu/sas/documents/focusonmath.pdf); the ability to understand,
analyze, and evaluate text and to form sound arguments for English language arts
(http://www.calstate.edu/SAS/EPT.pdf). These assessment efforts, however, do not delve
into whether students successfully develop the self-regulatory strategies required in order
to be successful at the college level. Thus, not all aspects of college readiness are
assessed by the EAP.
Common core standards. The common core standards initiative
(http://www.corestandards.org/) is based on an effort to establish consistent curriculum
across states, with a focus on the content knowledge necessary to prepare students for
postsecondary education and career/technical training, as well as for participation in the
workforce. Based on a collaborative effort between various school staff, experts, and
other community stakeholders within and across state lines, standards were developed in
accordance with the most effective exemplars available. The common core standards
have emphasized content related to English language arts and mathematics.
As a new initiative, there is still much to be learned about how the standards will
be implemented. However, the College Board (2010) and others have endorsed the
common core standards and its goals, with the expectation that indeed if the standards are
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 29
taught in the way specified that students may leave high school college-ready. Its
usefulness as a college readiness assessment measure remains to be determined.
College-level indicators. Numerous college-level indicators are available that
assess whether or not students entered into postsecondary institutions prepared for the
work ahead of them. These indicators include first-year college GPA, avoidance of
remedial coursework, completion of an undergraduate degree, and undergraduate
cumulative GPA (Porter & Polikoff, 2011). Looking at college-level indicators is useful
when considered jointly with high school-level predictors, in order to identify which high
school-level factors can predict whether students are college-ready.
Achievement test scores. Both ACT (2011) and SAT (Wyatt, Wiley, Camara, &
Proestler, 2012) have been used as a means of assessing college readiness. In terms of
the ACT, College Readiness Benchmarks were established. ACT evaluates the threshold
at which students are considered college-ready (in terms of ACT scores) and relates it to
a specific outcome—the threshold at which students have about a 50 percent chance of
earning a grade of B or better, or approximately 75 percent chance of earning a grade of
C or better in their first-year of college, specifically in credit-bearing coursework. For
the SAT, an Academic Rigor Index is generated by looking at the relationship between
SAT scores, high school GPA, first-year college GPA, and coursework completed (Wyatt
et al., 2012). In both instances, achievement test scores are evaluated in conjunction with
college performance—they have been established as predictors of college success, and by
means of this as a way of assessing whether or not students are prepared for college.
Similar to state-based standardized tests, achievement tests such as ACT and SAT may
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 30
also be difficult to interpret due to the variation in participation rates across high schools
(Roderick et al., 2009).
Summary. Numerous indicators exist to help identify students who are college-
ready, including various types of achievement and content standards tests, high school
exit exams, and high school coursework and grades. While there are strengths and
weaknesses among many of the indicators, taken together they provide a more
comprehensive picture of a student’s college readiness, as well as allow for the
identification of factors that may predict how well students do when they enter into a
postsecondary institution. Ultimately, the most accurate approaches to assessing college
readiness are ones that use multiple indicators (Wiley et al., 2010), such as the College
Board’s Academic Rigor Index (Wyatt et al., 2012) and ACT’s (2011) College Readiness
Benchmarks, which incorporate both secondary and postsecondary measures.
Requisite Skills for College Readiness
Multiple sets of skills are needed in order to succeed in college. One key aspect is
academic content knowledge (Conley, 2007). It is generally accepted that students
require knowledge in mathematics, sciences, social sciences, world languages, and the
arts. The importance of this knowledge is emphasized by the fact that selective
institutions generally require students to demonstrate understanding in these areas, as
evidenced by their high school coursework (which was discussed in the previous section).
In addition, the Intersegmental Committee of the Academic Senates (ICAS) of the
California Community Colleges, the California State University, and the University of
California also noted the importance of reading and writing skills, as well as critical
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 31
thinking and technology skills. In a statement published by ICAS (2002) regarding
academic literacy, faculty expectations regarding student preparedness were presented.
The major areas included in the report are (1) academic literacy across content areas, (2)
habits of mind and critical thinking, (3) reading, writing, and the connection between the
two activities, (4) listening and speaking, (5) technology, and (6) preparation of English
language learners for the postsecondary context. These general areas of concern overlap
with the requisite skills articulated by others studying college readiness (e.g., Barnes &
Slate, 2010; Conley, 2007).
Content knowledge. Students entering postsecondary institutions are expected to
be acquainted with writing and research, as well as have knowledge in the core academic
subjects such as those noted in the A-G requirements and other college preparatory
curricula (Conley, 2007). ICAS (2002) reemphasized its importance, as much of the
concerns expressed by faculty are centered on students’ ability to engage in critical
reading, writing, listening, and thinking in a variety of areas. Also of importance is the
ability to utilize technology in order to find and evaluate sources of information, as well
as to engage in basic technological tasks that are omnipresent in current times (e.g., email
use, word processing, and web-based research through internet browsers).
Critical thinking and other cognitive strategies. Throughout the various skill
and knowledge areas discussed by ICAS (2002), the ability to think critically was deeply
emphasized. This skill was described in terms of “habits of mind” (p. 3), explaining the
characteristics expected of students—e.g., curiosity and openness to participation in
intellectual pursuits, a desire to engage new ideas and to evaluate one’s own beliefs, an
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 32
ability to critically engage what is taking place in the environment, and personal
responsibility for one’s learning. Engagement in self-advocacy was also identified as
important to student success.
Conley’s (2007) thoughts mirrored what was articulated by ICAS. He described
several cognitive strategies at the heart of the pursuit of knowledge. Again, intellectual
openness and curiosity were noted as important, as well as the ability to critically engage
by analyzing the views of others, receiving constructive criticism, and adapting one’s
views by incorporating new and relevant evidence. The ability to interpret situations,
select strategies with precision, and engage in complex problem-solving with both routine
and non-routine tasks were also identified as requisite skills for success in college. On a
related note, both Conley (2007) and Barnes and Slate (2010) highlighted the importance
of self-regulated learning and academic strategies from which more complex behaviors
such as critical thinking, problem solving, and effective communication are launched.
Contextual knowledge and cultural capital. Beyond these skills, contextual
knowledge about college is necessary for students to be able to navigate the environment
(Conley, 2007). This is particularly significant when students are the first generation in
their family to attend college and thus have no family members to guide them through the
process (essentially, lacking cultural capital in the form of college knowledge). Systemic
knowledge is essential, since it facilitates students’ progress through the system—they
are then familiar with the norms, values, and standards for interacting in the college
context. Indeed, contextual knowledge helps students develop the interpersonal skills
necessary to manage interactions within, as well as adapt to, the system.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 33
Summary. In summary, there are numerous areas in which students must
develop skills in order to be considered college-ready. Such areas include English
language skills, such as reading and writing, as well as critical thinking skills, a mindset
conducive to intellectual pursuit, and metacognitive and self-regulatory strategies that
support their intellectual efforts. Additionally, contextual knowledge about
postsecondary education (cultural capital) also plays an important role in ensuring that
students are able to navigate the postsecondary educational system.
Factors Influencing College Readiness
A review of the literature revealed that curriculum, formative feedback,
assessment, cultural capital, and students’ interpersonal relationships were related to
building college readiness.
Curriculum and formative feedback. According to ACT (2011), there are
several aspects of the high school experience that influence students’ college readiness.
These factors are (1) clear performance standards, (2) rigorous course work, (3) early
monitoring and intervention, and (4) data-driven decision-making. A rigorous set of
content standards is necessary to guide the courses students take, and there must be clear
indicators in terms of how to determine the threshold for having met the college readiness
criteria. As noted previously, this is an ongoing issue, as college readiness in itself is
difficult to define and assess. Early monitoring and intervention allows students to
engage in efforts to remediate early, to ensure that they are leaving high school with the
foundational skills needed to be successful. ACT recommended assessing students in
upper elementary and middle school, which is far earlier than when the EAP is
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 34
implemented to assess college readiness. Thus, a problem exists in terms of ensuring that
struggling students are identified and helped early enough in their academic careers to
impact their college readiness outcomes.
Further still, in a qualitative study conducted by Reid and Moore (2008),
participation in AP and college preparatory coursework was tied to increased college
readiness of students. This was especially the case for participation in English courses.
Students also expressed that academic, study, and time-management skills would have
better prepared them for college. However, an issue arises when considering the varying
degrees to which such strategies may be taught, and in some instances students may
never receive direct instruction on these strategies.
Student access to a college preparatory curriculum is another factor influencing
college readiness. Finding general knowledge about the topic has been difficult;
however, local knowledge via LAUSD has yielded information regarding the
accessibility of coursework that satisfy UC/CSU A-G requirements (Lopez, Rickles, &
Valdes, 2008). One key finding revealed by Lopez et al. (2008) is that various aspects of
the implementation of the A-G initiative were not being fully actualized. For example,
the report indicated that secondary math initiatives and seventh grade English language
arts lessons were not being fully implemented at LAUSD school sites. Additionally,
Rickles (2005) found that LAUSD students were generally enrolling in A-G courses, and
that high schools were providing a sufficient number of A-G courses in order to maintain
reasonable class sizes. However, enrollment tended to be biased toward mainstream
students, with English language learners and students with disabilities being
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 35
underrepresented in these courses.
Further still, Rickles and White (2005) revealed that retention of LAUSD students
in A-G coursework was low, and this issue was particularly prominent when analyzing
first-year retention rates (from ninth to tenth grade). The results of their study suggested
that some of the A-G courses (e.g., Algebra, geometry, and laboratory sciences) taken
within the first year may have functioned as gatekeeper courses, impacting the progress
of these students to complete the coursework throughout the remainder of their program.
In LAUSD, at the end of four years, only half of the students remained enrolled in
courses that satisfied the A-G requirements, and of those students only about a quarter of
them actually passed the coursework with the minimum grade needed for it to be
UC/CSU-eligible (“C”). These rates were lower for African American and Latino
students, as well as for English language learners and special education students, which
highlighted the achievement gap that exists in attaining college readiness. Thus, the
freshman year A-G courses served as a barrier to students’ college readiness, halting
students from pursuing additional coursework and thus impacting their ability to graduate
college-ready.
College preparatory programs, such as Advancement via Individual
Determination (AVID; http://www.avid.org/sta_avidsecondary.html), also appeared to
have an impact on student outcomes (Reid & Moore, 2008), as they often teach strategies
to students in an effort to prepare them for postsecondary education. AVID is a
structured program that targets students who are academically underperforming and are
capable and motivated to engage in extensive efforts to complete the demanding AVID
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 36
curriculum. The primary goal of the curriculum is to accelerate learning, rather than
remediate, and students are taught critical academic strategies tied to writing, inquiry,
collaboration, and reading, which ultimately is aligned with what is expected of college
students (ICAS, 2002). These particular academic strategies strongly influence students’
college readiness (as noted in the prior section) and may in fact represent best practices in
terms of helping students to prepare for college—that is, direct instruction on academic
and self-regulatory strategies can provide students with the skills they need to succeed.
However, due to resource constraints and the highly personalized nature of the program,
access to the AVID curriculum is limited in many schools, thus impacting students’
ability to access it.
Assessment. As noted previously, assessing college readiness can be a challenge.
The issues tied to assessment can be further compounded when explored in terms of race
and ethnicity. Walpole, McDonough, Bauer, Gibson, Kanyi, and Toliver (2005)
emphasized the discrepancy between the performance of African American and Latino
students and their Asian American and European American counterparts on college
admissions tests, noting that the performance of the former set of students was
significantly lower. One of the explanations provided for this discrepancy is that these
students simply did not have the resources to adequately prepare for the tests. For
example, none of the underrepresented ethnic minority students in the Walpole et al.
(2005) study reporting having access to major preparation courses (e.g., Princeton
Review), nor did they have access to private tutoring. When these students lack the test
knowledge and access to the resources that would help them perform well, a cultural
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 37
discrepancy can emerge in terms of preparation for the assessment, which negatively
impacts their ability to compete in the college admissions process.
Cultural capital. Cultural capital is an important factor shaping the development
of college readiness, and it is influential because of its pivotal role in supporting students’
academic achievement. According to Gándara (2002), cultural capital is knowledge
regarding how educational systems work and how to manage these resources. It is a
multifaceted concept (Hagedorn & Tierney, 2002), that involves the ability to leverage
resources for the benefit of the student (Gándara, 2002).
One of the ways in which cultural capital is cultivated and transmitted is by means
of family involvement—in particular, through active engagement with school staff in
order to generate the best opportunities for students (Gándara, 2002; Holcomb-McCoy,
2010). College opportunities for children are shaped by parental involvement, as well as
parents’ educational attainment. College-educated parents communicate both implicitly
and explicitly to their children to follow in their footsteps and attend college (Rowan-
Kenyon et al., 2008), transmitting this form of cultural capital to their children. When
students and their families lack this type of cultural capital, it is difficult to see past the
various barriers that exist in their context—e.g., limited financial resources and the
perception of college as unaffordable (Grodsky & Jones, 2007; Perna, 2006), immigration
and Latino students’ generational status in the United States (Ojeda & Flores, 2008), and
class-based structural inequalities and social stratification (Aronson, 2008).
Limited cultural capital is one of the key issues faced by underrepresented groups,
in particular Latinos, in trying to prepare for college (Gándara, 2002; Gándara &
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 38
Contreras, 2009). Lack of college knowledge is frequently discussed as a factor that
negatively impacts college readiness, and in reference to ethnic minority groups it is often
presented in the light that these families simply lack college knowledge and thus are
unable to adequately support their children’s college aspirations.
It is important to note that parents who do not have direct experience with or
knowledge of the college context still find ways of supporting their families and
maintaining high aspirations for their students (Gándara & Contreras, 2009). In fact, Jun
and Colyar (2002) suggested that parental involvement varies based on social class and
racial/ethnic background. To simply state that African American and Latino families are
less involved is inaccurate—rather, they differ from European American and Asian
American families in terms of the types and levels of involvement. For example,
authoritarian parenting styles of ethnic minority parents were tied to greater levels of
supervision of teenagers’ daily activities; whereas, supervision of Asian American and
European American teenagers declined as the students grew older. An examination of
the parenting practices of African American and Latino parents revealed that these
families maintained more rules and communication with their teens, as well. The authors
also discussed a study that described how African American parents were “more likely to
conduct family discussions, attend school meetings, and contact teachers” (p. 198), as
compared with European American, Asian American and Latino parents. Thus, although
college knowledge may not be overtly transmitted, ethnic minority parents still structured
the home environment and sought opportunities to enable their children’s success.
In addition to specifics about college knowledge and guidance/structure designed
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 39
to help students achieve well academically, cultural capital is also cultivated in the form
of language development beginning in infancy. Indeed, language development during
children’s first three years of life can have a significant impact, such that their
accomplishments in these early years can predict their academic performance—in
particular, language skill and reading comprehension—when they reach middle
childhood (Hart & Risley, 2003). Students arrive at school with a wide array of
experiences that result in varying degrees of prior knowledge. Furthermore, the way this
unfolds for English language learners is of even greater concern. When students enter the
US educational system without having English as their primary language, they are placed
at a keen disadvantage.
When parents were unable to provide students with cultural capital, schools and
other family members intervened. Older college-going siblings sometimes filled the role
a parent would have played by providing much needed college knowledge to students
(Ceja, 2006). Additionally, connections to school staff (e.g., teachers, counselors, and
administrators) also helped to build student knowledge because this was often the means
by which information was shared regarding the college process. Encouraging the staff-
student connection helped to minimize missed opportunities, increase student access to
resources, and reinforce college knowledge (Reid & Moore, 2008).
The importance of family involvement and cultural capital was clearly highlighted
in the literature; however, it remained focused on explicating the importance of cultural
capital and the steps that parents take to support their children. More research is needed
to delve into why and how family involvement influences students to proactively engage
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 40
specifically in behaviors that promote college readiness and teaches students the requisite
skills to be successful in a college setting.
Summary. Overall, the literature on the factors that contribute to college
readiness tended to be mostly focused on the role of curriculum and high school
coursework. Cultural capital also played a central role in helping students gain
knowledge about the postsecondary context; the relationships that students had with
various adults in the educational context and at home ensured that students were able to
recognize and take advantage of the opportunities available to them. Some of the
implications of the extant research are that perhaps college readiness could be facilitated
if (1) approaches could be developed to help students engage in more rigorous curriculum
and be better prepared for various assessments of college readiness, and (2) knowledge
regarding the strategies taught by existing intervention programs could be translated into
tangible behaviors that could be utilized by individuals without access to those resources.
The existing gaps in the research regarding these behaviors were significant, and more
exploratory research is needed to advance an approach to developing college readiness
via specific behavioral strategies. This research could be developed through the use of
the positive deviance approach, which is discussed in the next section.
Positive Deviance
The purpose of this section is to present the positive deviance framework. To
accomplish this, the history of the approach will first be discussed. Next, positive
deviance is presented as a construct and defined. Finally, research regarding situations in
which the positive deviance approach has been used will be presented.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 41
Positive Deviance Approach and How It Differs from Other Approaches to Change
The positive deviance approach is a form of inquiry based on the idea that among
groups of people experiencing challenges there are individuals who have unique
behaviors and strategies that enable them to overcome these challenges. It is used
primarily with persistent, intractable problems not successfully addressed by other
solutions. The approach has been used in diverse contexts, from public health to business
to education.
According to Pascale and Sternin (2005), the positive deviance approach differs
from typical approaches to organizational or community change. The key differences are
reflected in how leadership is conceptualized and how change initiatives are
implemented. First, rather than the leader owning and driving the change process from
the outside, the leader acts as a facilitator within the positive deviance inquiry process—
the community owns the change process. Also, rather than focusing on the deficits and
why individuals are doing poorly, the positive deviance framework focuses on the assets
within the community and what individuals are doing well. In this approach, the
community is expected to “act their way into a new way of thinking” (p. 4), rather than
the reverse. Because the process is community-driven, change occurs from the inside out
and consequently results in changes that are more sustainable and replicable.
History
The Positive Deviance Initiative (PDI; http://www.positivedeviance.org/)
described the history of positive deviance inquiry, from the early 1990s to the present.
According to PDI, the approach was first presented as a concept tied to research
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 42
conducted by Zeitlin, Ghassemi, and Mansour (1990) and Zeitlan (1991) on food and
nutrition. A study was conducted to address issues of malnutrition by exploring positive
deviants’ successful behaviors within communities experiencing poor outcomes.
Specifically, focus was directed to the children who were better nourished than others
within the same community. This asset-based approach of identifying strategies was
encouraged by Zeitlin and her colleagues to address the issue and to create change at the
community level.
Later, the ideas presented by Zeitlin and her colleagues were adapted by Sternin,
Sternin, and their colleagues, in an effort to promote behavioral and social change,
initially in public health-related projects (e.g., addressing child malnutrition in Vietnam;
Pascale et al., 2010). The approach soon began to be used on a local, national, and
international scale by a variety of governmental and non-governmental organizations to
address a wide array of issues, within and beyond the domain of public health.
