“Successful African-American mathematics students” Essay Example for Free

â€Å"Successful African-American mathematics students† Essay â€Å"Successful African-American Mathematics Students in Academically Unacceptable High Schools† is author Peter A. Sheppard IV’s dissertation for his Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Science and Mathematics Education. And although there have been numerous studies already conducted on successful African-Americans, as revealed by Sheppard’s Review of Literature, not much has been made regarding the accountability aspect of the No Child Left behind Act (NCLB) 2001 (where states are required to publicly identify low-performing schools) and its influence on students. Hence, Sheppard sought to explore the relation between academically unacceptable schools – which, as defined by the NCLB 2001, refer to schools that got a School Performance Score of 44. 9 or below – and the existence of quite a number of African-American math students in such seemingly negatively labeled academic institutions. Completed on May 2005, Sheppard’s article posed two primary and four secondary research questions. The main questions that the study aimed to address are: 1) Why are successful African-American mathematics students (with â€Å"successful student† defined as someone who scored ‘Advanced’ or ‘Mastery’ on the math portion of Louisiana’s Graduate Exit Exam or GEE) able to thrive in academically unacceptable schools? 2) Why have these successful African-American math students chosen to stay in academically unacceptable schools despite being given an option to transfer to a better-performing school? In an attempt to answer the above questions, Sheppard (2005) also hopes to stumble upon answers to the following sub-questions: 1) Is the negative school designation, academically unacceptable, an appropriate description of the schools in this study? 2) What is the role of the teacher in the achievement of successful math students in state-recognized poor schools? 3) What is the role of the school-based leader (principal) in the achievement of successful math students in state-recognized poor schools? 4) To what extent do peers affect the achievement of successful math students in state-recognized poor schools? Sheppard made it clear that his paper was in no way an attempt to generalize the situation of all African-American students in all academically unacceptable schools. In fact, the answers he’ll be deriving at will be applicable only to â€Å"a small non-probability, purposeful sample† that is limited to the eleven successful African-American math students who studied in either Lake High School or River High School and who participated in the study (Sheppard, 2005). It is for this reason that Sheppard approached his study with a qualitative design. Since Sheppard was attacking his research qualitatively, the theoretical construct used is not that well-defined. The use of a theory in a qualitative study is, after all, not as clear as its use in quantitative researches. John Creswell (1994) explains, â€Å"In a qualitative study, one does not begin with a theory to test or verify. Instead, consistent with the inductive model of thinking, a theory may emerge during the data collection and analysis phase of the research†¦. † But even with an undefined theoretical construct, it may be safe to assume that Sheppard was proceeding with the research under the same theoretical constructs that other researchers mentioned in the Review of Literature were using: that despite an â€Å"ominous set of troubling conditions† provided by family life, peers, society, and – as applicable with the study at hand – a negative label on the schools they attend, African-Americans are able to overcome the challenges and become academically successful thanks to â€Å"support from teachers, parental academic engagement, self-discipline, self efficacy, and positive peer influence† (Sheppard, 2005). To arrive at a conclusion, Sheppard attempted to answer his research questions via what he called data triangulation, where he â€Å"[brings] more than one source of data to bear a single point†. And his sources of data were tape-recorded interviews with the 11 successful African-American students and principals and math teachers from the two participant schools plus a 10-item open-ended survey that the 11 students had to complete. Conducting tape-recorded interviews indeed worked to Sheppard’s advantage as it allowed him to keep the original data and â€Å"preserve the words of the respondents† (Sheppard, 