From: Dax, Wood
Email:
Course: CD 169:Motivating Children and Adolescents in Educational Settings
College: San Jose State University
Instructor: Eugene Matusov
ClassWeb: http://www.ematusov.com/cd169
ChildrenObservations: No
Date: 23 May 1997
Time: 06:29:09
Remote Name: ww-ti03.proxy.aol.com
In our Child Development 169 group project, I discussed what tracking is and when it began (historical/present), Rose C. talked about tracking psychologically and social effects, Tracy N. discussed the alternatives to tracking, and Chuck S. compared how public and Catholic schools use tracking. All this focused on how it pertains to elementary school children. Very interesting we thought, but I wondered if it stopped there. For my final I wanted to find out if tracking carried on to college and even further into the work force. According to my research, tracking does continue. The institutions that participate change, but the tracking idea and purpose is still there. Tracking seems to be a tool that many important institutions that people deal with daily.use that a p in a person's life. Institutions like state run agencies, education institutions, and almost any agencies that deal with people seem to use tracking as a basis to keep things running fairly and smoothly. I think it is here to stay.
Arizona State University is located in one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the country at the for front of having many types of students, such as first-time, transfer, re-entry, non-traditional, commuting, and minority students. Arizona State started conducting longitudinal studies in the late 1980s of tracking from each student's curriculum history from when the students enter until they graduate consisting of applications, admissions, course registrations, grades, and degrees awarded. All the data is then put into files and used to determine how many students share a particular characteristic or may be affected by a specific policy. The questions tend to focus on students exhibiting specific behaviors or outcomes. Examples of questions include graduations rate for the institution and number of times students change majors.
The longitudinal files are made up of two main files. The first file contains students responses to the most student asked questions like student persistence and graduation rate. The second file contains information on financial, listing any financial benefits students have received over the course of their schooling. This file is designed to see if financial benefits have on student persistence and graduation and to see if financial benefits have contributed to academic success. Like many academic files, the files are accessed with the students Social Security Numbers and don not contain names or other personal information.
Using the tracking files allows the university to analyze a variety of data specifically. Some examples are changes in residency status, changes in school status (part-time/full-time student status), academic status (good/probation), and performance in certain courses. Another advantage of the files is that they act as a tool for categorizing students after the fact. The longitudinal studies can track students through graduation and identify agents that contribute to students persistency. The files can also be regrouped and reanalyzed to the original state allowing for figuring differential rates of graduation and persistence. Another contribution the files make is that it allows for comparisons. Researchers can backtrack to obtain historical information and compare it to present day standings. This allows for comparisons of hours spent in earning a certain degree to how many students dropped out in a particular semester. The files present a sense of convenience and eliminate the need for additional files.
The longitudinal files for financial aid helps obtain data containing information on academic performance, economic background, and financial aid. The file is updated yearly and contains specific information made up of a student's major, residency, total financial aid budget, total family contribution, adjusted gross income, and number of dependents in the family. Also, one section of this files contains a student's information that includes registered hours per term, net earned hours per term, term GPA, cumulative earned hours and GPA, and a flag that tells if a student has made satisfactory progress (meaning if student meets federal requirements of percentage verses credit hours attempted). The information is then used to delegate financial aid benefits that are awarded on a yearly cycle throughout the university (September to August). This part of the file is very important to help keep financial aid being awarded to those students that are there getting an education, not just taking the money and excluding others.
Once the files are created, they present a wide variety of important information for institutional research. A draw back of the tracking files is that they take a great amount of time to keep maintained and updated, but once they have been created and updated they are very helpful. Arizona State University has stated that the files have significally changed the way students are looked at and the way they go about analyzing academic data. Overall the tracking files have proven their importance and are greatly appreciated by an academic institution accompanying thousands of eager students yearly.
Not only is tracking used in schools throughout the country, but it is used by the government to track employment. Starting in 1988 state governments have been collecting information from employers about employment and earning for sixty to seventy percent of workers in each state. Each state's department of labor or employment security collects and maintains this information in a file for unemployment insurance wages. The file exists to determine whether or not an employee is eligible to receive unemployment insurance benefits and set the level of the benefits the worker would receive if he/she becomes unemployed. Like educational files, these tracking files are identified by Social Security Numbers. The unemployment insurance files also has potential for researchers to not only track unemployment, but the labor force status of students and former students. An increasing amount of institutions and state systems find this system to be beneficial in obtaining fairly comprehensive low-cost data.
The Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (WSBCTC) first tapped into the system in 1989. The idea was to find a data base that allowed them to describe student employment status during and after university enrollment. The combination of their (WSBCTC) administrative files and the states surveys helps to generate data outcomes that allows for specific examinations that pertaining to specially funded training efforts, to evaluated vocational programs, and to construct institutional success indicators.
It is thought that at least twenty states now link higher education enrollment data with available unemployment insurance wage files. Many two-year colleges have replaced their own vocational follow-up surveys with the use of these files. The thought is that the survey is a useful indicator of the quality of education received by students by looking at the students' employment status after college. The records allow researchers to examine directly the complex dynamics of employment.
No kind of tracking is directed toward people who have stepped out of the work force to engage in full-time homemaking or retirement. Unemployment is only tracked in administrative records used for benefits and funding. Federal workers are not included in the unemployment insurance files nor (usually) are self-employed workers. Strategies that are used to address the percentages of the uncovered population consists of three ideas. The first is to create an employed-to-labor-force ratio. Since the unemployment insurance files only record a certain number of former student (it is said that 3-15 percent are not), the covered employment rate is rather low (consisting of only seventy percent). The second is to use the unemployment insurance wage and benefit files and job service files to identify the amounts of students in the work force. A ration is then calculated, keeping in mind those that have dropped from work force, and come up with a ninety percent employment ratio. The third is to find a way to estimate the status of those not covered by the system. A way is to conduct occasional employment surveys statewide to students who are not found in administrative records. These survey estimates are then added to generate total percentage of employed, attending school, or unemployed. This would then allow for researchers to determine if the employment rate for a state was too high or too low. The most important decision is then how to handle those not included in the administrative files. The decision may directly affect the reported statistics on employment status.
Most employers in midlevel occupations hire workers based on experience, attitude, and communication skills, not years of school completed/academic performance. To identify quality of employment or placement, the reporting systems used by most states depend on the assumption that training is the key to employment. Some reporting systems require additional indicators that suggest students actually use the skills and abilities obtained from the training they received. Many states look at the unemployment insurance wages to provide feedback of high-quality or training-related employment. Therefore the training received is then tracked and determined and added to the employment rate.
Tracking does not end after a person graduates from high school. As shown, tracking is used in college and proceeds into the work force. Maybe the researchers/users of the tracking information and findings change, but the idea is the same. It seems that some kind of tracking is used throughout the life span. When a person retires they then enter Medicare's form of tracking, Social Security benefits tracking, and so on. It becomes less personal, name rarely if at all used, but a person is still contributing to some kind of statistical data that is used to determines its future. No matter what is said, tracking seems that it is here to stay.
References
Wheelock, Anne. 1994. Alternative to Traking and Ability Grouping American Association of School Administrators.
Oakes, J. 1990. Multiplying Inequalities: The effects of race, social class, and tracking Santa Monica, CA:RAND.
Rosenbaum, James. 1976. Making Inequality Canada, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
http://www.ak.nea.org/excellence/tracking.html