Conceptualizing Positive Deviance
Spreitzer and Sonenshein (2004) presented four major sociological approaches to
conceptualizing positive deviance: statistical, supraconformity, reactive, and normative.
The statistical approach is conceptualized in terms of behaviors falling on a normal
distribution curve. Deviants are the outliers at the far end of the curve, with positive
deviants as those furthest on the right end. The supraconformity approach relies on
observing individuals’ exceptionally high levels of conformity to norms. In fact, such a
high level of conformity is actually outside the established patterns for the norm-referent
group (the community in general), which makes the behavior what the researchers
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 43
considered “pronormative” (p. 831). The reactive approach directs attention to the
reaction of the community to the behaviors of the deviant—typically considered in a
negative sense, with condemnation as a result. While the authors discard the notion that
reactive deviance can be only negative in nature, they do acknowledge that a
community’s reaction to the behavior is a key component of positive deviance. Finally,
the normative approach is defined in terms of divergence from the norms of the referent
group. Conceptually, the distinction lies in the characteristics of the behavior and the
manner in which it departs from the expected behaviors of the community.
Based on these differing conceptions of deviance, Spreitzer and Sonenshein
(2004) presented the definition of positive deviance as “intentional behaviors that
significantly depart from the norms of a referent group in honorable ways” (p. 841). This
definition encompasses many of the aspects of the various approaches, including the
reactive component (response from the community to the deviant behavior is positive,
since it is considered honorable) and normative component (a departure from norms of
the referent group). Intentionality is also a key aspect of this definition, as positive
deviants make an active choice to engage in the behaviors that vary from those of the
broader community.
Distinctiveness of the positive deviance construct. Spreitzer and Sonenshein
(2004) and Warren (2003) described deviance, particularly positive deviance, as a distinct
construct, despite its similarity to other constructs such as organizational citizenship
behaviors, corporate social responsibility, creativity/innovation, and whistleblowing.
Many of these constructs overlap, for example in terms of the degree to which the
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 44
behaviors depart from the norm and the valence of the actions themselves, but are not
equivalent. Rather, Spreitzer and Sonenshein (2004) emphasized the characteristics of
positive deviants’ behaviors in terms of (1) honorableness, (2) intentionality and
voluntariness, and (3) distinctness from community norms.
Positive Deviance Inquiry
According to Pascale et al. (2010), an inquiry drawing on the positive deviance
approach consists of four major steps: define, determine, discover, and design.
Define. Positive deviance inquiry is launched through a process of problem
definition. Members of the community come together to solidify their understanding of
the problem they are trying to address. Sometimes, the problem has been conceptualized
one way and must be reframed in another way that allows the community to articulate
what is taking place, so that they are able to look internally at their community in terms
of focusing on assets rather than deficits. The degree to which the problem is impacting
the community must also be established. As part of this process, the community must
move past the act of defining to identify how they want the situation to change, as well as
be willing to delve into the issues surrounding the problem and its relationship to existing
community norms and obstacles to overcoming the problem. Stakeholders are identified
and actively involved in the process, and information is distributed broadly within the
community. The community may be able to tackle this stage by illuminating the
information available about a particular issue. Pascale et al. (2010) recommended
activities, such as using baseline data to diagram what is currently taking place in the
community in reference to the issue, so that individuals can visually process information.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 45
They also recommended creating consensus regarding the timeframe within which goals
should be accomplished.
Determine. The next step requires the community to figure out what the
common, normative practices are. This can be accomplished through activities such as
focus group discussions and participatory learning and action activities (e.g.,
diagramming). The process of learning is an ongoing process, and thus Pascale et al.
(2010) emphasized that continual conversations with as many community members as
possible is best.
Discover. This step of the process involves identifying the positive deviants
within the community. These may be individuals, families (or other groups), or other
entities (e.g., schools, organizations) whose outcomes are better than others within the
community. Another aspect of this process is ensuring that the circumstances for the two
sets of groups (normative and positive deviant) are in fact comparable. That is, within
this process, positive deviants are excluded unless they experience the same or worse
barriers, obstacles, and challenges as the normative group. Information about deviants is
revealed through the use of detailed interviews and observations, as well as brainstorming
and community feedback sessions, conducted by the community and positive deviance
facilitators. The main goal of this stage of data collection is to detect the uncommon
behaviors and strategies associated with the positive deviants’ relatively better outcomes.
The findings of this process are then discussed amongst the community to ensure that it
accurately represents what everyone believes to have been found.
Design. Finally, based on the results of the study, the community is able to
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 46
generate potential solutions to the problem at hand. Pascale et al. (2010) recommended
that positive deviance projects scale up—that is, they suggested starting small, and then
implementing on a larger scale once the smaller project has proven successful.
Opportunities should be provided for the community members to engage in the activities
and strategies identified through the positive deviance process, to act their way into a new
way of thinking. As the solutions are implemented, the community must undergo an
ongoing, recursive feedback process in which facets of the intervention are assessed, such
as the effectiveness of solutions and how initiatives can be improved. Dissemination of
information is crucial, both within and to surrounding communities, and this can be
accomplished by sharing the results of what is happening within the community.
Positive Deviance Inquiry with Existing Data Sets
One of the remarkable aspects of the positive deviance approach is its
adaptability, and Walker et al. (2007) leveraged this feature by modifying it for use with
existing data. Instead of the extensive community relations process of the classic inquiry,
this approach relied on whatever knowledge existed already regarding the community.
The approach was deconstructed into three major steps: determine, assess, and identify.
Determine. The first step is to assess the appropriateness of the positive deviance
approach for the situation. To use an existing dataset to conduct a positive deviance
study, all of the variables tied to the problem must be present in the dataset. If the
variables are not there, then a positive deviance study cannot be conducted from the data.
Assess. Next, problem and risk analyses are conducted. A clear understanding of
the problem is established, and the risk factors (and threshold for being considered at risk
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 47
or as being subject to the problem) must also be identified. The context is studied to
determine what the normative practices, beliefs, and attitudes are, and the available data
must be studied in light of this contextual analysis. Positive deviants are then classified
based on the presence or absence of risk status and problem—positive deviants are
labeled as such when they are at risk for being affected by the issue, and yet the problem
is absent for them. Table 4, based on Walker et al.’s (2007) work, illustrates this point.
Table 4
Identification of Positive Deviants Using the Existing Data Set Approach
Risk Status
Problem/Outcome
Absent Present
Present Positive Deviants Normative Pattern
(for at-risk cases)
Absent Normative Pattern
(for low-risk cases)
Negative Deviants
Identify. Finally, the characteristics and strategies of positive deviants are
identified, and the findings of the study are interpreted within context. The researcher
explores all of the variables, using statistical analyses to establish which characteristics
differentiate positive deviants from others within the community.
Versatility of the Approach
The positive deviance approach is versatile and can be adapted to a wide variety
of contexts and problems, beyond those identified in the last two sections. There are
instances in which a full-scale positive deviance inquiry is impractical—particularly for
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 48
cases in which the community must move quickly to address an issue. In other situations,
there may not be any existing data sets that contain all the data relevant to the issue at
hand. However, the key tenets of the positive deviance approach—qualitative inquiry
focused on identifying the assets within the community and learning from them—can
yield important knowledge that supports the growth of the community.
Existing Research Utilizing Positive Deviance
Public health. The positive deviance approach has been most frequently utilized
in the area of public health and has been leveraged to address a variety of issues, such as
reducing childhood malnutrition in Vietnam, preventing female circumcision in Egypt,
minimizing the risk of hospital infections in the United States, and reducing infant
mortality rates in Pakistan (Pascale et al., 2010). Stuckey et al. (2011) utilized the
positive deviance approach to explore the successful weight control practices of positive
deviants. In this study, the researchers conducted detailed interviews to identify the
behaviors in which positive deviants engaged and the thoughts that frequently entered
into positive deviants’ minds when considering weight control practices. Based on these
interviews, several key themes were identified in regards to weight control strategies,
including nutrition, physical activity, self-monitoring, and motivation. Specific
recommendations were generated that resulted in the dissemination of a list of practices
in which the community could engage to improve their chances of successfully
controlling their weight.
Many of these public health projects overlap with community health education.
For example, Dickey et al. (2002) conducted a study in which nutrition education and
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 49
rehabilitation programs in Vietnam were launched based on information derived from a
positive deviance approach. The use of the positive deviance approach in conjunction
with health education programs yielded improvements in physical growth, diet, health,
and the general feelings and beliefs of maternal and health providers in terms of their
ability to accomplish the behaviors and strategies being taught in the program.
Business. The positive deviance approach has also been applied in corporate
settings (Pascale et al., 2010). For example, a company used this approach to enhance
pharmaceutical sales for products that had stalled. Representatives were called together
from a variety of offices, and each shared the strategies that worked best in terms of
helping them to meet the sales quotas. This generated within the community an
understanding of positive deviants’ successful practices, and the community was able to
leverage its resources and create change from the inside out (rather than establishing best
practices and attempting to push change from the outside in). Consequently, the
company saw a substantial increase in offices meeting and/or exceeding the sales quota
established for them.
Education. Positive deviance is emerging as a useful tool within the field of
education. Currently, there are two notable projects being conducted in California and
Utah, in which positive deviance is being utilized to enhance the outcomes of K-12
students.
The California Teachers Association (CTA) and Merced Union High School
District (MUHSD) established a multi-year project to explore how positive deviance
inquiry can help to improve the graduation rates of students at Merced High School
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 50
(CTA, 2010, 2012; Po, 2011). In the process of working with the campus community—
in particular, with school staff and students—the everyday challenges that students faced
were revealed, and working with positive deviants allowed the project stakeholders to
assess how students who successfully graduate are developing solutions to overcome
barriers to their success (Po, 2011).
In another project, Park City School District in Utah has been engaged in positive
deviance projects to close the achievement gap between students in mainstream classes,
English language learners, and those in special education programs. According to
Oswald (2010), identification and promotion of positive deviance has been established
through studying (1) data tied to Utah’s Criterion Referenced Tests (CRT) to measure
student achievement and (2) locally gathered information on practices, which provided
essential information about the behaviors in which district and school staff engaged to
support academic achievement, particularly for those students who appeared to be facing
academic challenges. The district has used its CRT to demonstrate academic progress
among at-risk populations, and have established multi-tier systems of supports in each of
the schools within the district. Emphasis has been placed on the role of principals and
district leaders as instructional leaders. Implementation of these efforts has been
associated with bridging the achievement gap that currently exists in their schools.
In another case, situated in one of the Utah elementary schools in Cache County
School District, the community found that utilizing an evidence-based curriculum along
with differentiated small group instruction was a key factor in the success of students. In
addition, regular formative assessments, parental involvement, and instructional coaching
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 51
also helped the school to achieve success with its students. Given the national
recognition they have received for academic achievement on their campus, it is
encouraging to be able to identify the strategies they used, which have been held up as an
exemplar for how greater achievement for students can be attained despite context
(Oswald, 2010).
Summary
In summary, the positive deviance approach is an asset-based model that
leverages the community to create social change from within. Focus is directed to
individuals in the community who are succeeding despite the barriers and challenges that
exist. Over the past 30 years, the approach has been gaining popularity. Much of the
research has been conducted in the areas of health and business; however, in recent years,
more uses for the positive deviance approach have been found in the field of education.
Educational research is still in the early stages, so very little information exists in
scholarly journals to support the use of the positive deviance framework in education.
However, the preliminary results of on-the-ground action research projects suggest that
positive deviance initiatives are having a measureable, positive impact.
Study Framework
The issue of college readiness remains an ongoing, intractable problem that has
not been fully addressed by existing initiatives (such as the A-G initiative in LAUSD),
nor has it been solved via the multitude of studies that have established recommendations
for improving college readiness among students (e.g., Conley, 2007; Greene & Winters,
2005) or the implementation of college preparatory programs such as AVID (which can
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 52
only address the needs of a limited number of students). Consequently, it is still the case
that large numbers of students leave high school unprepared for the rigor and
environment that they will experience in college. Thus, this type of issue can greatly
benefit from a positive deviance inquiry.
The literature review revealed that factors such as curriculum and assessment
issues (e.g., access to rigorous college preparatory courses) and access to cultural capital
via various interpersonal relationships (e.g., family) posed challenges for the
development of college readiness. Despite these existing influences and challenges,
positive deviant students develop the skills needed to perform well on the various
indicators of college readiness noted previously (e.g., test scores, coursework, and
grades). How they overcome the existing challenges and leverage the resources available
to them to attain college readiness is currently not well explained, which was one of the
primary purposes for conducting the current study. Positive deviance inquiry can
illuminate these less understood areas of the literature and offer possibilities in terms of
interventions for less successful others.
Figure 1 presents the concepts and findings related to college readiness within a
positive deviance framework.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 53
Figure 1. Framework to understand college readiness utilizing the positive deviance
approach
In this figure, students are shown as progressing toward one of two outcomes. Either
they attain the mainstream outcome, which is to not achieve college readiness.
Conversely, they achieve the positive deviant outcome—becoming college-ready.
Challenges significantly impact both pathways; however, it is the positive deviants’
uncommon successful strategies that help these students to attain college readiness. The
focus on uncommon successful strategies is a central component of the positive deviance
inquiry process, which is emphasized in Figure 1, and the key area of focus for the
High School
Students in
Southeast
Los Angeles
Challenges
Lack of cultural capital
Lack of access to resources
(e.g., college preparatory
curriculum, direct instruction
on academic strategies)
Ethnic disparities in
performance on assessments
College
Readiness
Uncommon Successful Strategies
Lack of
College Readiness
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 54
current study. Because the positive deviance approach is a behavioral model, focus will
be directed toward illuminating the tangible behaviors in which positive deviants engage.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 55
Chapter 3: Methodology
As illustrated in the previous chapters, low rates of college readiness are a
persistent and serious issue that existing interventions have not successfully resolved.
Because these issues negatively impact the lives of students, the immediate community in
which they reside, and society as a whole, efforts must be made to help students to
complete high school better prepared for college.
The positive deviance framework offered one promising approach for addressing
the persistent and challenging issue of college readiness. The purpose of the current
study was to utilize this approach to explore the following questions:
1. What were the challenges faced by students who achieved college readiness
and the school staff who supported these students on their path?
2. What were the behaviors and strategies of these positive deviants?
3. How did positive deviants utilize these strategies and behaviors to facilitate
success?
This chapter presents the methodological approach to address these questions.
First, the positive deviance theoretical framework will be briefly revisited. Next, a
discussion of the study sample will be presented. Then, instruments and data collection
procedures will be described. Accompanying this will be a discussion of the data
analysis tools and techniques that were utilized to make sense of the data, as well as how
the tools and procedures were used to address the specific research questions. Finally,
potential ethical issues that conceivably could have been encountered in the study will be
addressed.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 56
Theoretical Framework
The positive deviance approach, described in detail in Chapter 2, offers a valuable
perspective from which this research was conducted. The focus on community assets
directs attention to strategies that work for individuals, rather than what does not work
(which is the focus of deficit-oriented research). One of the most practical ways for
creating sustainable change is to involve the community in the process at every step, from
problem identification to solutions analysis. Positive deviance inquiry incorporates this
into its approach, as the community drives the inquiry. Consequently, when solutions are
generated from within, the community is more likely to implement them.
In the current study, the positive deviance approach was adapted; the theoretical
underpinnings were used as a lens through which the strategies used to develop college
readiness could be explored. Focus was directed primarily toward the identification and
understanding of the uncommon strategies and behaviors of positive deviants—the
“discover” stage of the positive deviance inquiry process. This is because generating
school staff commitment to the extensive process described in the positive deviance
approach was not feasible for this study. However, the uncommon behaviors and
strategies of positive deviants still yielded considerable information that could impact the
strategies of others within the community in terms of supporting college readiness; thus,
the theoretical concept remained useful for this study.
Sample
The study was conducted at a Southeast Los Angeles high school (SELA), which
functions under the management of a Los Angeles charter management organization
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 57
(LACMO). LACMO currently operates eighteen schools in high-needs areas of Los
Angeles, including a middle school co-located with SELA. Over 10,000 students are
enrolled in LACMO schools. Of these students, nearly 96 percent qualify for the
free/reduced lunch program, suggesting that these schools serve primarily low-income
families. Similarly, at SELA, 99.5 percent of students qualify for free/reduced lunches.
SELA was chosen for study because of its greater proportion of graduates meeting
the A-G requirements—that is, the school itself is a positive deviant both within the
immediate Southeast Los Angeles community and the broader context of Los Angeles
County. As seen in Table 5, the school had a cohort graduation rate of 82.2 percent—
notably higher than nearby surrounding schools—with nearly 89 percent of those
graduates having completed the A-G requirements (http://www.ed-data.k12.ca.us).
Table 5
2009-2010 Graduation Rates at Southeast Los Angeles Schools
School Name Enrollment
Cohort
Graduation
Rate
Percentage of
Graduates with
UC/CSU Courses
Neighboring School 1 1,277 47.4% 63.6%
Neighboring School 2 546 76.7% 63.6%
SELA 527 82.2% 88.9%
Neighboring School 3 1,547 52.0% 63.7%
Neighboring School 4 4,470 54.3% 55.5%
Neighboring School 5 2,857 61.3% 61.9%
Neighboring School 6 2,020 60.1% 43.4%
Neighboring School 7 163 64.7% 32.7%
Los Angeles County 92,580 52,363 51.3%
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 58
SELA was selected based on 2009-2010 data because it was the most recent data
available when this study was initially developed. Since then, 2010-2011 CDE data
regarding high school graduates have been published, and a significant drop in
completion of the A-G requirements was reported to the CDE. This change, however,
did not impact the validity of this study, as the decrease was attributable to external
causes—primarily that students from another LACMO high school were merged into the
SELA cohort, changing the characteristics of the cohort. This is evidenced in Table 6,
which displays graduation data for the past two academic years for both SELA and the
merged high school.
Table 6
Comparison of 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 Graduation Data
2009-2010 2010-2011
Number of
Graduates
Percentage of
Graduates with
UC/ CSU Courses
Number of
Graduates
Percentage of
Graduates with
UC/ CSU Courses
SELA 90 88.9% 133 42.9%
Merged
School 65 20.9%
- -
District 35,454 54.1% 36,140 74.8%
County 100,705 43.0% 102,009 51.3%
State 405,087 36.3% 408,861 40.3%
Note. SELA was founded in 2006, and the cohort graduating in 2009-2010 is the first
reported for the institution. Thus, data are available only for these two years.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 59
LACMO described its mission as “provid[ing] access to high-quality instruction,
social-emotional support, and community resources so that [students] are prepared for
college, leadership and life.” Explicit in the academic mission is the desire to ensure that
all students are college-ready. This is reflected in its instructional focus, which involves
the hiring of effective teachers who, in turn, support students in becoming active
participants in the development of their own knowledge and skills that facilitate life-long
learning. Emphasis is placed on learning environments that are collaborative and that
demonstrate high academic expectations and rigor. Consequently, according to the
LACMO website, the schools under their purview have high graduation rates (85%), as
well as high college acceptance rates (91%), which make their schools positive deviants
within the population of Los Angeles County schools.