2005). Conducting one hour semi-structured interviews with each of the principals and teachers allowed Sheppard to make use of one of the advantages of the said data collection type, which is that it gave him control over the line of questioning (Creswell, 1994). Same thing goes with his interviews with the students. However, the interview with the students posed one limitation: since they were conducted in a group setting, the presence of other interviewees may have biased the responses. In fact, it should be noted that 5 of the 11 students interviewed were either reserved or brief in responding. Sheppard did use another data collection type to verify the students’ answers during the group interviews. But for a study that is openly outlined as qualitative in nature – Sheppard himself wrote so a couple of times throughout the paper – it was surprising that the second method used was the open-ended survey. It is a common fact that survey – open- or close-ended – is a method associated with the qualitative procedure (Burns and Bush, 2005; Creswell, 1994; Qualitative research). I believe that it would have been wiser for Sheppard to have stuck with the methods he applied during his pilot study, which were group and individual interviews. This is not only to make sure that he stays parallel with a qualitative design but also because a face-to-face interview achieves something that a written survey can never hope to do so – and that is allowing the researcher room to ask for additional information (Burns and Bush, 2005). Surveys, even those with open-ended questions, allows for respondents to provide incomplete answers that a researcher will have a hard time clarifying; with face-to-face interviews, though, it will be easy for the interviewer to throw in a follow-up question and let the respondent elaborate on his/her answers (Burns and Bush, 2005; Creswell, 1994). Besides, the methods in the pilot study has already proven successful as two of the participants who were reluctant during the group interviews answered more openly during the individual session, thus making the group-individual interviews seem like a smarter path to tread. It is also worth noting that the use of open-ended and semi-structured questionnaires was indeed a good move on Sheppard’s part because it allowed him to collect information in the participants’ own words and these kinds of questionnaires elicit complete answers (it is just up to Sheppard to probe further). And although the information collection with these types of questionnaires are difficult to code and interpret (Burns and Bush, 2005), Sheppard was able to go about it with member checking, where he asked the participants to review and edit the transcripts. Sheppard’s methodology was, arguably, effective in arriving at a satisfactory conclusion. But in my honest opinion, there would have been a better way of approaching the research to ensure that the result he’d arrive at will be more ‘trustworthy’. But his study, â€Å"Successful African-American Mathematics Students in Academically Unacceptable High Schools†, although not applying a methodology I would personally have preferred is indeed a good starting to point to further exploring relationships between successful African-American math students and academically unacceptable high schools. REFERENCES Boeree, C. George. (1998). Being Aware Of Your Biases. Qualitative Methods Workbook. Retrieved August 23, 2007, from http://webspace. ship. edu/cgboer/qualmethfour. html. Burns, Alvin and Ronald Bush. (2005). Marketing Research (5th ed). Europe: Pearson Education. Creswell, John W. (1994). Research Design: Qualitative Quantitative Approaches. California: Sage Publications. Northern Arizona University. (1999). Interviewing in Qualitative Research. Qualitative Research. Retrieved August 23, 2007, from http://jan. ucc. nau. edu/~mid/edr725/class/interviewing/. Qualitative research. (2007, August 19). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved August 23, 2007, from http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Qualitative_research. Quantitative research. (2007, July 25). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved August 23, 2007, from http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Quantitative_research. Sheppard, Peter IV. (2005 May). Successful African-American Mathematics Students in Academically Unacceptable High Schools [Electronic version]. ERIC. Retrieved August 23, 2007, from http://www. eric. ed. gov/ERICWebPortal/contentdelivery/servlet/ERICServlet? accno=ED489992.

The Great Gatsby :: essays research papers

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is more than a story about a mans love for a women, but rather a mans will to achieve greatness as he perceived. Jay Gatsby was a man driven by money and power. He was a man with a vision, a vision to succeed in life. As a child, Jay Gatsby grew up on a farm. He saw his parents as nothing but lethargic farmers. Gatsby knew exactly what he didn’t want to be and that was like his parents. They were people who were content with who they were. Gatsby, on the other hand, was the exact opposite. He wanted to move on. Jay Gatsby wanted to be someone special, someone with prestige and someone definitely with money. Gatsby developed a self improvement plan to help him flourish as a young man. His plan detailed dumbbell exercises, studying electricity, practicing elocution and studying needed inventions. Even his parents knew he was driven. His father said: "Jimmy was bound to get ahead.. He always had some resolve like this or something. Do you notice what he’s got about improving his mind? He was always great for that" (182). The structured drive let Gatsby prevail in his endeavors. However, there are some things people just can’t get away from. James Gatsby desperately wanted to achieve success in life. However, it is difficult to flourish with a background like Gatsby’s. So to escape his past, he changed his name at the age of 17 from James Gats to Jay Gatsby. Nonetheless, changing his name only did so much for him. Gatsby ended up living a life of lies because of his hidden identity. Nobody really knew Gatsby. So in the absence of peoples knowledge, they conjured up rumors. "One time he killed a man who found out he was a nephew of von Hindenburg and second to the devil"(65). These were just some of the rumors about Gatsby. Some believed he was a German spy, while others thought he was a war hero. These were things he had to go through to reach his ultimate goal in life, which was to succeed. After he left the farm, Gatsby went to work for a man named Dan Cody. Cody was a stable father figure for Gatsby. He looked up to Dan and saw what he really wanted to be. "That’s Dan Cody, old sport.

Mis at Coca Cola

Management Information Systems at The Coca-Cola Company Lewis Bianco Professor Rampersad CMS 315 Due: 12/7/10 As a world-wide leader in the soft drink and beverage industry, Coca Cola maintains a vast corporate and industrial structure which serves to run the business as smoothly as possible, and enhance all around internal performance. To make this happen, and to grow to where Coca Cola is as a business today, they have amassed a large variety of products, and reached deeply into the global market with these products.Some useful stats which help to realize the corporate landscape of The Coca-Cola Company are as follows: as of 2009 the company employed 92,800 people, featured a line of 3,300+ beverages, boasted 48 consecutive years of increased dividends, and had its products being sold in over 200 different countries (The Coca-Cola Company, 2009). However, all of this expansion and growth as a business could not take place without significant internal structuring.The corporate struc ture of Coca-Cola utilizes a mix of high end technology and computer systems, collaboration with bottling companies and retailers which exists on a large and impressive scale, as well as a massive focus on advertisement that is constantly on the competitive edge and the horizon of social developments in order to represent their products most efficiently to customers.Customers are of course, the final and most important link in this chain, and Coca-Cola has excelled at finding new and creative ways to reach its customers, while at the same time growing and expanding as a business in order to retain its position as the global leader in its industry. An example of Coca Cola’s extremely large dominion over the beverage industry comes in the form of a statistic, one of several important statistics found on the Coca Cola corporate website which states that according to a 2009 study, people worldwide consumed an average of 1. billion servings of Coca Cola products per day (The Coca- Cola Company, 2009). In order to manage all of this capital effectively, Coca-Cola employs a highly technological, highly structured system that includes 300 bottling companies independent of Coca-Cola. The company works essentially by producing the syrups, concentrates, and base products used in Coca-Cola beverages. This is the main purpose of the Coca-Cola Company, along with advertisement and management. After the syrups and bases are manufactured, they are shipped to any of the 300 bottling companies, who finish and package the final product.In this way, Coca-Cola is able to exist on a global level, while still working with local bottling companies. This is an efficient way to manage such a huge distribution operation, and although corporate oversight obviously still exists to a certain extent, it breaks the huge process of distribution up into smaller, more manageable chunks which improve the over-all efficiency of the company. Bottling partners are for the majority not owned b y Coca-Cola, and the company prides itself on allowing bottling partners to work completely independently in most cases.An important stat which highlights this corporate relationship between Coca-Cola and bottlers can be found in the Coca Cola 2007 Investor’s Review, where