SELA has established a more distinct mission that is aligned with what LACMO
has established:
. . . [O]ur mission is to prepare students for college, leadership, and life through
innovative instruction, a rigorous curriculum, and the use of the cutting-edge
technology. [SELA] is committed to the education, development, and
socioeconomic success of students who historically have been unlikely to attend
and excel at an institution of higher learning. . . . We achieve our mission through
a thoroughly student-centered environment that fosters life-long learning, cross-
cultural competency, social responsibility, and academic excellence. We align the
efforts of family, community, and school to foster these values.
Thus, SELA takes support of students further by focusing on serving individuals who
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 60
have been typically underrepresented in higher education, appreciating and incorporating
aspects of student culture into the school experience.
Participants
Participants were selected by means of purposeful sampling—specifically,
deviant case sampling—which involves strategically selecting cases that yield a depth of
information based on the purposes of the study and the resources available to the
researchers (Patton, 2002). Deviant case sampling was utilized in a manner reflective of
the positive deviance approach, such that individuals with non-normative outcomes (i.e.,
college-ready students in subgroups typically underrepresented in higher education) were
selected for study.
Description. The sample was comprised of students who graduated from SELA,
as well as school staff who worked directly with these students. Students were the unit of
analysis, as the study explored the outcomes of students who engaged in positive deviant
behaviors. Information was collected via interview from both students and school staff,
since both may yield information about the uncommon strategies and behaviors of
positive deviants.
Selection/recruitment. Participants were recruited through a key informant at
the school site. The key informant identified both school staff who had frequent contact
with positive deviants and student participants who recently graduated from the school.
The students were selected based on whether they were college-bound to the UC system,
which by proxy suggests that they have completed the A-G requirements (or some other
specific college preparatory curriculum) as an indicator of college readiness. Although in
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 61
itself completion of the A-G requirements and/or acceptance to a selective university is
not a comprehensive indicator of college readiness, it was the most readily accessible
indicator available at the student level and thus was utilized in this study.
Consenting procedures. Participants were provided an information sheet and a
general recruitment letter which explained the purpose of the study, the types of activities
required of them, the length of their involvement, and compensation they would receive
for participating in the study. The information sheet and general recruitment letter are
included in Appendices A and B, respectively. Before each interview began, the
researcher reviewed the information sheet with the participant and obtained permission to
record the interview.
Participant profiles. Twelve participants were selected. Seven of the
participants were incoming UC students, and five participants were SELA school staff
members. Table 7 displays the demographic characteristics of the participants.
Table 7
Participant Demographics
School Staff
Select Characteristics Student Teacher Counselor
Number of Participants 7 3 2
Gender
Male 43%
50%
Female 57% 100% 50%
Latino 100% 100% 100%
First generation 100% 100% 100%
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 62
Table 8 profiles all of the participants of this study.
Table 8
Participant Profiles
Role Pseudonym Description
Student José Attending UC Berkeley; majoring in astronomy and
aerospace engineering; graduated as class valedictorian;
recently received a visa; actively involved in
extracurricular activities and community service and
leadership.
Student Carlos Attending UC Davis; majoring in biology; wants to
become a neurosurgeon; dedicated to helping family,
particularly since mother has glaucoma and deep vein
thrombosis and requires extra support, and wants to do
everything he can for the family; responsible for care of
siblings.
Student Gabriel Attending UC Santa Cruz; majoring in business
management and minoring in sociology; moved to Los
Angeles from Portland, OR; sees himself as the “man of
the house” and wants to support his family; parents are
divorced and has two younger siblings; wants to give
back to family for the support he was given.
Student Elena Attending UC Santa Cruz; possibly majoring in
anthropology; wants to go to college to create stability for
her life; involved in church and extracurricular activities
such as Planned Parenthood and National Honor Society.
Student Maria Attending UCLA; undecided about major, but wants to
work in a helping profession serving children; isolated
from her mother but closely connected to her sister for
whom she was a caregiver; sees herself as a role model
for young people in her family.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 63
Role Pseudonym Description
Student Rosa Attending UC Davis; majoring in neurobiology,
physiology, and music; wants to be a neurosurgeon;
highly driven and thrives on challenge; supports her
household, but there generally seemed to be one parent at
home at any given time throughout her school years;
involved in church; sees herself as a role model and wants
to motivate siblings to achieve similarly.
Student Lourdes Attending UC Davis; majoring in Spanish, wants to minor
in something also; not certain of what she wants to do, but
knows that she wants to do something that helps her
community; involved in extracurricular activities, such as
NHS and peer counseling; did not carry as many AP
classes as other participants, but showed a higher degree
of other forms of school involvement; sees herself as a
role model, tries to motivate younger siblings.
Teacher Ms. Rodriguez Teaches anatomy and physiology; has been teaching for
nine years; is a founding teacher at SELA; frequently
devotes extra attention to students and stays late to
support them; is also a student and mother of two
children; coaches Students Run LA and supervises the
Planned Parenthood club.
Teacher Ms. Sanchez Teaches AP Spanish; has been teaching for six years;
earned her degree in Spanish and sociology, but ended up
teaching at SELA after working at a continuation school;
sees mentoring students as her responsibility.
Teacher Ms. Maldonado Teaches science; is in her ninth year of teaching; is a
founding teacher at SELA; is chair of her department; is
an advisory co-coordinator; is passionate about helping
her students become self-advocates.
Counselor Ms. Montes Just began her fifth year of counseling; has been at SELA
since she graduated with her master’s degree; is self-
reflective and concerned with improving her work.
Counselor Mr. Diaz Is in his fifth year as a counselor at SELA; started
immediately after completing graduate school; has been
at SELA since its third year of operation; was initially the
only counselor until Ms. Montes arrived; was himself a
positive deviant in a community geographically nearby to
SELA.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 64
School-Related Data Sources
The CDE website has published links to two publicly available data reporting
systems—Ed-Data and DataQuest—which offer aggregated data on student graduation
rates, measures of accountability, and test scores (e.g., CAHSEE, CST, SAT, ACT, AP),
in addition to demographic information about students, staffing, finance, and
performance rankings (http://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/). Information available through these
websites was utilized to contextualize the environments in which the behaviors of
positive deviants were studied. Data for this study also included LACMO’s and SELA’s
websites, as well as SELA’s handbook for students and their families.
Instruments/Measures
There were two main interview guides utilized in the study—one for each role
group. The guides contained an introduction script that was read at the beginning of the
interview. Additionally, participants were asked to discuss the challenges of becoming
college-ready, behaviors and strategies that supported or developed college readiness,
perceptions of the behaviors and strategies of others who may or may not have
successfully prepared for college, and recommendations for how college readiness can be
better supported. The interview guides are included in Appendices C and D. All
interview guide items have been mapped to the research questions, as noted in Table 9.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 65
Table 9
Mapping of Numbered Interview Guide Items to Research Questions
Interview Protocol
Research Questions Student School Staff
1. What were the challenges faced by students who
achieved college readiness and the school staff
who supported these students on their path? 2-4, 9-10 2-3
2. What were the behaviors and strategies of these
positive deviants? 5-14 4-10
3. How did positive deviants utilize these strategies
and behaviors to facilitate success? 6-8, 10, 13 5-7
Thus, each item had strategic importance in addressing the research questions.
Data Collection Procedures
According to Creswell (2009), qualitative research designs offer an approach for
“exploring and understanding the meaning individuals or groups ascribe to a social or
human problem” (p. 4). This type of design is often used when the goal of the research is
to explore in depth the issues that are encountered in a particular context. Specifically,
interviews are a useful tool for delving deeply into the experiences, perceptions, and
knowledge of individuals (Patton, 2002), a key aspect of the positive deviance approach
which focuses on behaviors and strategies (Pascale et al., 2010).
The design for this study involved the use of semi-structured in-depth interviews,
which provided sufficient guidance so as to ensure that the interviews addressed the
primary research questions, but allowed the interviews to remain open to other topics.
The primary goals of these interviews were to establish knowledge about normative and
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 66
positive deviant practices that promote positive deviants’ college readiness, and to
identify ways in which positive deviants’ practices could be used to help others become
more successful.
The data collection methodology can be broken down into three stages structured
around the identification and interviewing of participants:
Stage 1: Identification and contact of school staff who work with positive
deviants. A key informant made contact with potential school staff. If the
staff member demonstrated interest, the key informant referred to the
researcher these potential school staff participants. All school staff interviews
were scheduled on-site at the high school campus.
Stage 2: Identification and contact of positive deviants. A key informant
contacted positive deviant students who graduated from the high school,
inviting them to participate in the study. The key informant scheduled all
interviews with former students on-site at the high school campus.
Stage 3: Detailed Interviews. Interviews were conducted with school staff
and former students. All interviews were recorded and transcribed to ensure
accuracy. At the interview, each participant was assigned a unique identifier,
used throughout the research to maintain the participant’s privacy.
Interviews were conducted in accordance with the interview guide mentioned
earlier. They were recorded via digital audio recorder, and permission was gained for the
interview to be recorded at the start of the interview. At the end of the interview,
participants were also asked if the researcher could contact them in the future, if any
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 67
clarification was needed or if additional questions arose. Participants were also informed
at this point that they would receive a copy of the interview transcript as soon as it was
completed, and they were invited to correct any mistakes they identified. After
completion of the interview, the participants were provided with a gift card to
compensate them for their time and effort. For all interviews, written field notes were
recorded to document aspects of the interactions that were not captured by the audio
recording (e.g., body language, physical environment).
Data Analysis
Qualitative data analysis techniques are often used to make sense of textual data
(Creswell, 2009). For this study, the interviews were transcribed by a third party and
coded utilizing ATLAS.ti, a qualitative research analysis tool. The transcribed and coded
data were analyzed to identify patterns in participant responding and to evaluate in detail
the specific strategies used to support positive college readiness outcomes. Specifically,
there were multiple iterations of coding, to translate information from the specific details
of each participant’s interview to the broader meanings and themes common across
interviews (Creswell, 2009).
Anfara, Brown, and Mangione (2002) presented the coding of data as a three-
stage iterative process. In the first stage, the researcher analyzes the surface content of
the text, and initial codes are identified. In the next round of coding, patterns among the
initial set of codes are identified. In the third iteration, the patterns identified are used to
generate hypotheses or theories about what is taking place in context and are mapped to
the research questions, to ensure that the research questions have been addressed. This
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 68
process, as well as the data that feeds into it, are displayed in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Methodological approach to data collection and analysis
This figure illustrates how the in-depth interviews and various documents and statistics
were both components of the overall data analysis. Data collection and analyses for this
study occurred simultaneously, which is aligned with the recommendations made by
other researchers who suggested that this process of constant comparative analysis
supports the generating of categories and building of theories.
The methodological approach for this study was developed in a way to enhance
credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability. According to Anfara et al.
• Transcribed and coded
• Sent to participants for optional
validation
Semi-Structured
Interviews
• SELA and LACMO websites
• SELA handbook for families
• California Department of Education
(DataQuest, Ed-Data)
Document Analysis and
School Statistics
Analyze
surface
content; initial
coding
Identify
patterns among
initial set of
codes
Identify
broader
patterns to
generate
theories
Three-Stage Iterative
Process of Data Analysis
(Anfara et al., 2002)
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 69
(2002), this can be accomplished by using a variety of strategies. For example, to
establish credibility and dependability, data were triangulated through the inclusion of
multiple voices. To enhance transferability, thick description, gathered through in-depth
interviews, and purposeful sampling were used.
Ethical Considerations
Ethical considerations were closely monitored throughout the design of this study,
and the research followed the guidelines established by the University of Southern
California University Park Institutional Review Board, as well as the United States
Department of Health and Human Services code of federal regulations regarding the
protection of human subjects. The study was also conducted in accordance with the
American Psychological Association’s established code of conduct and ethical principles.
The current study focused on the assets in the educational context. Because of
this, the anticipated risk of harm was minimal. However, it was possible that positive
deviants’ uncommon behaviors and strategies could have been perceived negatively by
those around them (particularly as it related to peer and family influences). Additionally,
asking positive deviants to discuss these types of contexts could have created
psychological or emotional feelings that were not necessarily positive in nature.
Consequently, efforts were made to frame the discussion in the most positive light
possible, to reduce the risk of potential harm.
Participation in the study was voluntary, and participants could choose to leave
the study at any time. Although personal information was collected about participants, at
no time has or will the participants’ identity be revealed, and confidentiality has been and
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 70
will continue to be respected and maintained. In cases where specific quotes have been
used, pseudonyms were assigned to the participants to protect their identity, and none of
the participants’ first or last names have been used to describe anyone in the study.
Information collected during the interview was stored separately of any personal
identifying information, and all personal information was password protected. Any
personal identifying information contained within the transcriptions of the interviews was
removed. Contact information for participants was stored until the end of the data
collection period and was maintained separate of the collected interview data. After the
data collection period ended, personal information on participants was destroyed.
Because incentives were used to draw students and school staff into the study—
particularly since it required participants to engage in research activities outside of the
normal day-to-day school context—some may perceive the potential for coercion. To
minimize the potential for coercion, incentives were small and not distributed until after
active participation in the interviews was completed.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 71
Chapter 4: Results
This study sought to identify the behaviors and strategies of students who
achieved college readiness in a Southeast Los Angeles high school (SELA) serving ethnic
groups underrepresented in higher education. To explore this topic, the following
research questions were generated:
1. What were the challenges faced by students who achieved college readiness
and the school staff who supported these students on their path?
2. What were the behaviors and strategies of these positive deviants?
3. How did positive deviants utilize these strategies and behaviors to facilitate
success?
Using the asset-based positive deviance approach as the underlying framework, data were
collected via interviews with recent high school graduates and school staff at SELA, and
by analyzing SELA and LACMO documents available through their respective public
websites. The purpose of this chapter is to present the challenges revealed in the study,
as well as the findings regarding the strategies used to facilitate college readiness. A
discussion of the efforts made by SELA as an institution is also included.
Challenges Faced by Students Preparing for College
The challenges faced by SELA students were numerous and included limited
knowledge, family context, community distractions, and access to academic resources.
Figure 3 provides an overview of these challenges.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 72
Challenges
Family
Context
Community
Distractions
Commitments
and competing
priorities
Commitments
and competing
priorities
Below grade-level
academically
Below grade-level
academically
Limited
English language
proficiency
Limited
English language
proficiency
Parental involvement
and support
Parental involvement
and support Limited cultural
capital
Limited cultural
capital
Lack of and/or
inability to access
school resources
(e.g., APEX)
Lack of and/or
inability to access
school resources
(e.g., APEX)
Inconsistency and
discontinuity in
curriculum
Inconsistency and
discontinuity in
curriculum
Community
violence and crime
Community
violence and crime
Easy access to
drugs and sex
Easy access to
drugs and sex
Limited
Knowledge
Access to
Academic
Resources
Activity in the home
Activity in the home
Immigration status
Immigration status
Figure 3. Challenges faced by students in the community served by SELA
Limited Knowledge
Students’ limited knowledge was a key issue that hindered their ability to prepare
for college. Students often entered and progressed through high school without acquiring
the level of academic content knowledge they needed to succeed. In this study, limited
knowledge existed in terms of low levels of English language proficiency and below-
grade-level knowledge of academic content.
Limited English proficiency. In many families served by SELA, Spanish was
spoken as the primary language, and often students acquired English as a second
language at various points in their lives—sometimes as late as adolescence. Additionally,
although students acquired English skills at school, these skills may not have been
reinforced at home. The issue of limited English proficiency persisted as a challenge,
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 73
even for families who have resided in the United States for multiple generations. Ms.
Rodriguez considered students’ limited English proficiency as one of the biggest
challenges and described the issue in the following way:
So a lot of students . . . were not born in this country . . . and they had to learn the
language. A lot of students were born here. They’re even like second- or third-
generation, but they’re still not literate in English . . . which then kind of feeds
into other subject areas like science.
The issue, according to José, is that English language learners struggle to understand
what is being taught to them in the classroom. He explained that “it was like much more
difficult for them to understand like what was going on in their classes, so they find it
much more difficult to like pass their classes.” Even some of the positive deviant
students indicated that English could sometimes be a challenge for them—for example,
Rosa talked about the challenge of not being a native English speaker, particularly since
she did not pick up the language until she reached middle school. She stated, “I always
liked to read, but then it was hard for me because some words I didn’t understand and
stuff like that.” Thus, English reading comprehension was sometimes difficult for Rosa
and other students at SELA.
Meeting grade-level standards is significantly more challenging when students are
trying to learn both academic content and English language skills simultaneously, and
consequently many students begin to fall behind. Eventually, if students are unable to
gain a sufficient level of proficiency to support their learning, they begin to perform
below grade-level—an issue that is discussed further in the following section.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 74
Below grade-level academically. Some of the teachers indicated that students,
particularly English language learners, were often entering high school with skills far
below their grade level. This issue posed yet another set of difficulties—in addition to
helping students learn grade-level content knowledge, they must also catch up in terms of
their English knowledge and skills, both academic English and more generalized and
essential vocabulary. When students made the effort to become college-ready, this
attempt to catch up to their current grade-level and to simultaneously progress in
accordance with state content standards was an ongoing challenge. Multiple school staff
members mentioned that students were offered the opportunity to take courses via the
APEX credit recovery program, in addition to being provided with access to intervention
programs which allowed them to catch up as part of their school day. Even with these
efforts, a large proportion of students were still not considered proficient in terms of
grade-level content knowledge. In reference to the students’ performance on the CST,
Mr. Diaz explained, “. . . there is a skills gap across, I think, many of our students—their
writing skills, their reading skills—just based on their data.” Without proficiency in
these content areas, particularly in English/Language Arts, students are not able to
achieve college readiness, as discussed in Chapter 2 (e.g., ICAS, 2002).
Family Context
Positive deviant students’ experiences were impacted by the family context in
which they were situated. In the interviews, this context was explored in terms of
commitments and priorities, level of support, degree of parental involvement, and
distractions within the home. The family’s immigration status also had an impact on
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 75
students’ opportunities to learn. This study revealed that their experiences were diverse,
such that the influence of various aspects of the family context differed by student and
could be both supportive and challenging.
Commitments and competing priorities. Most of the students revealed that
they had family commitments to which they had to attend. Students sometimes were
required take over the care of their younger siblings. For example, some students were
responsible for taking younger siblings to school in the morning and picking them up
once the school day was complete, as well as helping their siblings with their homework
in the evening. Carlos explained his family commitments in the following way:
I help [my family] a lot because my dad works full-time . . . [and my mom] has
glaucoma, . . . a vein thrombosis, and she has a loss of balance sometimes. So I
have to drive her back and forth to the hospital and making sure she’s fine. I take
care of my brother and my sister, like helping with their homework. I try doing as
much as I can for them.