in a pie graph entitled â€Å"Company’s 2007 Worldwide Unit Case Volume by Bottler Relationship† it shows that a majority 54% of its bottling operation is in non-controlling equity interest. The other portions of Coca Cola’s unit case volume are as follows: 25% – no ownership interest, 10% – controlling interest, and 11% – â€Å"other† which includes foodservice operations as well as the production of juice and sports drinks (The Coca-Cola Company, 2007).As we can see, the importance of these â€Å"bottling partners† cannot be underestimated, as it is their responsibility to manufacture the product and package it to vendors, who are the next key member in the structure of The Coca-Cola Company. The vendors are less intimately involved with the workings of the company as a whole but are equally important as it is their job to actually sell the products to customers. In this way, we see that the organizational structure that exists from within and without The Coca-Cola Company is elegantly simple, and is prosperous for bottling companies who are allowed to take part in the ompany without being owned by it. This is definitely something that most consumers don’t know about Coca-Cola, but it is a defining factor that makes the company what it is today. It is obviously important to understand how this relates to management information systems and in the sense of that term, without such systems in place the process by which information is gathered that is needed to make decisions on behalf of 300 independent bottlers as well as retailers would be a much less easily manageable task.The Coca-Cola Company also has a unique relations hip with its retailers and vendors, the people who actually sell its products. Through Coca-Cola’s superb information management, they are able to reliably track information about their products and make adjustments to their business strategy accordingly online accordingly. We see that management information systems are perfectly suited to a task like this as it allows Coca-Cola to gather bulk data on sales and details on the nature of those sales.This insight into the market is a big reason why it is possible for Coca-Cola to operate on such a large level with independent businesses working together in this way. The information gained through the use of management information systems is utilized by Coca-Cola in several different levels of the business structure which was mentioned in detail earlier.A simple and effective way of summing up this process is laid out in the publication â€Å"Management Information Systems, Controller’s Handbook† by the where it sta tes â€Å"MIS also enhances job performance throughout an institution. At the most senior levels, it provides the data and information to help the board and management make strategic decisions. At other levels, MIS provides the means through which the institution's activities are monitored and information is distributed to management, employees, and customers. (Comptroller of the Currency Administrator of National Banks). With this information, and general knowledge on the matter it is easy to see that this method of gaining large amounts of data is becoming an industry standard by necessity and those businesses who utilize management information systems will have a competitive edge in their markets. This is due to the foresight that this data offers into who is buying products, how many are being bought, and where they are being bought.Another important area where management information systems come into play with The Coca-Cola Company is that of online sales, and especially in to day’s market no major business can afford to disregard this tool. As many companies do in today’s industry, Coca-Cola chose to find another business to help organize and run their e-commerce sector. This company’s job is to essentially serve as a massive inventory center for Coca-Cola, in order to help with their distribution and shipping of products that customers may buy online.The shift towards the importance of e-commerce created a change in the marketplace that successful companies were able to adapt to early on. The most noticeable change that companies had to undergo after the rise of e-commerce was the fact that focus and control shifted from the retailer to the customer in online markets. No longer were retailers allowed to choose the hours during which customers could purchase things, and the demand could not be affected by how much any given retailer ordered for stock.With the online shopping experience, the companies themselves had to bend to the wil l of the customer in an even more in depth way than ever before. With this challenge of course came the necessity for increased data from online sales. A company like Coca-Cola has prospered very well from a combination of using all possible information to react to the changing market, as well as utilize some of the same practices that make them so successful with offline sales.Perhaps the biggest perk to having the internet at Coca-Cola’s disposal for the purposes of collecting and utilizing data is the fact that the speed of the internet can make for a much smoother over-all operation. As it is stated in the book â€Å"E-Commerce† by Ritendra Goel, â€Å"delays in inventory tracking and management can ripple from the cash register all the way back to raw material production, creating inventory shortages at any stage of the value chain.The internet promises to increase business efficiency