These commitments required considerable time and energy that competed with students’
time for academic endeavors. Carlos noted:
It was just getting things I have to do before school done in time so I can get to
school on time. . . . I have to take my brother and my sister to school . . . there
were a few times that I had to drive my mother to the hospital in the morning and
then drive all the way back to school . . . And there are a few times that I was late.
Thus, his efforts to help his family often impacted his ability to be punctual for school,
competing with his academic efforts.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 76
When these ongoing commitments and the desire to help one’s family were
combined with a heavy academic workload—particularly in students’ senior year of high
school—competing priorities became an even more significant challenge. The majority
of the students in this study indicated that over the course of their high school years, the
workload progressively became heavier until senior year in which it became
overwhelming. Carlos described his experience in the following way:
Well, my senior year I took AP Government and AP English lit and there was a
lot of reading and a lot of stuff I had to do. And I had other smaller classes that I
had homework in. I was just always stressed.
Gabriel echoed the sentiment, describing his senior year as “one of the most stressful
years” he had ever experienced. One explanation for this is that positive deviant students
tended to engage in more difficult classes (i.e., AP classes) during their junior and senior
years of high school. Students also were involved in the college application process
throughout the first half of their senior year, which put additional demands on their time.
Maria described how she had to deal with grief tied to the loss of a beloved cousin who
died from a terminal case of breast cancer, while still trying to manage the demands of
schoolwork and college applications. She stated:
[I]t was around that time when . . . I wasn’t really home because [my cousin]
would live like all the way to Garden Grove. So we would go visit her almost like
every day in the evenings. . . . She passed away on the 20
th
[of December]. . . . It
was really hard and then having to keep up, like when we came back to school . . .
I was still like all depressed because, you know, she wasn’t here anymore. And I
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 77
didn’t know what was going on. . . . But having to start school again, I was like,
“Oh, my God, I don’t even want to do this anymore,” . . . like “why am I still
here?”
To complicate the experience further, she provided emotional support to her mother, who
she describes as having “lost it,” in addition to dealing with her own grief. In the process
of addressing these competing priorities, she directed attention to family members first,
and her academic work was sacrificed. She later struggled with the consequences of
prioritizing her family, and at some points found herself questioning her own work
toward academic success. While battling her depression and juggling the various
priorities in her life, her grades in English slipped significantly. However, despite her
struggles, she recognized that she was not happy with where she was academically.
Through great persistence and effort, she turned a failing grade into a grade of C for the
semester and a B overall for the course.
Although students’ responsibility and commitment to supporting their families
has been presented as a challenge, it is important to note that these efforts were often
freely given. The students valued helping their families and wanted to improve their
well-being. It is this same value that motivated many of the positive deviant students to
go to college. To illustrate, Maria expressed strong feelings of caring for her sister, and
happily took responsibility for her sister’s care from an early age. She explained:
I mostly took care of [my little sister], but I loved it because I always wanted a
little sister. . . . Ever since she was born, she’s been like my motivation, like in
school and stuff. . . . So yeah, I’m glad to be her role model and everything.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 78
In another example, Elena talked about being the “strong one” in her family and setting
expectations for herself so that she placed the minimum amount of burden on her family,
saying, “I just don’t want them to get depressed on seeing their children, you know, sad
also in what’s happening with them.” Additionally, Gabriel talked about going to college
for his family, in the context of giving back to them. He stated:
I know that [my dad is] a hard-working guy. And my mom sacrifices herself
every day just for the better of her kids. And so I feel that seeing their struggles
just kind of helps me be more motivated towards my education because I know
that in the future I’ll be able to like in a way say I can repay for what they’ve done
to get at like the point in life they’ve brought me to.
Thus, family commitments served as both a challenge and motivation for students.
Parental involvement and support. The degree of support positive deviants
received from their family varied. In some instances, students felt strongly supported.
Some of the families valued the positive impact that they believed college would have for
their children, and demonstrated this by providing emotional support and encouragement
to motivate students to pursue their goals. To illustrate, Elena explained:
. . . [T]hey were supportive in the fact that they got knowledge from the
counselors on how to support me. So then, you know, my dad thought he was
going to have to pay $34,000-$36,000 to go to school and then they explained it
to him and he was just, “Okay, you know what? Go for it. . . . You know, at a
point in your life, you’re going to have to go on without us and why not be it right
now. It’s for something good and not something bad.”
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 79
Thus, Elena received encouragement to pursue her goals, her parents acknowledging that
a college education would be a positive achievement. José and Rosa also discussed
experiencing similar types of support from their families—José mentioned that his
parents were “always there” for their children, and Rosa explained that her mother
“understands it’s for my well-being and it’s going to be beneficial to me in the future”
and consequently did not prevent Rosa from moving forward with her college goals.
However, the provision of support was inconsistent across positive deviants’
experiences. Rosa talked about the discouragement that she received from members of
her family. She said, “I have two older brothers. . . . When they would see like my
certificates or honor medals that I have in my room, they would be like, ‘You’re not
going to graduate,’ or ‘You’re not going to do it.’” The disbelief expressed by her
brothers was discouraging because it conveyed that those closest to her did not expect
that she would be successful in her goals. Rosa was resistant to their low expectations,
and fought against the discouragement. She explained:
I guess I really got like frustrated with their comments and then I was like . . .
“Only because you didn’t pass the CAHSEE, or because you do this and that.
The same mistakes you did, doesn’t mean that I will commit those same mistakes.
I’m learning from your mistakes in order for me not to go that way.”
Across interviews, when asked about advice that they have for other high school students,
positive deviants strongly encouraged others to ignore the discouragement or doubt that
individuals in their lives may direct toward them and their efforts to go to college.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 80
Ms. Rodriguez offered another perspective regarding the support received by
students. She described the high level of autonomy that students were granted as they
took over the responsibility of caring for siblings and for themselves while their parents
worked to acquire the financial resources to support the home, suggesting that for these
students there may be limited parental involvement. This has significant implications for
student outcomes, as extensive research suggests that parental involvement can be a key
factor in supporting students’ success (Wei-Bing & Gregory, 2009).
Activity in the home. At times, students struggled to simply carve out a space
for themselves in their home, in which they could work free from distractions. Ms.
Sanchez described how “. . . a lot of the times, our students are not completing their
homework—not because they don’t want to, [but] because many of them work or babysit
or they don’t have the space.” In some instances, students shared their space and did not
have their own room—for example, Maria described how she shared one room with her
mother and sister. Thus, the activity taking place in the home often served as a
distraction for the students. Positive deviant students responded to this issue by (1)
communicating the need for family to minimize the distractions, (2) doing their work
outside of the space, and/or (3) waiting until all family members went to sleep in order to
complete their assignments, often working well into the night and early morning.
Immigration status. Another important factor was the family’s immigration
status. Across school staff and student interviews, participants revealed that status as an
undocumented immigrant in the United States posed a significant challenge for finding
financial resources to attend college. In fact, some school staff described instances in
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 81
which students lacked the motivation to invest their time and effort in meeting the
requirements to attend college, simply because they were concerned that there would be
no payoff for their efforts. Ms. Sanchez said:
It’s so heartbreaking to see our students that are [undocumented]—you see so
much potential in them, and then senior year it really hits them. “I’m AB540.
Even though I have the best grades at my school, I did well on my SATs and now
I’m not going to get financial aid.” . . . And then they ask, “Well, Miss, I really
want to go to college but what happens after?” . . . I feel like many times AB540
students give up in general, even in high school. They’re like, “Well, what for?”
Some of this is mirrored in José’s experience, in which he described the struggle of
having been undocumented for much of his high school career, stating that it was
“difficult at first” since he and his family “weren’t going to get like support from the
government, like financial aid.”
For many students, this issue is one that is difficult for them to control,
particularly as minors, and is simply a characteristic of their lives because of the family to
which they belong. José was fortunate to have been able to obtain a visa before heading
off to college, but many students are not able to accomplish this. The recent passage of
the Dream Act is promising because it has created more educational opportunities for
undocumented immigrants—opportunities on which everyone must be educated in order
for students to take advantage of the new resources. Its passage means that
undocumented students may no longer be limited by their family’s immigration status
and can receive financial aid to pursue a college education.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 82
Community Distractions
Both teachers and students indicated that distractions within the community posed
a challenge for students. In some cases, the distractions required students to focus their
energy and attention on preserving their own safety—e.g., when students had to confront
violence in the community. Distractions also came in the form of easy access to drugs,
sex, and other activities that compete with students’ academic activities.
Community violence and crime. SELA teachers described the threats that
students faced daily in traveling to and from the school campus—citing in particular the
concerns over students being attacked for their personal belongings or for treading in
gang territories. Conversations with school staff revealed that prolonged exposure to
these types of stressors can cause post-traumatic stress and desensitize students, making it
more difficult for teachers to reach them. Ms. Sanchez explained:
And if you just look at their community, they already come in even the first day
of school with, I would say, some type of barrier. And it does take a while for
you to break that down and to really show the students that you really are here to
make a difference and to really help them through their education.
There appeared to be consensus among school staff that mutual trust and the building of
personal relationships with students was one of the keys to supporting their success. For
example, Ms. Rodriguez also noted, “Almost everybody at our school is very personal,
and everyone has like different personal relationships with different kids.” Ms.
Maldonado talked about “setting an atmosphere of respect and honesty from day one,”
and how she explained to students that there will be a process through which they have to
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 83
earn each other’s respect. This process of building trust and respect is necessary because
school staff must break down these barriers, since they can hinder students’ academic
performance and progress toward completing college requirements.
Easy access to drugs and sex. Students’ ability to easily access drugs and sex
was also a distraction, particularly when parents were unavailable to supervise teenagers’
activities due to work constraints. Ms. Rodriguez described these distractions in the
following way:
It’s so easy to get drugs, marijuana, ecstasy; and kids, a lot of times, they lose
priority. So they might set up some type of hangout where like right after school,
they go to somebody’s house and they know parents aren’t home. So they might
drink. They might do drugs. They might get sexually involved. . . . There’s so
many other things that students could find more interesting and fun, than staying
after school and doing homework or looking for that tutoring or for that help.
Thus, these behaviors can derail students from engaging in college readiness activities.
Access to Academic Resources
Students also experienced challenges in accessing academic resources. For
example, threats in the community sometimes prevented students from being able to take
advantage of the resources available to them. Access was also an issue at a more
structural level—that is, when curriculum was inconsistent and discontinuous in nature,
students were unable to access the types of learning experiences that would better prepare
them for college. Limited cultural capital also had an impact on students’ access to
resources, particularly since college knowledge is a mechanism through which students
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 84
recognize important resources.
Lack of and/or inability to access school resources. Violence and gang activity
in the neighborhood, described as a challenge in a prior section, created circumstances
that prevented some students from seeking and taking advantage of resources that could
help them to be more successful. Ms. Rodriguez described the challenge that one of her
students experienced in the following way:
. . . [W]e were looking at his grades, and . . . he’s probably going to be lacking 60
credits at graduation time unless he makes them up. . . . I asked him, “Look,
you’ve got to get these grades up because when you apply for college next month,
they’re not going to accept it.” . . . and he told me, “I can’t. I can’t make them up.
. . . I can’t go to _____ because of the neighborhood.” So he’s probably got a lot
of enemies there . . . some rival gang member or something. So he can’t go there
because he will get jumped. And I said, “. . . Stay after school, so you can do
APEX.” And he says, “I’m not allowed to stay after school” for the same
reason—his safety.
Parental efforts to protect this student created circumstances in which he was unable to
take advantage of resources to make up credits or participate in academic activities.
Moving the example away from her specific student, Ms. Rodriguez explained that
parents often do not allow students to stay after school “because there’s a lot of instances
of students getting jumped, students getting knives pulled on them, held at gunpoint,
robbed for their backpacks, iPods, cell phones, wallets, money, anything.” While the
decision was made to preserve the safety of their children, these parents inadvertently
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 85
limited access to the available resources.
SELA school staff also expressed concern over the lack of resources available and
students’ inability to use the existing resources. For example, Mr. Diaz talked about how
Princeton Review would come in and offer SAT preparation. He added, “Unfortunately,
it’s usually just one class per semester, so we can only accommodate about 32 kids
maximum.” Ms. Sanchez also discussed students’ access to resources. She explained,
“We don’t have a library. We don’t have books. The computer lab—we have one but
. . . there has to be a teacher in here, and if there is no teacher they can’t use the
computers.” Public schools such as SELA have limited financial resources available to
them—while they may want to offer more extensive services to the students, they are
limited by what they can afford. Thus, students may be required to find other resources
to complete their college applications or schoolwork (or they simply do not find these
resources and these activities remain incomplete). This lack offers challenges to the
school as well, which can be hindered from meeting the students’ needs when it is unable
to generate the necessary resources.
Limited cultural capital. At SELA, many of the students with college
aspirations were also the first generation in their family to attend college, so their families
were not able to transmit essential information regarding what students must do to
prepare for and succeed in college. Teachers and counselors both explained how many of
the parents had very little knowledge of college, so they made extensive efforts to
educate families on the opportunities available to their children. For example, Ms.
Montes noted, “A lot of our parents unfortunately don’t understand the system just
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 86
because they never went through it, you know. So I think that’s why we’re so heavy on
[asking], ‘Okay, what can we do to provide them with that?’” Without college
knowledge, family members are limited in terms of the support they can provide students
directly related to preparing them for college, and thus students are not able to identify
and access all of the available resources that would allow them to more easily navigate
the college-going process.
Inconsistency and discontinuity in curriculum. In addition to the lack of
resources discussed in the prior sections, school staff at SELA have been trying to
address inconsistencies in terms of implementing rigorous curriculum across classrooms
and continuity and vertical alignment of instruction across students’ years at the high
school. Ms. Maldonado described how inconsistency in terms of exposure to rigorous
curriculum results in students playing catch up over the course of their high school years
to be able to access the academic content. She stated, “So, I think that’s a challenge.
When you’re not exposed to certain rigorous curriculum, you struggle a little bit with it.”
Ms. Maldonado added that high staff turnaround is related to these inconsistencies, as it
“trickles down to the classrooms and the structures that are in place” by “impacting
students’ vertical plan,” as well as the students' experience at a particular grade level.
She provided the following example:
. . . [I]f our teachers are consistent and they stick around, we can create that
vertical pathway for the students where I already know what they were exposed to
in ninth grade and I can build on that. And since I already know what they’re
supposed to know for the next grade level, I can also build to that. And when you
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 87
don’t have that strong consistent staff that communicates and collaborates, then
there’s a disconnect between [points in] that pathway.
This observation suggests that students’ learning is compromised when consistent,
rigorous curriculum is not present, and school staff cannot build upon prior knowledge or
assist students to attain the next level of learning.
Summary
In sum, four key challenges were revealed through the data analysis: limited
knowledge, family context, community distractions, and access to academic resources.
In terms of limited knowledge, students sometimes had limited English proficiency and
often performed below grade-level. This has significant implications for students’
college readiness because without this knowledge, it becomes remarkably more difficult
for students to prepare for college. The family context created additional demands on
students’ time—from caring for siblings to helping parents cope with issues that arose in
the families’ day-to-day lives—and could create contexts that were both supportive and
challenging for students. Furthermore, activities taking place in the community served as
distractions. This included students addressing threats to their safety and having easy
access to activities that can displace academic undertakings in their time. Finally, access
to resources played a key role in terms of students’ challenges. Students were often
unable to remain at school to take advantage of educational resources available to them.
Limited cultural capital created a challenge in even knowing which resources to seek.
Inconsistency and discontinuity in curriculum vertical alignment also hindered students’
achievement of college readiness.
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Strategies Used to Achieve College Readiness
Positive deviant students leveraged a wide array of strategies in order to achieve
college readiness. The analyses revealed that students focused on school, self-regulated
their learning, and developed support systems. A roadmap of these strategies is displayed
below in Figure 4.
Student
Strategies
Support
Systems
Self-
Regulated
Learning
School
Focus
Challenging
coursework
Challenging
coursework
Class participation
(e.g., note-taking, studying,
minimizing distractions)
Class participation
(e.g., note-taking, studying,
minimizing distractions)
Personalizing
academic content
Personalizing
academic content
Help-seeking and
relationships with
school staff
Help-seeking and
relationships with
school staff
Self-advocacy
Self-advocacy
Time management/
organization
Time management/
organization
Prioritization
Prioritization
Awareness and selection
of learning strategies
Awareness and selection
of learning strategies
Envisioning of
future selves
Envisioning of
future selves
Extracurricular
school activities
Extracurricular
school activities
Completing the
minimum requirements
for college
Completing the
minimum requirements
for college
Models
Models
Peer collaboration
and support
Peer collaboration
and support
Identifying and
accessing additional
learning resources
Identifying and
accessing additional
learning resources
Figure 4. Strategies used by positive deviants to achieve college readiness
School Focus
Students spent a considerable amount of time focusing on activities in the school
context. These activities included targeting and completing the minimum college
requirements and engaging in challenging coursework (e.g., AP and honors courses), as
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 89
well as participating in various extracurricular activities.
Completing the minimum requirements for college. As discussed in Chapter
2, in order to meet the minimum admission requirements for a public four-year university
in the state of California (as well as for public schools outside of California and private
schools across the United States), students must complete a sequence of recommended
coursework (e.g., the A-G requirements). To achieve college readiness, high school
programs were structured to ensure that all SELA students completed the A-G courses.
Further still, positive deviant students reported focusing on academic achievement,
attaining A’s and B’s in most of their coursework with rare occurrences of C’s.
Completing the A-G requirements in this way was important, as it ensured that students
met the prerequisites that served as a gateway for admittance to college.
Additionally, all of the students reported taking the SAT and/or ACT exam, which
is another college admission requirement. Surprisingly, some of the positive deviant
students revealed disappointment with their performance on the SAT and ACT. For
example, Gabriel said, “I took them both. I don’t remember what I got from my ACT
though. But I know it wasn’t that great. And neither was my SAT.” Similarly, Rosa felt
that she “didn’t do like so well, excellent,” indicating that she wanted a higher score
similar to some of her friends but that she “didn’t get a score that high.” This
disappointment was present, even in instances in which students participated in SAT
preparation courses. When asked how well she performed, Lourdes replied:
Not that good. Not what I expected. I even took a class, the SAT prep, and then I
would like be understanding it. But it’s like when they explain it to you, you get
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it a whole lot different. But when you’re actually there like on your own
sometimes, it would get hard. It wouldn’t be easy.
While students shared how they felt about their performance on the assessment in
general, many seemed reluctant to reveal their actual scores, and these students were not
pressed into revealing them during the interview. Thus, it was difficult to assess whether
the students had extraordinarily high expectations of themselves that they failed to meet,
or if they had issues taking the test (e.g., vocabulary, test preparation, timed writing,
biased assessments). In general, the ranges of SAT scores provided by students seemed
to indicate that they performed at average or above, relative to the mainstream population
of students across the United States.