by reducing reporting delays and increasing reporting accuracy. Speed is clearl y the business imperative for the value chain† (Goel, 2007). This is a very important concept to understand as it shows how important the collection of up to date data is for a company like Coca-Cola, especially when the nature of their corporate structure contains over 300 independent bottlers and even more numbers of vendors and retailers. Effective management of all of this data is what allows this unique structure to prosper.Being a global leader in its market, The Coca-Cola Company is in a unique position as a business. It has over 80 years of history behind it, and in that time has grown to become one of the most recognizable names in the world when it comes to beverages. Because of this, they can accelerate past much of the research and development that younger, less established companies must undergo. However, with such a huge business, the need for effective and fast data collection and storage is absolutely imperative.The unique structure of the business, with Coca-C ola primarily making syrups and concentrates, while 300 bottling companies make the finished product calls for even more careful management and analyses of this data in order to turn these numbers and figures into profit. After researching into what makes this company tick it is easy to see how Coca-Cola has become so successful in today’s market.Bibliography Comptroller of the Currency Administrator of National Banks. (n. d. ). Management Information Systems Controller's Handbook. Retrieved December 2, 2010, from Office of the Comptroller of the Currency : http://www. occ. gov/static/publications/handbook/mis. pdf Goel, R. (2007). E-Commerce. New Age International . The Coca-Cola Company. (2009). Growth, Leadership, and Sustainability. Retrieved December 2, 2010, from The Coca-Cola Company: http://www. thecoca-colacompany. com/ourcompany/index. html The Coca-Cola Company. (2007). The Language of Refreshment 2007 Annual Review . Executive Communications, The Coca-Cola Company .

Travesia . To Write To Be A Writer, I Have To Trust And

TRAVESIA To write to be a writer, I have to trust and believe in myself as a speaker, as a voice for the images. I have to believe that can communicate with images and words that I can do it well. A lack of belief in my creative self is a lack of belief in my total self and vice versa- I cannot separate my writing from any part of my life. It is all one (95). Thirty years ago (1987), Gloria Anzaldà ºa published Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. The editor notes the revolutionary and controversial aspect of the book, first because of its context and second because of the historical moment in the USA: the sociopolitical environment that Hispanic, queers and people of color had to endure. Though in 2017 many organizations thrive†¦show more content†¦Further, for Church one is possessed by demons. Thus by being Mexican and lesbian, she violates the tradition womanhood. In an anecdote in page 41, talks about the woman [lesbian] who has magical power and was believed to be half-half: man and woman. Indeed, one common belief in the Hispanic culture is that gay men are hyper creative. Another example of this duality in people from Latin America living in the United States is the constant proof of proficiency. For instance, one goes to the primary care, the first question when they notice you have a Hispanic last name and speak with an accent, do you understand English? Other times, they would speak slowly as if the patient was two year-old. e.g., h- o-w ol-d are you? If one is lucky, he/she will have a bilingual physician who pretends that his/her Spanish has faded away. Another place where this test is taken is in Manhattan Corporate buildings (e.g., one enters the building and says, I would like to go to the XY Company. The door man or clerk at the security desk would say OK, give me your ID, right at the moment security person sees your last name, you are a dummy to them. Again, the security person would guide you in slow motion pointing out every single step to the elevator, the instructs you to press the 8th floor written in the address slip you handed to the m.Show MoreRelatedTravesias. â€Å"To Write To Be A Writer, I Have To Trust And1167 Words   |  5 PagesTravesias â€Å"To write to be a writer, I have to trust and believe in myself as a speaker, as a voice for the images. I have to believe that can communicate with images and words that I can do it well. A lack of belief in my creative self is a lack of belief in my total self and vice versa- I cannot separate my writing from any part of my life. It is all one† (95). Thirty years ago (1987), â€Å"Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldà ºa was published. The editor notes the revolutionaryRead MoreNotes The Revolutionary And Controversial Aspect Of The Book Borderlands / La Fronter The New Mestiza1171 Words   |  5 PagesTRAVESIA To write to be a writer, I have to trust and believe in myself as a speaker, as a voice for the images. I have to believe that can communicate with images and words that I can do it well. A lack of belief in my creative self is a lack of belief in my total self and vice versa- I cannot separate my writing from any part of my life. It is all one (95). Thirty years ago (1987),Gloria Anzaldà ºa published Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza . The editor notes the revolutionary and controversial