Challenging coursework. All of the positive deviants reported participating in
challenging, higher-level coursework, such as honors and/or AP classes—indeed, they
sought these classes whenever they could—with the goal of accessing the resources that
could most prepare them academically for college. To illustrate, Rosa described how she
would have liked for her “entire high school experience” to “have been like my senior
year, where I was taking three AP classes and I was like working hard with no type of
sleep.” Positive deviants’ drive toward high performance extended to these more
difficult classes as well and was evidenced by not only their grades but the ability of
some of the students to pass the AP exam(s) they took. For example, Maria expressed
pride in passing an AP exam. She said, “So, I was like, ‘Yes!’ I felt proud. . . . I didn’t
care that it was all so hard because in the end I passed it, and I felt satisfied.” Overall,
engagement in higher-level coursework ensured that students accessed the rigorous
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curriculum that could help them develop a stronger grounding in the content knowledge
needed to get into and be successful in college.
Extracurricular school activities. Both school staff and students believed that
involvement in extracurricular activities was a crucial aspect of becoming college-ready,
and most of the students were involved in some form of activity. As Ms. Rodriguez
explained, positive deviant students were “really involved in extracurricular activities.
They spend a lot of time at school.” Participation varied from involvement in athletics
(e.g., volleyball, basketball) to after-school clubs such as Planned Parenthood, Dream
Activist club, Students Run LA, and National Honor Society. Leadership development,
community support, and peer education were just a few of the outcomes that motivated
students to join these activities (and school staff to support them). Further still, both
school staff and their students indicated that they saw involvement in extracurricular
activities as a necessary component of the college application, with the understanding
that colleges seek more than just strong academic performance. Ms. Rodriguez described
students’ participation in extracurricular activities as follows:
. . . Students Run LA . . . they train for the LA Marathon. So it shows dedication,
perseverance. They’re motivated. They’ve got their minds set on this goal which
is to finish the LA Marathon. And once they do that, they have this mentality that
“if I can do that, I can do anything.” . . . We have Planned Parenthood . . . and that
one, students are to become leaders. . . . [T]hey do it because they first enjoy it,
and second they can’t wait to put it on their college applications. Like our kids
know, colleges want to see how well-rounded you are.
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Thus, the knowledge that students must be well-rounded individuals actively involved in
their school and broader community compelled many students to join these activities.
Self-Regulated Learning
College-ready students developed approaches to regulate their learning, and they
did so in a variety of ways. First, students made an effort to participate in their classes
and extended their learning by engaging in a variety of study strategies. When learning
new material, students discovered ways of personalizing academic content and making it
relevant to their lives. Students also were aware of and deliberately employed learning
strategies that worked best for them, and they developed time management and
prioritization strategies. Finally, students envisioned their future selves and acted toward
that vision.
Class participation. Both positive deviant students and school staff agreed that
class participation was a central aspect of students’ success in becoming college-ready.
According to the participants, class participation took a variety of forms, from in-class
discussions and presentations to quizzes to completion of homework. In this section, four
specific components of class participation are identified: completing homework, taking
notes, studying, and minimizing distractions. These are noted especially for the role they
play in setting the stage for students to effectively learn.
First, the importance of homework was noted by Ms. Rodriguez, who viewed
homework as a “continuation of the day’s lesson” and an opportunity for students to
engage in practicing the concept. She considered this such an essential aspect of the
student learning experience that, when students failed to complete their homework, she
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would mandate tutoring in order to create a space for students to engage the concepts
they had been learning in class. She further explained:
. . . [I]t was like mandatory last year . . . I would not accept any late work or
make-up work unless they gave it to me during tutoring. . . . So a lot of them came
in and did their homework during tutoring because they didn’t want a phone call
home. And for me, it wasn’t even about getting them to do their homework, it
was about getting them to actually sit and study, like to practice the concept.
This focus on homework suggested that it was a key aspect of the path toward mastery of
academic content, which supported students’ college readiness.
In relation to class participation, both students and school staff discussed the
importance of taking good notes because of its relationship to studying and learning
outside of the classroom context. One note-taking strategy, which Elena described,
involved learning from her peers how to focus on recording only what was relevant. She
talked about “read[ing] from the [teacher’s] PowerPoint and get[ting] the most important
stuff” into her notes. A few of the students also described using note-taking as a tool for
retrieving content discussed in class during later study sessions. For example, Carlos
mentioned memorizing content and taking “a few notes so” he “wouldn’t mess up.”
To foster effective note-taking strategies, teachers at the school began explicitly
teaching students effective and practical approaches to note-taking—specifically, the use
of Cornell notes—in all classrooms from the ninth grade onward. Ms. Sanchez described
the importance of this strategy:
We expect [students] to be good note takers. The reality of it is that students
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don’t know how to take notes. So as a school, . . . we decided to use Cornell
Notes . . . because it’s the easiest and most basic type of note-taking that you can
do and it’s something that you can take with you if you want to go to college.
When asked what was involved in taking Cornell notes, she further explained that
constructing Cornell notes involved putting the questions, topics, and main ideas
on the left side of the paper, and the actual notes about these items on the right
side of the paper. They have also expanded on the use of Cornell notes, by having
students begin writing questions about the topics on which they have taken notes.
Thus, Cornell notes functioned as a means for students to organize their notes and
to be able to quickly pinpoint various aspects of the lesson—main ideas, topics,
and so forth—as well as for shifting students into fostering higher-level cognitive
processes by having them form questions about what they have learned.
The notes that students took in class became an essential component of their
studying, and their study efforts were a central force that sparked learning. Students used
a multitude of strategies while studying. They reported engaging in activities such as
highlighting, color coding, and re-reading notes to prepare for class. For example,
Lourdes described “highlighting or boxing the important things” and organized her notes
and agenda by “mak[ing] it colorful.” She said, “Like when I had school, I would be
like, ‘First period, one color’—like it would have their color.” Sometimes, students made
additional notes regarding a topic during their independent study time, while they were
reviewing material for class. As Carlos described, “. . . I read the material. I usually take
notes through the course of—if we have like a mid-term or a certain test, I’ll go over the
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material that I read before and all the notes I took before . . .” Reviewing notes served to
help students refresh their memory regarding what was covered in class that day.
Students also engaged in activities designed to help them further their
understanding of academic content, to make stronger connections and go into greater
depth. When classes required that students store declarative knowledge, they often
utilized flash cards and other memorization strategies. Illustrating the diverse methods
used, Rosa described her approach to studying as follows:
So let’s say I’m studying. I write a note. Sometimes it was notes that would
make me remember what the material was about. . . . [and just writing] the flash
cards too for government, which is very helpful. . . . And I remember studying,
like quizzing myself. Whenever I would write my notes, my notes would be
about anything that would remember me [sic] about that topic or also anything
that made me analyze further like on that topic.
Rosa also mentioned some of the strategies that she saw other students using, such as the
use of post-it notes to connect examples to the main ideas in their class notes.
Students also utilized outlining as a study strategy—as a way of sorting their ideas
and planning what they want to write. For example, Lourdes explained her outlining
approach in the following way:
. . . [I]f I’m doing an essay, I would break it up and . . . be like, “Oh, on my first
paragraph, I’m going to do this,” and then I’ll put the details . . . in bullet points.
It makes it easier because I’m like “Oh, I already know what I want there.”
Elena described a strategy that involved focusing on terms with which she was
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unfamiliar. She would begin by reviewing the material and taking notes on it. When she
encountered vocabulary that was unfamiliar to her, she would write the words down.
When she read through content she did not understand, she would re-read it until she
gained comprehension. Taking the time to focus on the unfamiliar, as well spending time
with the material until comprehension was reached, proved to be a strategy not just for
Elena, but also for others.
When students were unable to figure out a problem or made mistakes, they
attempted to complete the problem anyways and at a later point, with guidance, figure out
what was wrong. For example, Maria described her strategy in the following way:
I would do the problem based on my notes and then on what I thought was like on
my knowledge, how I would try to solve like the rest of the problems. And then I
would kind of just like be like, “Okay, I’m just going to leave it with this answer.”
And the next day, when we went through it like in class, I would make sure [to
ask myself], “Okay, like what was it that I did wrong or is it right?” . . . And if it
was wrong, . . . I would look at what [the teacher] did and see what I did wrong
and like correct it.
The student’s use of notes combined with the desire to check her work contributed to her
overall understanding of the homework problem and the correct way to solve it.
Positive deviant students also made an effort to minimize distractions in the
classroom. To accomplish this, they would verbally instruct other students to pay
attention, ignore the students creating the distraction, or non-verbally communicate
through body language that the distracting student’s behavior was not being well-
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received. For example, Rosa described how friends would frequently want to talk or
gossip, and when those instances arose she would give them “the stare” to indicate “. . .
like you better be quiet or I’m going to beat you up.” She said this with a laugh in her
voice, but she was serious about the need to curtail the distractions around her. Carlos
took a similar approach, saying, “If someone’s trying to talk to me, I just ignore them and
stay focused because I want to learn what they’re saying.” Lourdes also ignored
distracting classmates, as well as instructed them to stop distracting her and pay attention.
While these students cared about and wanted to interact with their friends, they made an
effort to prioritize paying attention in class. The degree to which they successfully
minimized distractions was related to their level of interest in class content.
Overall, both students and school staff used aspects of class participation in order
to facilitate learning. Whether students were completing homework, taking effective
notes, studying, minimizing distractions, or engaging in other helpful strategies, the
ultimate outcome was that students maximized their academic learning experiences by
leveraging strategies that helped them to attend the important details, be fully engaged,
and extend their learning. Teachers complemented and enhanced students’ efforts by
helping them to learn effective strategies, as well.
Personalizing academic content. One very important strategy that school staff
and their students used was to find real-life examples of academic content related to
students’ personal lives. According to Ms. Maldonado, making the connection between
course content and the student is a component of rigorous curriculum. She explained:
. . . I think it’s still infusing the standards that we have to teach as teachers in the
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state of California, but making sure to make the standards relevant, accessible to
students. . . . [It] infuses literacy and all aspects of literacy—reading, writing,
speaking, listening—with critical thinking in terms of that meta-cognitive level,
and then connecting it back to the student as an individual, a member of their own
family, a member of the school, a member of the community.
Additionally, making that connection helps students to understand why they should care
about their learning. Following is one approach that Ms. Rodriguez, an anatomy and
physiology teacher, used to help students make the connections between what they were
learning and why they should learn it:
So like giving them the examples like, “Look, if you work really, really hard,
you’ll get a great job and you’ll be able to give back to your parents. You can
take care of them. Like do you think that they can keep working as hard as they
can 20, 30, 40 years from now? They’re getting older and we talked about the
body, what happens to your body with age. You don’t function as well as you
used to.” So a lot of them . . . want to be able to take care of their . . . family. . . .
Like if anything is relevant—whether it’s in biology, history, math, science,
advisory for college—if it’s relevant to their lives right now, they make that
personal connection. You can go places with that.
The teacher further explained how she used a conversation about cells and mutations and
changes in DNA to discuss cancer, which many students were able to relate to issues that
arose in their family. Ultimately, the goal was to trigger their questions and to provide
examples that were relevant to their lives.
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The importance of personalizing content is supported by students’ experiences, in
which this strategy was an aspect of their efforts to pay attention. Maria, for example,
mentioned that part of paying attention involved “trying to connect with what [teachers
were] saying,” and in her mind realizing that she could relate to what had been said. For
Carlos, personalizing academic content took a different form. He viewed his classroom
learning as an opportunity to bring knowledge home to his family. He explained, “It’s
like an amazing feeling you get because not many people have the opportunity of going
home and having to explain to their parents.” Thus, teachers seemed well aware that in
order to capture student interest and motivate them to learn, they must engage in
behaviors to make the material relevant to students’ lives. Students were also self-aware
that they needed that connection in order to foster learning.
Awareness and selection of learning strategies. Positive deviant students also
recognized which learning strategies were most successful. For example, Rosa described
how simply reading text was insufficient. She explained:
. . . but the way I studied, it was not just like reading things over and over. . . . I
needed to re-read and analyze things. . . . I had to really . . . comprehend. I would
always make myself notes . . . and then ask myself questions about that.
She realized that she needed to employ strategies like analyzing the text and asking
herself questions in order to spark higher-level cognitive processing that would help her
grasp the material.
Students were also aware of themselves in terms of acknowledging the contexts
that best supported their learning. In this instance, there was variation. Some students
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greatly enjoyed working with others—they learned best when they were collaborating
with other students. Carlos acknowledged the important role that his friends played,
understanding that when there was challenging content to learn, they would “all just get
together and help each other out.” Other students acknowledged that, while they enjoyed
spending time with their colleagues, they much preferred working independently. For
example, Gabriel described his preference for independent learning in the following way:
Because sometimes when we’re together, we don’t tend to always focus on what
we’re supposed to do. So I feel like it really helps us if we do our own like self-
independent work. Because that way we fully devote ourselves to the assignment
or the work or whatever is given to us.
An awareness of which context was more suited to learning helped students make
decisions about where they physically wanted to be and with whom they wanted to be
when they studied and what types of strategies worked best for them (e.g., reading and
reviewing notes by themselves or collaborative problem-solving).
Also, teachers nurtured these metacognitive awareness efforts when working with
students in the classroom. In fact, Ms. Maldonado discussed this in terms of “personal
development requirements” that must be met in order to be successful in college,
explaining that students must understand how they learn best and that she, as an advisor,
must find ways of helping students to reflect on how they learn. She said:
And then in terms of personal development, I would say getting to know yourself
as a learner. “So how do I learn best? Do I learn best by taking Cornell Notes or
outlining? Do I learn more when I study at night or get up early in the morning
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 101
and study?” . . . [W]hen I was an advisor . . ., I would always get them to think
about that. Let’s get to know each other as a learner because the way I learn, may
not necessarily be the same way that so-and-so learns.
Ms. Maldonado also suggested that students need to connect this type of knowledge with
the strategies that will help them to succeed in college. Sparking that metacognitive
awareness helped students to leverage the strategies that worked best for them, thus
enabling them to be more successful.
Time management and organization. Positive deviant students consistently
communicated that identifying the time to complete tasks was particularly challenging
during their senior year. Thus, they often would devise a time management strategy that
worked best for them—particularly those students who were heavily involved in
extracurricular activities. Most of the students noted that they made decisions to sacrifice
personal and leisure time in order to accomplish all of the academic work they had been
assigned. For example, Carlos described his experience in the following way:
. . . I had homework every day. And even on the weekends, I wouldn’t have time
for myself. Like if my parents wanted to go to the park, I was like, “No, I can’t. I
have to stay home. I’ve got homework to do.” And they were like, “No, you can
just do it tomorrow. It’s Saturday, come on.” And I wouldn’t feel right. I
wouldn’t be able to just leave my work there, knowing I had to do it, knowing that
I would stay up late and I’d be so tired. I just didn’t have time for myself.
Another aspect of time management was the student’s ability to recognize when a
strategy was not working for them and to seek out additional assistance that would help
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them to learn how to manage their time better. For example, José mentioned how the
teachers and counselors were available to help students. He stated:
They could tell you, “Okay, this is what you could do.” . . . Like when they saw
that time was getting out of hand, that they were missing some assignments, then
they could like go to the counselor or to their teachers and ask them, “Okay, what
can I do to like organize my time better and like be able to focus more on like
passing so-and-so classes?”
This strategy of self-reflection into one’s time management, then, enabled students to
develop the skills and behaviors needed to become more self-regulating as students.
Related to the issue of time management were the positive deviants’ efforts to
avoid procrastination. The interviews were consistent in terms of the students’ beliefs
that procrastination created challenges and could hinder students’ ability to complete
tasks well. Carlos emphasized, “You have to do all the work that you have when you
have it, and don’t postpone it. Don’t procrastinate because I did that and it didn’t help.”
He further explained:
Because I mean like I said, I had things to do at home and I’d be, “Oh, I’ll just do
this tomorrow.” And the next day, I’d be up very late trying to finish that thing
and it’s like, “Damn, I could have done it last night or I could have done it
before.” So that’s something that it really opened my eyes, that “Hey, if you
procrastinate, you end up paying for it. You shouldn’t be doing that.”
One approach to managing time was to work on long-term assignments by
completing a couple of pages each day. This approach had the added benefit of providing
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students with the opportunity to refine their work and correct errors prior to the
assignment deadline, as well as avoid unnecessary stress. For example, José explained
how he was happier pacing out the work, stating:
Yeah, it was much better because you were able to like put your ideas on like two
pages and then the next day you’d be like, “Oh, well, I have new ideas” and you
can like enhance your writing. And it was like I think a better strategy than
actually having to deal with it all in just one day. Because you’re writing and
you’re stressing out even more because you don’t even know—like you’re all
tense [and thinking], “Should I go back and check if it’s all right?” But if you
work on like two pages each day, like you have time to go back and check and
correct any grammar mistakes and like make sure you’re answering the topic.
So as a self-regulatory strategy, students leveraged time management as a way to
minimize their overall stress levels, complete as much work as possible, and create
opportunities in which they could refine their work.
Prioritization. Understanding how to prioritize one’s work—closely related to
time management—was also an important self-regulatory strategy, particularly because
students had to make decisions about how to accomplish their tasks in a finite amount of
time. José’s observation of his peers revealed that when students were overloaded with
assignments but had limited time, they would complete the high-impact assignments first
or complete as many low-value assignments as possible in order to maximize their time
and effort. He explained:
It was good to . . . work on things that you actually needed to work on, like get
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things done. And that’s what I saw in a lot of my peers. Like they would also
like if they knew an assignment was worth a lot of points and that they had to like
finish it on-time and like do a good job on it, that they had to spend a lot of time
on it. Well also with assignments that like weren’t worth a lot of points, it was
always good to like finish as many assignments as you could.
Similarly, when Lourdes fell behind in her classes after being sick, she had to prioritize
tasks in order to catch up. She explained how she prioritized in accordance with her
desire to stay on track with the assignments, stating, “I started to focus on the work they
were [currently] doing and . . . I would take like a portion of it to start doing it.”
Additionally, she would note to herself, “Oh, they’re going to need this so I’m going to
do this first,” completing that assignment prior to finishing her other work. Positive
deviants’ prioritization of tasks helped them to focus on the activities that would allow
them to be successful in completing course requirements.
Envisioning future selves. One of the factors that kept positive deviant students
moving forward was engagement in internal speech regarding their desired future.
Carlos, who struggled to stay on top of the workload of senior year, stated, “It was
basically just me keeping my head, telling myself, ‘I have to do this, I have to do this. If
I don’t, I’m not going to get to where I want.’” Sometimes, they would see their future
selves in reference to others around them. Rosa expressed her frustration regarding
students who did not take advantage of the opportunities available to them in the
following way:
You have so many opportunities. Right now, high school offers you like
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everything. It’s like on your plate, just take it. Just eat it. All this knowledge and
you don’t want to take advantage? Later on, when you’re working, you’re going
to be like, “I should have just continued. I should have just worked my butt” . . .
because all that effort . . ., it’s going to be paid in the future. And even though . . .
there will be times you feel like giving up, the fact that you don’t give up is
what’s going to help you because there’s so many people that were so close with
success but yet they gave up and not knowing how close the door was to them.
Additionally, because students were able to see what lies ahead if they did not
take the path to college (by observing the struggles faced by the broader SELA
community who did not pursue a college education), they were able to tell themselves to
shoot for a different and more positive future for themselves, which was achievable
through college. Conversely, students who were unprepared for college were seen by
both the positive deviant students and teachers as not thinking of their future, as Ms.
Rodriguez described regarding one of her students. She said:
So I know this child knows what he has to do, but he’s got trouble prioritizing
what’s more important. And he probably doesn’t see far down the road, you
know—one year, five years, ten years . . . And it’s funny because even that term
YOLO is so . . . popular with the students. They always say like, “YOLO—you
only live once. So might as well do it.” . . . That mentality’s dangerous. It’s like,
“Well, I might die tomorrow, so what’s the point?” And I always tell them, “But
what if you don’t die? Don’t you want to have a plan?”
Thus, envisioning and planning the future were key aspects of the positive deviant
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students’ strategies toward staying focused.
Support Systems
Positive deviant students became efficient at utilizing resources and developing
support systems. Essentially, they sought ways to garner the support they needed. Their
strategies included (1) identifying and accessing additional learning resources, (2) self-
advocacy, (3) modeling, (4) peer collaboration and support, and (5) help-seeking.
Identifying and accessing additional learning resources. Positive deviant
students were able to find the resources they needed and ways to access them. For
example, when Gabriel was asked how he dealt with difficult academic work with which
he was unfamiliar, he responded:
I would do some research online just for the fact that I’m not so knowledgeable.
. . . So I feel that the Internet is always a good source to find . . . answers or just to
learn more about a certain problem or topic that you’re given.
This illustrated how he identified the internet as a potential resource, and leveraged it to
help him expand his knowledge on a topic.
Resourcefulness also entailed taking advantage of existing programs designed to
help students attain college readiness—e.g., SAT preparation courses, after-school
tutoring programs, and teachers’ office hours. For example, Lourdes mentioned taking
SAT preparation courses, and Elena approached teachers for tutoring when she had
difficulty understanding the course content. Additionally, Ms. Rodriguez noted that
college-ready students are “going in for tutoring . . ., they’re asking for help.” Ms.
Maldonado also noted that personal development requirements involved learning how to
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“utilize[e] your resources, either in terms of a math center, a writing center, a tutoring
center” for help.
Empowering and advocating for self. School staff made a special point of
recognizing that the students had progressed significantly in terms of self-advocacy.
Self-advocacy functioned as a buffer that helped students ensure that their needs were
being met—a different form of resourcefulness. To illustrate, Ms. Rodriguez described
how students were “demanding their rights”—for example, students had thoroughly
reviewed the syllabus, understood its purpose a legal document, and “call[ed] a teacher
out” when the teacher attempted to implement activities not on the syllabus.
Ms. Maldonado described the self-advocate as a student who is vocal about what
they deserve—for example, sometimes students who have been tracked into mainstream
courses must advocate for themselves to open up the opportunity to participate in AP or
honors courses. She explained:
A self-advocate is really being vocal about what you deserve. So . . . a student
that is tracked in a honors course or . . . advanced placement course . . . really
advocate[s] for themselves in terms of, “Hey, this is what I need to do.”
These students also did not hesitate to follow up with teachers when they need something
from them—i.e., having a grade entered into the student information system. Ms.
Maldonado described them as the students who ask, “Have you entered my work
assignment? Because I checked my grades and it’s not there.” These students, she
further explained, are “consistent and constant” in their efforts. Students who have not
been considered positive deviants could eventually move into a space that better
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facilitated college readiness if they advocated for themselves to acquire access to the
challenging coursework and other tools that positive deviants access.
Advocacy can take a variety of other forms, from student activism on campus for
undocumented students (e.g., Dream Activist club) to students calling the City of Los
Angeles regarding a dead dog near the campus. Interestingly, SELA’s staff and overall
structure supported these tendencies toward advocacy through their emphasis on personal
and social responsibility, noted in school staff’s interactions with students and via
SELA’s mission (described in Chapter 3). Advocacy is a component of both leadership
and social responsibility.
School staff also modeled advocacy behaviors for students—for example,
students witnessed the teacher calling the City of Los Angeles to request the removal of a
dead animal. Consequently, students realized that they, too, should feel empowered to
call the city and advocate. Teachers also influenced students through their efforts to
ensure that trash was removed from around the campus. Ms. Maldonado described their
advocacy in the following way:
So our SRLA club, Students Run LA, they run around the school. And now
they’re more active about calling the city to clean up the trash around the school
which they run in. . . . [They] are active about calling and [saying], “Hey, pick up
the trash!” I mean kids ran by a dead dog . . . and we kept calling for a week. By
we, I mean the teachers, the students. We would call for the city to come and pick
up that dead dog. But it didn’t stop the kids from running, and it didn’t stop the
kids from making the phone calls.
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Consequently, students learned to see to their needs and the needs of those around them.
This form of resourcefulness has important implications for college readiness.
Self-advocates ensure that their needs are being met. Additionally, they actively seek out
the resources they need to persist. Getting into, persisting, and graduating from college is
partially reliant on students being able to engage in this type of behavior.
Modeling. Support systems were established for positive deviants and others
through the use of models. First, school staff, peer, and family models (both positive and
negative) provided knowledge about which strategies were most successful.
Additionally, positive deviants modeled what they learned for others and used these
efforts as a source of motivation for themselves.
Positive deviant students frequently witnessed their parents’ struggle to
financially support the family. Consequently, they indicated that they wanted to avoid
the outcomes that they saw their families face. For example, when Maria was asked
about what influenced her decision to go to college, she indicated that seeing her parents
struggle was a strong influence—particularly since she observed her mother engaged in
the arduous labor of sewing. She explained that her mother “works like really hard and
she never got the education she should have gotten” and how she didn’t “want to go
through that” but instead wanted a better future for herself and the family she would
eventually establish. In another case, Carlos discussed how his parents had encouraged
him, but also suggested that he ought to avoid the outcomes that they experienced. He
said:
I mean my dad would joke around once and awhile and say, “Yeah, you don’t
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want to become a security guard like me or be working at McDonald’s.” And I
know it’s not bad, but he just wanted to encourage me—I went to high school,
and they know I can achieve much more than they could or they ever did. . . .
They always told me, “Okay, if you don’t want to live in the way of a hard life,
then you should just keep going to school.”
Thus, the financial challenges faced by these families influenced students, and these
students acknowledged their desire for a different outcome.
School staff played a very important role in modeling for the students what can be
achieved through persistence and effort. Although the positive outcomes of teachers
were admired, students mentioned learning a lot from teachers’ negative experiences as
well. For example, Carlos saw the influence of school staff as motivating him to do
better—they set examples about which road to take. He also saw them as individuals
who had to overcome obstacles and whose experiences were something from which he
could learn. He explained:
So I learned what they did and how it affected them. . . . So I would just take their
problems and put myself in that situation. And I would try to avoid it because I
wouldn’t want to be in the situation that they were in.
School staff were very much aware of their role as models and mentors to the students.
They purposefully connected to the students by means of their own experiences, which in
some ways were very similar to their students’ experiences. For example, Ms. Sanchez
discussed her experience as a first generation college student and the challenges she
experienced while navigating the system without a mentor. She also stated:
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I feel that when the students know . . . that their teachers are first generation
college students themselves, they tend to talk to their individuals. I don’t know if
it’s because they feel like at ease knowing that “You went through what I went
through, so you’re here to help me.”
Ms. Sanchez also noticed a trend in which students would tend to connect to individuals
who were similar to them.
For school staff, the drive to be a model moved past the threshold of simply
wanting to share experiences. Ms. Sanchez further explained that she felt a responsibility
to serve as a role model, since she was in a position to strongly support students. Thus,
the influence of models was heightened by the personal relationships formed between
school staff and students.
Students preparing for college also served as peer models for other students. The
students interviewed for this study indicated that they often looked to and learned from
their colleagues. For example, in an earlier section on note-taking, an example was
provided in which Elena modified her note-taking strategies based on what she observed
successful others doing, which helped her to record better notes by guiding her to focus
on what was important. Hence, students would try to pick up academic strategies from
other positive deviants who seemed to be successfully tackling an academic task.
Rosa described how other students’ academic excellence drove her to better her
performance. She explained how their performance would be intimidating, and yet she
noticed also how other teachers were impressed with their work. She talked about how
she “wanted to be that student” and would adjust her academic performance so that on
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each subsequent task she would do better. In this instance, her peers served as
aspirational models that set the standard for what she wanted to achieve. In a different
story, she described an occasion in which discussions with her peers over who would be
valedictorian inspired her to strive to be in the top five percent of her class. She said:
And we were talking about, “Who’s going to be valedictorian? . . .” Like I didn’t
know what valedictorian meant until I was in the 11th grade. . . . And then I
figured out it was like the top student with the top GPA. And when I noticed I
was like, “Aw, man, I can’t be valedictorian anymore, but I’ll fight to be in the
top five percent.” And I did make it to the top five percent.
Thus, in addition to modeling learning strategies, their mere presence could inspire
students to perform better—that is, in a way similar to their positive-achieving peers.
Moreover, positive deviants took the knowledge they were gaining to establish
themselves as models for siblings. At times when the challenges of preparing for college
seemed overwhelming, these students acknowledged that they had a strong desire to set
the example for their siblings, so that members of their family could also achieve
something more for themselves. For example, when asked what influenced his decision
to attend college, Carlos explained:
The feeling that I have in my family of being the first in the house to go
into college and being the role model I am already to my siblings. I’m the
oldest so they look up to me a lot, and I would be very disappointed in
myself having them think that not going to college was okay. So I was
thinking that if I went then and did something, I should set the example.
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Maria expressed similar feelings. She wanted the children in her family to see her
succeed so that they could have a role model, particularly since she herself had no role
model available while she was preparing for college. It is important to recognize that
these students reflected on their motivations for attending college, and they used it to
drive themselves to act toward their goals. Engaging in behaviors that established
themselves as a role model was an important part of this process.
Peer collaboration and support. Peer collaboration and support also appeared
to be an important aspect of students’ experiences. When encountering challenges,
positive deviants connected with their peers for both academic and emotional support.
Indeed, they emphasized collaboration and cooperativeness as key aspects of their
interactions with each other. For example, when engaging in a task, Carlos described
how “if we work together, two minds are better than one” and that three or four minds
would be even better—that is, collaborative problem-solving proved to be a useful
strategy in helping students learn challenging material. He mentioned how students
would meet to help each other and described their collaborative strategies as follows:
If there was a poem that I couldn’t dissect myself or I wouldn’t really understand
it, I would ask my neighbor. And if [my neighbor] didn’t understand it, we would
. . . just work it out as a group . . . [and] put together all of our ideas and basically
just come up with one straight conclusion. . . . [I]f it’s something that I need a
little bit of help, I usually get one or two friends. But if it’s like a big help that I
need, we usually form a big group . . .
So together, the students were able to build on their knowledge and solve problems that
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were difficult to solve individually. Additionally, Carlos’s approach demonstrated that
students learned to escalate their efforts, starting small at first and then incorporating
more feedback until they accomplished the task. Further still, José’s described how good
it was to have peers that were motivating and supportive—people he could rely on for
reassurance, as well as support his learning. This peer support was especially important
when students were unable to find support in other places, and it ensured that students
exposed themselves to positive influences that helped them persist, rather than discourage
them from heading off to college.
Help-seeking and relationships with school staff. Positive deviant students
engaged in two prominent help-seeking approaches—asking questions and forming
personal relationships with school staff. José explained how important it was to seek
help from teachers, stating, “If you don’t understand something, it’s always good to like
ask.” He recommended seeking help after school, if that was the space in which students
felt comfortable asking for help. When Elena was struggling with aspects of her
schoolwork, she discovered the importance of this as well. She explained:
Well, first I came to tutoring and then that’s where Ms. _____ told me . . . she was
like, “[Elena], you have to ask for help. Ask for help, even if you feel it’s a stupid
question. Just ask for help, you know, because other students might have that
same question but are just too shy to ask it.” So then the next day, I didn’t
understand something, and the first thing I did was raise my hand for help.
From the students’ perspective, it seemed that shyness was one of the major obstacles to
students engaging in this particular form of help-seeking in the classroom. However,
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they emphasized how essential it was for students to address their personal challenge of
shyness and seek help in whatever way they could. Discussions with school staff yielded
similar results. One counselor put it quite simply when asked what key advice would
benefit students—“To always ask questions. If you’re not sure about something, ask.”
Further still, positive deviants sought emotional support and encouragement from
school staff, which was particularly useful in helping them to overcome challenges. For
example, Ms. Montes described how she witnessed students seek support from school
staff by stating, “I think the advisors play a big role in kids being able to overcome those
barriers. . . . I know their advisors; a lot of [students] tend to do go directly to their
advisor for support.”
Discussions with school staff and students revealed that this emotional help-
seeking—in particular, through forming personal relationships with school staff—was
frequently used as a strategy. To emphasize this point, José described his high school
experience positively because of his access to supportive school staff who were there to
push students, and he underscored the importance of having a good relationship with
school staff. He mentioned that the teachers were “always there for the students” and
how the teachers were approachable when students needed to be set on “the right path
again.” Additionally, because of all the support, he stated, “I think that’s a main factor
why like it’s good to have a good relationship with your counselors and teachers and
everybody else that you’re around with.” Rosa echoed the sentiment, describing a
teacher that she had even prior to her time at SELA who would offer her support, despite
being some distance away in Sacramento. She said:
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She was always helping me, not only school-wise, but also emotion-wise. . . . She
would contact me, “Okay, there’s this opportunity. Do you guys want to come?”
And I don’t know how . . . but . . . she would make it happen.
Thus, Rosa’s teacher played a key role in helping her to access resources available to her.
Teachers were aware of the importance of having personal relationships with their
students, and they made an active effort to reach out and to show students that they
genuinely cared and wanted to be there with them. Ms. Maldonado explained:
I think [relationships] set the foundation for giving, empowering students to do—
not to try, but to do. And when students believe, number one, that you are here
because you want to be here, you make the choice. It’s not a burden to get up and
come to school or work, that it’s a choice that you make . . . then they’re not
afraid to do because they know that even if they do and they may not be
successful, that you won’t let them get away with it. And that’s what it comes
down to. . . . [I]f they see that you don’t let them get away with anything in terms
of giving up, then they know, they have no other choice but to try.
The power of caring is played out in this teacher’s classroom (and beyond the
doors of her classroom) in a number ways. She described the importance of
establishing an atmosphere of respect and honesty from the start. She added:
Something . . . I’ve always done since the first year I started teaching is I tell my
students that when I was younger, my father told me that education, it opens
doors. So . . . I was like, “These important people that exist in our planet, do they
ever open a door for themselves? No. . . . Okay, if education is supposed to open
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doors, then every day when you leave my classroom, you will never have to open
the door for yourself. . . . Don’t even waste your time grabbing this dirty handle, I
will open it for you. Because you are that important to me.”
For Ms. Maldonado, the expression of caring was revealed in her persistence in
monitoring students and providing them with feedback and opportunities to improve.
She would actively seek out students to let them know that she cared about them. She
also clearly acknowledged her role as a facilitator of their educational growth,
highlighted by the literal and metaphoric aspects of her discussion regarding opening
doors for students. Thus, Ms. Maldonado invested significant time and energy ensuring
that students maximized their opportunities to learn, faced obstacles that hindered their
learning, and received heavily personalized attention meant to uplift them and help them
move forward, as well as demonstrate her care for their outcomes.
Teachers at SELA varied in terms of the degree of attention they devoted to
students, but overall each teacher interviewed strongly believed in the importance of
personal relationships. Across the student interviews, a great deal of value was attributed
to the relationships they had with their teachers, noting that these relationships played a
significant role in their ability to prepare for college, as previously explained by José.
Carlos also described the degree of attention received, particularly when he was
struggling, “because the teachers would come and be like, ‘Okay, you’re not doing your
work’ or ‘You’re not turning it in on time. What’s going on?’” Gabriel mentioned that
he ”felt like [his] days were more laid back because of the teachers” and that he felt as if
he “could always come talk” to his English teacher. He described seeking her out,
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regardless of whether she had office hours, and how the teacher would respond to his text
messages regarding course-related questions. Further still, Maria noted that many of her
teachers supported her, particularly in terms of helping her with her college personal
statement, loan application, and senior portfolio. Thus, overall, students’ help-seeking
and teachers’ help-giving—in other words, students’ relationships with school staff—
appeared to play a significant role in students’ lives.
Summary
To summarize, three main categories of strategies were identified. First, students
tended to focus on their schooling, and this was revealed through their attention to
completing the minimum college admission requirements and engaging in challenging
coursework and extracurricular school activities. Students also leveraged numerous
approaches to self-regulating their learning, including participating in class, studying,
personalizing academic content, becoming aware of and deliberately choosing learning
strategies that worked best for them, managing their time, prioritizing tasks, and
envisioning where they wanted to be in the future. Developing support systems was
another approach, and they accomplished this by identifying and accessing learning
resources, engaging in self-advocacy, learning from and modeling for others, and
collaborating with peers, and through academic help-seeking and the establishment of
personal relationships with school staff.
School Efforts to Support College Readiness
SELA as a positive deviant institution and its school staff have implemented
programs and strategies that are designed to foster college readiness in students. These
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approaches included personalizing learning, involving families, disseminating college
knowledge, and collaborating among staff. Figure 5 provides an illustrative roadmap of
these strategies.
School-Based
Strategies
Family
Involvement
Staff
Collaboration
High
Expectations
College
Knowledge
Figure 5. Strategies used by SELA to build college readiness in students
College Knowledge
Because the school had only two counselors for over 600 students, it was a
challenge for the counselors to provide personal support to everyone. Thus, the school
implemented advisory classes wherein teachers served as advisors to the student. One
aspect of the advisory class involved reaching students earlier in their high school
career—connecting with students in their senior year is too late, since college knowledge
is needed early in order to be able to make decisions that allow them to prepare for
college.
The advisory class was used to help students develop college knowledge. To
accomplish this, information about specific college requirements was presented, and
students engaged in a variety of activities tied to monitoring their academic progress and
remediating any issues that they identified. Ms. Sanchez explained:
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For example, Mondays they do grade checks. So every Monday, students receive
their grades. And they have a form where they have to check off “Are you
college-ready? Yes or no.” So students already know if they’re getting D’s,
[they’re] not college-ready. And they have to reflect, like “What do I have to do
now that I have a D?” . . . Giving them a chance to reflect is more meaningful for
them to understand what it means to be college-ready.
Also incorporated as part of advisory is simply helping students understand the
vocabulary—e.g., being able to define what a resumé or transcript is—the basics of what
both she, Ms. Maldonado, and the counselors referred to as “College 101.” Thus,
teachers empowered students to be active planners of their high school career and moved
students to the point at which they had college as an option. Additionally, teachers
shared their personal experiences with their advisory students, which also helped to build
a college-going culture.
Ms. Maldonado spoke of advisory as a way of not only instructing students on
graduation requirements, but also encouraging students to push beyond them and the A-G
requirements. She “would always try to push them to take rigorous classes that were not
just only fulfilling the school elective requirement but actually could fall into the
recommended classes in the A through G spectrum.” Students, then, were also taught to
appreciate the value of rigorous curriculum in helping them reach their goals.
As part of the student’s high school graduation requirements, they were required
to fill out at least three college applications, so that they went through the practice
(regardless of whether they intended to head to college). This process also took place in
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the advisory class, in which students were able to establish SELA school email addresses,
as well as register on university admissions websites. Students were also guided through
the process of completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.
SELA made efforts to place visual symbols of its college-going culture in
noticeable areas of the campus—in particular, a sign was displayed near or on each
classroom door to indicate the college affiliation of the teacher. For example, a teacher
who was a graduate of the University of Southern California had a sign that indicated
students were “now entering Trojan territory.”
Ultimately, by the time students reached their senior year, the school intended for
them to have close familiarity with the various aspects of the college application process,
as well as what to expect when they arrived at college. Thus, advisory truly functioned as
a class in which cultural capital was transmitted and college knowledge was generated
both for the students as individuals and for their families (who benefit from the students’
college knowledge). Advisory classes offset the challenges imposed by the limited
cultural capital that students carried with them when they first entered high school.
High Expectations
Advisory classes were also used to establish a student-centered environment that
provided support to and established high expectations for students. For example, Ms.
Rodriguez described how the goal of advisory was to not only guide the students but to
“put the pressure on.” She explained:
Like for me, I’ve been known to hunt my kids down. So if somebody tells me so-
and-so wasn’t behaving today, I will like go find them and pull them out and “tell
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me what’s happening, because I heard about your inappropriate behavior today”
or “why isn’t this done?”
Feedback was not limited to problems—when students did well, school staff also tried to
reinforce that behavior. Ms. Rodriguez described getting “good phone calls, like so-and-
so did an amazing job today” and letting students know she was proud of their effort.
Although this level of communication can be beneficial for students, it also has its
challenges. For example, when asked how students responded to this attention, Ms.
Rodriguez replied that initially they did not always respond positively. She said:
I even had a student tell me one time like—because I said, “Look, I know you
and this is not typical behavior of you.” And he told me, “You don’t know me.”
And he was really upset, and I said, “You know, you’re right. I’m sorry for
assuming that I know you. I don’t know you. But regardless, that behavior’s
inappropriate, so stop.” And now this is one of my closest students. So at first,
it’s hard because the students kind of have to see, like “I’m coming down on you.
I’m coming hard because this is what I expect for you. I know you’re smart. I
know you’re going to go to college and I’m not going to lose hope. Even when
you do, I will not.”
Interestingly, Ms. Rodriguez also described the advisory class as a community
that emerged. She explained:
I call them my babies and we’ve given ourselves a name. So we call ourselves
the Copperheads. . . . Like that’s our family, and they call me Momma
Copperhead. So I tell them, “Copperheads don’t fail. Copperheads succeed.
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Copperheads will go to college and all of you will.”
Thus, through this community, she communicated to the students her (and also the
school’s) high expectations regarding their future academic success.
Staff Collaboration
One of the strong efforts being made by SELA teachers is the establishment of
rigorous and consistent curriculum across all SELA classrooms. As noted previously,
this was identified as a challenge, for students, teachers, and the school overall. To
address this issue, SELA teachers invested significant time and energy to engage in
teacher collaboration. Ms. Maldonado described one example of school staff
collaboration in the following way:
So usually we’ll meet by grade levels. . . . and then [ask], “Hey, so what are you
guys working on? All right, let’s establish some commonalities.” . . . So then [at
the] school-level, everybody’s doing pretty much the same thing. So Mentoring
Mondays on Monday, college of the week or career of the week on Tuesdays,
style and character on Wednesdays, Portfolio Thursdays and then Fun Fridays on
Fridays—so we’ve established that as a school-wide framework.
In this particular example, the goal of collaboration was to build consistency into the
advisory curriculum. Ms. Rodriguez also described working with other anatomy and
physiology teachers to refine the presentations delivered to students in class and to
develop greater consistency in terms of the content taught. In general, school staff
described using collaborative efforts to strengthen both the curriculum and instructional
delivery. Consequently, these improvements made the course content more accessible to
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students and better facilitated their development of college readiness.
As revealed in the section on SELA's efforts to establish high expectations for
students, teachers communicated with each other regarding what was taking place with
students, discussing both positive and negative behaviors that were impacting students'
academic life. Thus, school staff also collaborated in order to identify when students
needed additional attention and resources. These collaborative efforts and the
interventions that followed from them, then, were a form of data-driven decision-making,
implemented to ensure that students’ needs were being met.
Family Involvement
Another facet of SELA’s structure was its family involvement requirement.
According to SELA’s handbook, families were required to contribute to the school 35
hours per year and a total of 140 hours by graduation. Families served this time in a
number of ways, such as through donated items or actual volunteer face-time on campus.
Ms. Rodriguez described parent involvement in the following way:
[To complete their service] they need to either come to the school . . . or they can
donate things to the school, so like water or soda, anything of that sort. But
parents get hours for filling out a survey . . . [or] coming to a meeting. . . . The
school also does something really nice where a student has a GPA of 3.5 or
higher, the parent just gets five hours. So it’s kind of like an assumption, like,
“Oh, the kid’s getting good grades, so you must be directly involved, putting
pressure on them or something.”
So, there was an implicit understanding that increased parental involvement was tied to
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more favorable student outcomes.
Family involvement was also generated through other avenues. In addition to
developing college knowledge among students, school staff also worked to build cultural
capital among students’ families. Workshops were offered on Saturdays to help parents
understand the options available to students—in particular, financial aid options—that
could help facilitate their students’ ability to attend college. Mr. Diaz explained:
Every second Saturday of the month, there’s a [series of] workshop[s]. . . . One of
them usually is about academics or college. It’s how to read a transcript, how to
read a report card, how to log into PowerSchool, . . . how to apply to college,
what systems of universities exist, how is my student going to be eligible. So the
A through G requirements, financial aid . . . what does that mean, what does that
look like? We usually do like additional financial aid info sessions for parents to
kind of help them understand what everything they’re signing up for means, and
what they will need to do on their end to support students.
In addition to college information, parents were also provided with SELA’s graduation
requirements, so that they were aware of what the students needed to do to graduate and
they could find ways of supporting the students in meeting those requirements. Across
these parent outreach efforts, the goal was to help families acquire more cultural capital
and learn how to better support their students in terms of going to college.
Summary
In sum, the school employed four major strategies to support students’
development of college readiness. College knowledge was disseminated through
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advisory classes, and advisory classes were also a vehicle through which high
expectations were set for students. School staff collaborated to develop consistency and
strengthen curriculum and instruction, as well as shared information to target
interventions for students. The school also made a strong effort to involve families, by
providing workshops and other opportunities for parents to learn more about the college-
going process.
Chapter Summary
This chapter presented the challenges that students faced in preparing for college,
as well as the strategies used by students, school staff, and the institution itself in order to
facilitate students’ college readiness. Students experienced challenges tied to limited
knowledge, family context, community distractions, and access to academic resources.
To address these challenges and to gain the knowledge necessary for success in college,
students focused on school, self-regulated their learning, and developed support systems.
School staff worked diligently to support students’ efforts to develop successful strategies
to attain college readiness. Finally, SELA implemented strategies meant to disseminate
college knowledge, establish high expectations for students, involve families, and
promote collaboration among school staff with the hopes of creating a more supportive
climate to help students develop college readiness.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 127
Chapter 5: Discussion and Implications for Practice
College readiness development is complex, and the literature review showed that
in addition to meeting certain academic requirements, students must also develop
cognitive and metacognitive skills. The roles of college knowledge, rigorous curriculum,
and students’ relationships with school staff were also revealed. This review suggested
that college readiness could be facilitated if focus was directed toward these areas.
Because little research existed that explored the specific strategies used to support
college readiness, the current study was conducted. In this study, an adapted version of
the positive deviance approach was utilized to explore the following research questions:
1. What were the challenges faced by students who achieved college readiness
and the school staff who supported these students on their path?
2. What were the behaviors and strategies of these positive deviants?
3. How did positive deviants utilize these strategies and behaviors to facilitate
success?
To accomplish this, seven student and five school staff participants were purposefully
sampled from SELA to identify the challenges that hindered students’ college readiness
efforts and the strategies positive deviants used to overcome these challenges and prepare
for college. Also included was an exploration of how the school (as a positive deviant
institution) and school staff (who function within and support the positive deviant
institution and students) contributed to students’ development of college readiness.
Several key themes were identified in this study. Students experienced challenges
tied to limited knowledge, family context, community distractions, and access to
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 128
academic resources. Additionally, they leveraged numerous strategies to prepare for
college, including focusing on school, self-regulating their learning, and developing
support systems. Schools disseminated college knowledge, established high expectations
for students, engaged in staff collaboration, and involved families. This final chapter
discusses the themes that emerged and its implications for practice. Challenges,
limitations, and directions for future research are also presented.
Study Framework Revisited
At the end of Chapter 2, a framework was presented for understanding the
attainment of college readiness within the context of the positive deviance framework.
The current study has further illuminated this framework, as shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6. Revised framework to understand college readiness utilizing the positive
deviance approach
High School
Students in
Southeast
Los Angeles
Challenges
Limited knowledge
Family context
Community distractions
Access to academic
resources
College
Readiness
Uncommon Successful Strategies
Lack of
College Readiness
Student Strategies
School focus
Self-regulated learning
Support systems
School-Based Strategies
College knowledge
High expectations
Staff collaboration
Family involvement
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 129
Knowledge derived from the current study regarding the challenges faced by students
(displayed in the Challenges section of Figure 6) was consistent with what was present in
the extant literature. That is, limited cultural capital and limited access to resources were
still considered challenges within this study. However, the current research delved into
greater detail and expanded this list of challenges to further explore family context,
community distractions, and access to academic resources. For example, more was
revealed about how students must juggle the competing priorities in their lives, and also
how the student’s immigration status can impact their efforts toward achieving college
readiness.
The current study also revealed the diverse strategies that positive deviants used
to facilitate college readiness. For students, this included focusing on school, self-
regulating learning, and developing support systems. Additionally, schools disseminated
college knowledge, established high expectations for students, involved families in
students’ academic experiences (especially in college readiness efforts), and encouraged
school staff collaboration. While these factors have been related to influences discussed
in the literature review—e.g., self-regulatory strategies and development of support
systems and cultural capital—the understanding that college-ready students at SELA used
these specific strategies to prepare for college represents new knowledge regarding the
factors that contribute to college readiness.
Implications for Practice
The results of this study led to several important recommendations tied to
curriculum, school involvement, resource development and support systems, and
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 130
conceptions of college readiness. Curriculum-based recommendations are focused on
modifying the school’s academic context to develop beneficial college readiness
behaviors. These recommendations include efforts to:
Explicitly teach academic and self-regulatory strategies as part of the
curriculum
Encourage student participation in advanced coursework
Integrate aspects of supplemental programs and extracurricular activities into
the curriculum
Implement academic interventions (e.g., aligning curriculum, making
advanced coursework accessible) early in students’ academic careers
The following school involvement-related recommendation directs attention to the
positive aspects of engaging in extracurricular activities:
Encourage students to become more involved in school
The importance of gaining access to resources and developing support systems cannot be
underestimated. Thus, the following approaches are proposed:
Develop personal and academic support systems for students and their
families
Provide credible models to help students learn college readiness behaviors
Build cultural capital by expanding student, family, and school staff college
knowledge and by establishing a college-going culture early
Foster community involvement to increase the safety of students
Finally, the complexity of the college readiness construct must be revisited in order to
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 131
unveil better approaches to assessing college readiness; hence, the following
recommendation is proposed:
Establish more comprehensive indicators of college readiness to guide efforts
to prepare students
Explicitly Teach Academic and Self-Regulatory Strategies as Part of the
Curriculum
To support the students’ efforts, SELA school staff implemented curriculum that
targets the development of academic strategies—for example, they began teaching
students as early as ninth grade how to use Cornell notes. One teacher noted that students
appeared to show some gains on the CST, which coincided with the implementation of
Cornell notes on campus. While it cannot be concluded based on current knowledge that
this strategy led to the score increase, the relationship between students’ facility with
note-taking and academic performance is something of interest that should be further
explored, as note-taking helps students focus on pertinent information and allows for
increased retrieval of information longitudinally.
Self-regulatory strategies—e.g., time management, prioritization—can also be
used to help students minimize distractions in their environment and stay focused on the
tasks they must complete. For example, teaching students how to stimulate interest in a
topic, such as through personalizing academic content, helped SELA students to sustain
their attention when confronted with classroom distractions. When distractions are
present at home, students can be taught how to organize their time or to structure their
environment in ways that facilitate their learning. Additionally, the acquisition of
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 132
effective learning strategies can help students to become more efficient in terms of how
they use their time.
Explicit instruction on academic and self-regulatory strategies is necessary
because greater exposure to effective academic strategies has been shown to be beneficial
for students, and self-regulating students perform better academically. For example,
McCabe (2010) conducted a study in which undergraduate students’ familiarity with
successful learning strategies was positively correlated with their academic performance.
Further still, this research supported the idea that providing students with training, in
terms of being able to identify effective learning strategies, had the potential to improve
their ability to execute these skills. An increased effort to teach students how to choose
and use academic strategies could have a beneficial impact on their performance
throughout their high school and college years.
According to Cleary and Zimmerman (2004), extensive research exists supporting
the idea that students who have been trained to be self-regulating (particularly in terms of
setting goals, and monitoring and reflecting on self) are able to perform better
academically and also display higher levels of motivation. This coincides with one of the
goals articulated by SELA school staff, which was to help students recognize which
learning strategies work best for them—metacognitive awareness of one’s own learning
strategies. As noted in the literature review, these strategies are necessary for students to
function as independent learners (Conley, 2007).
Dembo and Seli (2012) have written a book that has been used on college
campuses to explicitly teach students specific learning and self-regulatory strategies to
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 133
help them be successful in college. In their book, they discuss both motivational and
behavioral strategies that students can use to improve academic performance, as well as
aspects of academic self-regulation (based on the work of Zimmerman) which include:
Motivation: Successful students learn to control their motivation, so they can
consistently engage in self-directed behavior.
Time Management: Successful students are able to manage their time well in
order to accomplish tasks.
Learning Strategies: Successful students must understand which learning
strategies are appropriate for various learning contexts.
Physical and Social Environment: Successful students structure their
environments so that they can minimize or control distractions and seek help
when they need it.
Monitoring Performance: Successful students use their performance as
formative feedback, and they adjust or make corrections to their approaches to
learning based on this.
Particularly important is the attention directed to preparing for and taking examinations,
which would be helpful strategies for high school students to learn in anticipation of
college admissions testing (e.g., SAT/ACT examinations).
Encourage Student Participation in Advanced Coursework through
Communication and Advocacy
The relationship between challenging coursework and students’ level of college
readiness was positive, as discussed in the literature review, and the results of this study
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 134
revealed that positive deviant students tended to participate in honors and AP courses.
The National Science Board (2004) noted that the completion of advanced courses had
specific benefits—that is, participation in advanced courses was positively related to
gains in achievement in mathematics, as evidenced by improved test scores—and these
benefits held true when the researchers controlled for students’ prior achievement. These
advanced courses were seen as more rigorous, and engagement in these courses was
associated with the increased likelihood that students who pursued postsecondary
education would actually graduate. Consequently, it is important to ensure access to
these courses.
SELA school staff recognized the importance of students’ self-advocacy in
relation to accessing these resources. As Ms. Maldonado pointed out, students must be
able to recognize that they deserve more than what they may be receiving in the
mainstream classes and seek out more advanced coursework. The ability of students to
acknowledge that they require more from their classes may not be something that is
simply inherent to them. Schools should make ongoing efforts to ensure that students
and their families are aware of the opportunities available, so that they can take
advantage of these options.
Integrate Aspects of Supplemental Programs and Extracurricular Activities into the
Curriculum
One of the challenges noted by SELA school staff that impacts their ability to
broaden their efforts is the limited resources available—they simply do not have the
funds to bring in extra programs to help students achieve on other indicators of college
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 135
readiness, making initiatives such as more extensive SAT or ACT test preparation
programs not practical as a long-term strategy. However, school staff can integrate into
the curriculum some of the test-taking and study strategies taught as part of these
preparatory courses, in a manner similar to how they implemented Cornell notes. These
test-taking and study strategies also have the potential to impact students’ performance on
the CST (and its EAP sub-component) through transfer of skills and knowledge.
Additionally, a significant number of students may not be in the position to take
full advantage of the after-school activities available to them—e.g., leadership
development programs. Thus, efforts should be made to understand the specific factors
that contribute to students’ personal development and growth in these programs, so that
schools could facilitate these desirable outcomes by developing in-school activities for
students who cannot become involved. This approach would then create opportunities
for these students to benefit from the most influential aspects of school engagement.
Implement Academic Interventions Early in Students’ Academic Careers
Academic interventions are a necessary aspect of building college readiness,
particularly in a school like SELA which serves a substantial number of English language
learners. As previously discussed, when students must gain proficiency in English while
still mastering grade-level content standards, students often fall behind. This happens
early in their education, such that when they reach high school they are already well
below where they should be in terms of academic skills. For those entering high school
without the requisite English skills, there is an inability to access the content.
School staff at SELA discussed the intervention programs they have in place to
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 136
help students remediate these skills—for example, courses offered as a part of the school
day. Additionally, teachers have sometimes delivered instruction in Spanish to students
to help them understand the academic concepts better, which some of the students
described as being helpful. Overall, the school reported gains in CST scores, which
suggests that some of their efforts to close this achievement gap may be working.
However, significant numbers of students are still not performing at proficient or above,
which suggests that more focused interventions may be necessary.
SELA school staff have also been making efforts to collaborate with each other to
align curriculum across classes within a grade level and build on student knowledge
across grade levels and disciplines. In 2010, a LACMO middle school was co-located
with SELA high school. This co-location could provide SELA with opportunities to
bridge the gap between middle and high school, further aligning the curriculum, and to
begin implementing intervention efforts sooner as part of a collaborative effort between
the middle and high school.
Implementing academic intervention efforts earlier provides students with more
opportunities to raise their performance to grade-level and allows students to redirect
cognitive and time resources to other aspects of college readiness, such as accessing and
highly achieving in rigorous advanced coursework and becoming more involved in
extracurricular activities. Freeing cognitive resources can help students to develop more
sophisticated academic strategies, as well as to engage in more self-regulatory strategies.
Encourage Students to Become More Involved in School
SELA school staff believed that school involvement was an essential aspect of the
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 137
process of preparing for college, and positive deviant students indicated that they were
frequently involved in various school activities, from athletics to leadership clubs to
student advocacy, academic honor society, and health education clubs. The development
of leadership skills was an important outcome that both students and school staff
perceived as emerging from school involvement. These activities were also seen as a
means of demonstrating well-roundedness on college applications. One teacher, Ms.
Rodriguez, even suggested that there may be a strong positive relationship between
participating in a club that she supervised—Students Run LA—and students’ college-
going rates. The merits of school involvement should be further explored, to identify
some of the other positive outcomes that could be generated by students’ participation—
for example, socioemotional or other developmental outcomes—that were not explicitly
acknowledged during this study.
Develop Personal and Academic Support Systems for Students and Their Families
At SELA, support systems played a key role in positive deviants’ attainment of
college readiness—particularly, supportive relationships with school staff and peers.
Positive relationships with school staff were perceived by students as a crucial aspect of
their high school experiences. The personalized attention given to SELA students is
something that could be replicated at other schools in a way that mirrors SELA’s
approaches—e.g., through advisory classes. In addition, it is important to convince
school staff to invest more in their students on a personal level—it is the personal
connection and the sharing of information between school staff and students that can help
students to feel supported and mentored. The importance of these support systems is
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 138
highlighted by the understanding that these relationships can help attenuate the impact
that lack of support in the home may have on students.
Further still, the development of support systems should be expanded to the
students’ families. This involves developing more resources for families (e.g., parent
workshops) to bolster their ability to provide support. For example, SELA counselors
explained to parents the types of sensitive information they may need to provide students,
so that they can enable their children to apply for and receive financial aid.
Establishment of these support systems is not unidirectional. Each stakeholder
group—students, families, and school staff—must take an active role in seeking ways to
establish supportive relationships and to gather the knowledge needed to help students
become college-ready. This requires the development of trust and some degree of
personal investment in order to build these support systems.
Provide Credible Models to Help Students Learn College Readiness Behaviors
Through interactions with school staff, family, and peers, students learn
vicariously which strategies work best and which to avoid. One approach to facilitating
college readiness is to provide students with numerous examples from which they can
learn, and by helping them to interpret the points that they should take from these
models. The latter is an important point, as part of propagating college readiness in the
community is to swim upstream against the existing community norms that lean toward
lack of college readiness. Understanding the relationship between specific behaviors and
their outcomes can help students realize why they should avoid certain behaviors that are
not conducive to college readiness and why they should engage in actions that support it.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 139
Students also benefit by being provided with opportunities to help others. Based
on the discussions with positive deviant students, the process of modeling for and helping
others is an important motivation. It helps students connect what they are doing to how it
impacts others, and allows them the opportunity to have a positive effect on others’ lives.
Build Cultural Capital by Expanding Student, Family, and School Staff College
Knowledge and Establishing a College-Going Culture Early
Without cultural capital—particularly in the form of college knowledge—students
have more difficulty navigating the postsecondary educational context; thus, the
development of cultural capital is a necessary component of building college readiness.
The challenges tied to limited cultural capital are mitigated by student, school, and
parental efforts to gather and disseminate college knowledge. In fact, SELA does an
extraordinary job of compiling and disseminating college knowledge to students and their
families. For example, while other institutions do offer their students advisory classes,
these classes do not seem to have the same heavy focus on college knowledge that
SELA’s advisory classes have. SELA’s model for transmitting cultural capital,
particularly through advisory, could be viewed as a best practice, which can be
customized by other schools to meet the needs of their students.
Additionally, SELA school staff engaged in extensive communication efforts to
keep families informed regarding their students’ academic progress and needs, and
students and their families took advantage of these opportunities to build college
knowledge. For example, parents were given the opportunity to attend college-related
workshops that were offered on Saturdays, and students sought help from counselors and
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 140
advisory teachers to figure out what they needed to accomplish.
The development of cultural capital can have long-reaching effects, the most
prominent of which is to reduce the discouragement and lack of support that students may
face due simply to family members’ lack of understanding of the college process and how
they can support their students. Cultural capital provides families with the necessary
tools to help students develop college readiness and attain their goals.
Similar to academic interventions, efforts at building a college-going culture must
also start early. One model that could be used for doing this is one implemented by No
Excuses University (NEU; http://turnaroundschools.com/neu-network/), a college
readiness model that begins its efforts in elementary school. One key aspect of NEU is
that students frequently encounter explicit visual representations of college-going—e.g.,
by displaying college flags and banners on every classroom door, much like what SELA
teachers do (i.e., posted signs describing the teachers’ college accomplishments, p. 121).
Foster Community Involvement to Increase the Safety of Students
As mentioned previously, students were unable to remain on the school campus to
access the resources available to them, due to the threats against them from within the
community. In order to circumvent these issues, more effort could be made to ensure the
safety of students who stay after school to take advantage of academic resources. For
example, in a nearby area, the University of Southern California has worked with the
surrounding community to establish a neighborhood Kid Watch program to ensure that
students are able to safely walk between home and school
(http://communities.usc.edu/neighbors/kid_watch.html). Perhaps such a strategy could
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 141
be used to mobilize the neighborhood surrounding SELA and other communities to better
ensure the safety of the students who attend there. This approach, then, also places
responsibility for protecting students into the hands of the community. The Kid Watch
program represents the efforts of positive deviants in South Central Los Angeles, whose
efforts could be translated into positive deviant behaviors within other communities.
Through these efforts, the community could attain a shift in culture that emerges from
within and creates a safer environment for its residents in a sustainable manner.
Establish More Comprehensive Indicators of College Readiness to Guide Efforts to
Prepare Students
Although not explicitly described as a challenge by participants, one issue that
emerged was the complexity of defining college readiness. As described in Chapter 2,
defining and assessing college readiness is a problem, and efforts at doing so have varied
extensively, from focus on curriculum and grades to standards and achievement tests to
high school exit exams (ACT, 2011; Conley, 2007; Porter & Polikoff, 2011; Roderick et
al., 2009; Wyatt et al., 2012).
In Los Angeles schools, the A-G requirements serve as one of the primary
approaches to assessing college readiness; however, completion of these requirements
does not necessarily indicate college readiness. Indeed, school staff showed concern over
the fact that SELA students completing the A-G coursework sequence were performing
poorly on the EAP, which suggested that they were still entering college without all of
the preparation they needed. A more integrated definition of college readiness is
essential in order to prepare students in a way that meets a multitude of college readiness
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 142
requirements and allows them to achieve greater success in college. This can be tied
back to the conclusion drawn in Chapter 2 that college readiness is best measured using
multiple indicators—students must be prepared to perform successfully across indicators.
Study Challenges and Limitations
As a qualitative study, the goal was to delve into the experiences of students and
school staff. However, the structure of this study did not allow for conclusions to be
drawn about the causal relationships between various strategies and the students’ college
readiness outcomes. Additional research should be conducted to isolate which strategies
actually had an impact on academic outcomes. Moreover, the nature of these
relationships (how and why it has an impact) must also be further explored, in order to
refine the understanding of the role of these strategies and to establish what the most
effective approaches to implementing such strategies would be. Further research should
also explore how students’ strategies change over time.
Perspectives of positive deviants’ family members were missing from the study.
These interviews were not conducted due to the language barriers that existed. The key
informant indicated that most of the students’ families spoke Spanish as their primary
language. This created challenges for the researcher in terms of translation and
interpretation of interviews. Additional research must include the family’s voice, as this
could illuminate further the strategies used by families to support students—a set of
strategies notably missing from the current analysis.
Because college readiness itself is such an elusive concept, it was sometimes
difficult to help students and school staff understand how to respond to the questions
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 143
asked during the interview. In the discussions with school staff, the response of “that’s a
really hard question” was frequently expressed. Shifting students’ thinking regarding
how they attained college readiness was particularly challenging, as many of the students
did not perceive their efforts from a behavioral perspective. In fact, much of the
discussion continued to gravitate toward motivation, and how they established their
desire to go to college. In some instances, students would speak of a strategy but would
struggle to describe how they implemented it. Thus, there is a strong possibility that
many of the students’ strategies may have been missed during the interview, since the
framing of interview questions (for students, in particular) was difficult.
Finally, the school’s status as belonging to a charter management organization is
an important consideration. Although charter schools are considered public schools, their
institutional capacity differs from traditional public schools. As noted on the LACMO
website, they “operate on public revenue independently from a school district’s central
bureaucracy” which provides space for LACMO “to be innovative and to include the
community’s input in shaping their local school.” Thus, these schools may, in fact, have
more capital. Additionally, parents must make a conscious choice to send their children
to these types of institutions, which suggests there may also be some differences in terms
of the families sending their children to SELA (as compared with the broader Southeast
Los Angeles community). Further research should be conducted to determine whether
the findings of this study could be replicated in non-charter public schools.
Conclusion
This study’s asset-based positive deviance approach represented an effort to
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 144
explore the behaviors of college-going students in a community heavily underrepresented
in higher education. Use of the positive deviance approach was especially valuable
because it allowed the discussion regarding college readiness to be centered on positive,
effective efforts being made by students, school staff, and the school as an institution.
Interviews with positive deviant students and school staff revealed a wealth of
information on strategies that could be used to support college readiness. The results of
the study provided reassurance that with the right support and skills, students can and will
successfully prepare for and attend college. Indeed, the recommendations of this study
are focused on helping all students acquire strategies to develop college readiness, and on
utilizing the available resources to shift curriculum and school culture—these suggestions
can be adapted and deployed in ways that help other schools to improve their students’
short- and long-term educational, social, and economic outcomes. Through student,
family, and school efforts, students across diverse contexts can achieve college readiness
outcomes that enable them to pursue higher education.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 145
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Appendix A: Information Sheet
University of Southern California
Rossier School of Education
Waite Phillips Hall
3470 Trousdale Parkway
Los Angeles, CA 90089-4038
INFORMATION/FACTS SHEET FOR NON-MEDICAL RESEARCH
Study: Addressing College Readiness through a Positive Deviance Framework
PURPOSE OF THE STUDY
The purpose of this study is to identify the behaviors and strategies of students who are
successfully completing college preparatory curriculum (e.g., A-G requirements) in low-
performing high schools serving ethnic groups underrepresented in higher education.
PARTICIPANT INVOLVEMENT
You will be asked to engage in an interview that may range from at least 45 to 90 minutes in
length. The minimum time commitment for the interview will be 90 minutes for students and 45
minutes for school staff or family. If all of the interviewer’s items have been responded to, then
the minimum time commitment will be considered as met.
Participation in the study is always voluntary, and participants can choose to remove
themselves from the study at any time. There will be no researcher- or school-imposed
consequences for choosing not to participate in the study.
In the interview, you will be asked about your thoughts regarding college readiness. This will
include details about your personal experiences and what it is like to be in your role as a student,
family member, or staff member. You will be asked about the types of things you do in order to
get ready for college for college (yourself) or to help others to get ready for college. You will
also be asked questions about the school, and how students can be supported when they are
getting ready for college. One of the major goals of the study is to see how your experiences can
be used to help other people prepare better for college.
A digital audio recording of the interview will be made, and the results of the recording will be
transcribed to text. The recording is necessary and required for participation in the study.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 154
PAYMENT/COMPENSATION FOR PARTICIPATION
You will receive a $15 gift card for your time to one of the following vendors of your choice:
Target, Amazon.com, or Starbucks. You do not have to answer all of the questions in the
interview in order to receive the card; however, compensation will be provided only in the event
that a) you have responded to all of the interviewer’s questions, and/or b) you have met the
minimum time commitment requested for the interview.
CONFIDENTIALITY
Although personal information may be collected about you during the interview, your identity
will not be revealed when the results of the study are reported. In cases where specific quotes are
used, pseudonyms will be assigned to protect your identity. Your personal information will be
stored in a location separated from where the transcribed interviews and audio recordings will be
stored, and will be password protected. The transcribed interviews and audio recordings will not
contain any personal information about you within it. Any contact information that you share
will be stored in a password protected location until the data collection period has ended. At that
point, your contact information will be destroyed.
The members of the research team and the University of Southern California’s Human Subjects
Protection Program (HSPP) may access the data.
The HSPP reviews and monitors research studies to protect the rights and welfare of research
subjects.
INVESTIGATOR CONTACT INFORMATION
Principal Investigator
Christie A. Rainey, M.A.
Ed.D. Doctoral Candidate
University of Southern California
665 Exposition Blvd
TGF200, MC 1123
Los Angeles, CA 90089-1123
crainey@usc.edu
Faculty Advisor
Courtney L. Malloy, Ph.D.
Clinical Assistant Professor
University of Southern California
3470 Trousdale Parkway
WPH802, MC 4038
Los Angeles, CA 90089-4038
clm@usc.edu
IRB CONTACT INFORMATION
University Park IRB, Office of the Vice Provost for Research Advancement, Credit
Union Building, 3720 South Flower Street, CUB # 301 Los Angeles, CA 90089-0702,
(213) 821-5272 or upirb@usc.edu
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 155
Appendix B: General Recruitment Letter
[Date]
Dear Participant:
My name is Christie Rainey, and I am a doctoral candidate in the Rossier School
of Education at University of Southern California. I am conducting a research
study as part of my dissertation, focusing on the uncommon strategies and
behaviors individuals use in preparing themselves or others for college. You are
invited to participate in the study. If you agree, you are invited to participate in an
interview session that may take at least 45 to 90 minutes to complete and will be
recorded via digital audio recorder.
Participation in this study is voluntary. Your identity as a participant will remain
confidential at all times during and after the study.
If you have questions or would like to participate, please contact me by email at
_______________ or by phone at _______________.
Thank you for your participation.
Sincerely,
Christie A. Rainey, MA
University of Southern California
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 156
Appendix C: Student Interview Guide
Introduction Script
Hello, my name is _______________. I’m glad that you’ve taken the time to speak with
me today. One of the reasons we are chatting right now is that I’m interested in learning
from you about how you’ve become college-ready. Before we begin, I just want to take a
few minutes to review the information sheet with you. (Review information sheet.) To
ensure that I am able to accurately capture everything you share with me, I’d like to
record this interview. Would that be okay with you? Do you have any questions before
we begin? Are you ready to begin?
Interview Questions/Prompts
1. Tell me about yourself.
2. Have you ever thought about not going to college? Why?
3. What are the challenges to getting ready for college?
4. Why did you decide to prepare for college?
5. What influenced you to go down this path (to become college-ready)? How?
6. Who has supported you along the way? How? What did they do? How did you
find supportive people/allies?
7. What steps did you take to be college-ready? What strategies did you use to
overcome your challenges?
8. When you were preparing for college, what was a typical day like for you as a
student?
9. What were the daily obstacles to meeting your goals? How did you overcome
them? What strategies did you use?
10. Which strategies have been the most useful to you? Which have made the
biggest difference in your success?
11. Think about other students like you. Do you know others who are also
successful? What did they do to be successful?
12. Think about other students like you who have did not graduate from high school
ready for college. How are they different?
13. What advice would you give to other students who want to prepare for and go to
college?
14. What lessons have you learned that might benefit others?
Conclusion Script
Is there anything more you’d like to add? Do you have any questions for me? Would it
be okay if I contact you if I have any additional questions for you? Also, I want to let
you know that once the interview is transcribed, you will have an opportunity to review it
and correct anything that is incorrect. What is the best way to contact you? Thank you
very much for taking the time to do this interview with me.
COLLEGE READINESS THROUGH A PD FRAMEWORK 157
Appendix D: School Staff Interview Guide
Introduction Script
Hello, my name is _______________. I’m glad that you’ve taken the time to speak with
me today. One of the reasons we are chatting right now is that I’m interested in learning
from you how you help your students become college-ready. Before we begin, I just
want to take a few minutes to review the information sheet with you. (Review
information sheet.) To ensure that I am able to accurately capture everything you share
with me, I’d like to record this interview. Would that be okay with you? Do you have
any questions before we begin? Are you ready to begin?
Interview Questions/Prompts
1. Tell me about yourself.
2. What does a college-ready student look like to you? What do they do?
3. What are the challenges to getting ready for college?
4. How do you support students in getting ready for college?
5. What steps do you see successful students take to become college-ready? What
strategies do they use to overcome their challenges?
6. What steps do you see other [school staff/families] take to help students become
college-ready?
7. Which strategies seem most effective in helping students become college-ready?
8. Think about other students who have did not graduate from high school ready for
college. How are they different from the ones who do leave college-ready?
9. What advice would you give to students who want to prepare for and go to
college?
10. What lessons have you learned that might benefit others?
Conclusion Script
Is there anything more you’d like to add? Do you have any questions for me? Would it
be okay if I contact you if I have any additional questions for you? Also, I want to let
you know that once the interview is transcribed, you will have an opportunity to review it
and correct anything that is incorrect. What is the best way to contact you? Thank you
very much for taking the time to do this interview with me.
Abstract (if available)
Abstract
This exploratory study utilized a positive deviance theoretical framework to unveil the challenges faced by students preparing for college, as well as the strategies used to address these challenges and develop college readiness. To accomplish this, twelve interviews were conducted with seven recent high school graduates and five school staff members. Results revealed challenges tied to limited knowledge, family context, community distractions, and access to academic resources. Additionally, students leveraged numerous strategies, including focusing on school, self-regulating their learning, and developing support systems. School staff emphasized the importance of establishing high expectations and rigorous, consistent curriculum for students, sharing college knowledge, and increasing family involvement. These findings have significant implications for practice, revealing specific strategies that students can be explicitly taught (e.g., learning and self-regulatory strategies) and approaches that can be taken by school staff to support students' college readiness efforts (e.g., strengthening the existing curriculum and developing support systems for students and their families).
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Rainey, Christie A.
(author)
Core Title
Addressing college readiness through a positive deviance framework
School
Rossier School of Education
Degree
Doctor of Education
Degree Program
Education (Leadership)
Publication Date
11/13/2012
Defense Date
10/19/2012
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
college readiness,college-going culture,learning strategies,OAI-PMH Harvest,positive deviance,self-regulatory strategies,support systems
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Malloy, Courtney L. (
committee chair
), Robles, Darline P. (
committee member
), Stowe, Kathy (
committee member
)
Creator Email
crainey@usc.edu,she_who_dreams@ymail.com
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-111430
Unique identifier
UC11290065
Identifier
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etd-RaineyChri-1290.pdf
Dmrecord
111430
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Dissertation
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(contributing entity),
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Tags
college readiness
college-going culture
learning strategies
positive deviance
self-regulatory strategies
support systems