Partly Cloudy with a 50% chance of rain HIGH LOW 81 75
Elvis’ death remembered at Graceland
Ash Lawson joins baseball coaching staff
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
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Issue 01
E D I T O R I A L L Y
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Vol. 115
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Academics, diversity highlight freshman class David Barnett Staff Writer This year’s incoming freshman class of 4,200 students is one of the most scholastically talented classes the university has seen. Richard Bayer, assistant provost and director of enrollment services, explained that the university classifies students as “high achieving” if they have a high school GPA of 3.75 and an ACT score of 29. The incoming freshman class had an average high school GPA of 3.81, representing a 0.11 point rise from last year. Additionally, 41 percent of the class left high school with a GPA of 4.0 or higher. Many students are entering UT with credit hours earned from advanced placement tests. “The class as a whole brought in 10,220 credit hours worth of credit,” Bayer said. “As we did the research to begin our quest to become a Top 25 university, we learned that UT Knoxville has, for several years, attracted students who are as good, if not better than, those students who attend the best universities in the country,” said Chancellor Jimmy Cheek in a recent UT press release. As UT fulfills its goal of ascending the levels of US News and World Report’s (USNWR) college rankings, the number of high-achieving students becomes increasingly more important. However, there are other salient factors. Amy Blakely, assistant director of media relations, said, “No doubt, having high-achieving students helps, but USNWR’s rankings take into account many ‘widely accepted indicators of excellence.’” In regards to the class’s composition, 17 percent are minority students, including 8.3 percent that are African-American, and 90 percent of all freshman are Tennessee residents. Many students qualified for both need and merit-based scholarships this year. As such, there was a greater demand for UT’s need-based aid programs, namely the Tennessee Pledge and Tennessee Promise Scholarships and Achieve the Dream grants. Ninety-nine percent of this year’s freshmen qualified for the HOPE Scholarship, a lotteryfunded scholarship that grants $4,000 per year toward mandatory fees. In the 2005-2006 school year, 99 percent of UT’s scholarships were merit-based. Now only 69 percent of the institutional scholarships that UT awards are based on merit. Nearly 14 percent of incoming freshmen have qualified for the Tennessee Pledge Scholarship. If bundled with other federal, state and institutional aid, the Pledge covers all UT’s mandatory costs. The Pledge scholarship is accessible to students whose families earn less than or equal to $40,000 per year with the average income for Pledge families this year being $19,400. 175 incoming freshmen received aid from the Tennessee Promise Scholarship, while an additional 353 received Achieve the Dream grants. This year’s freshman class, the largest the university has seen in recent years, with nearly 500 more freshman than last year’s class, has shown commitment to high academic standards as well as diversity on many levels.-
Tara Sripunvoraskul • The Daily Beacon
Students and Resident Assistants wait outside Morrill Hall on move-in day this past weekend. Signs around campus helped point students toward check-in areas and places to unload their vehicles.
Study examines summer reading Robby O’Daniel Recruitment Editor
George Richardson • The Daily Beacon
Students fill UT’s parking lots to the brim as freshman descend on campus for the first time this semester. The Class of 2014 is one of the most academically impressive groups of students to attend UT in recent years.
A new study shows that, though summer reading is important, children do not necessarily have to digest literary classics during the three-month vacation to maintain and expand their reading skills. Results of three years of research, done by UT professors Richard Allington and Anne McGill-Franzen, show that children can choose their own books to read and the effect on reading skills is equal to attending summer school. The study began with 1,330 randomly selected Florida schoolchildren in first and second grade. A test group of 852 students were each offered 12 free books from a choice of 600 different titles. A control group of 478 children were given activity and puzzle books instead. Books that children could select were split into four classifications: culturally relevant, curriculum relevant, popular series and pop culture. Culturally relevant books were written by minority authors, focusing on minority characters and reflecting minority life experiences. Curriculum-relevant books were tied to the children’s science or social studies subjects for the next year: students entering fourth grade might have selected a book on Florida geography or history. Popular series books include those focusing on characters such as Captain Underpants and Harry Potter. Pop culture, which ended up being home to some of the most popular books in the study, centered on books about popular figures, from musicians Miley Cyrus and Shakira to tennis-playing sisters Venus and Serena Williams. "In general, those last two categories of books — popular series and pop culture — were ones that kids were likely to select, about 80 percent of the total," Allington said. The study lasted for three summers — until the children were in fourth and fifth grade. The effect of reading these books was significant. "The kids who got free books made as much growth during the summer as kids in another study made in going to summer school during the summers," Allington said. Allington said the effect was twice as high among the poorest children in the study. The study was conducted in schools that, on average, had 85 percent of the children eligible for free lunch programs, whereas the national average is 40 percent eligible, he said. Children making up the test group were 95 percent minorities. Some of them came from very urban backgrounds, McGill-Franzen said, while others came from extreme rural settings and farmland. Yet during the first year of the study, the popular book choice was universal. "The most popular book was the unauthorized biography of Britney Spears," McGill-Franzen said. Other popular choices were a biography of another entertainer, Lil’ Romeo, and popular series centering on peer characters like Captain Underpants and Junie B. Jones.
These results — and the philosophy that children should choose any book over school — or parent-selected ones — have caused a great stir. An Aug. 2 New York Times article about the study has more than 200 comments as of press time, with readers debating the central issue: whether children should choose their own books. "The most popular ones, the character is feisty, immature and sneaky," McGill-Franzen said. "... That's totally the antithesis of what librarians or teachers would think of as heroes." Allington argued that the reading curriculum in schools is recycled with few modern choices mixed in. "You're talking about books that were on the curriculum, not just before the Internet, but before we had copy machines," he said. McGill-Franzen said kids identify not only with the characters in the series books and the popular books, but also with other readers of those books. "They're reading them because their friends are reading them, and they want to be a part of that reading culture," she said. "It's part of their social identity." Even when kids do make connections with school-chosen books, she said teachers and librarians invariably choose depressing titles. "Who wants a steady diet of really, really sad books?" she said. Allington said the approach schools take to summer reading is wrong. "Lots of English teachers and lots of parents do absolutely the opposite of what they need to do if they want to take advantage of the power of independent, voluntary reading," he said. Books chosen for summer reading lists or classroom curriculum during the summer often do not reflect children's taste, he said. It's this philosophy that hinders independent reading. He expects the blame for the "summer slide," what educators call the lapse in reading and dip in reading skills during the summer months, to go to electronic media, bad parenting or bad teaching. The highest-poverty, lowest-achieving schools in Tennessee spend $300 per child on workbooks, test preparation and Xerox copy, he said, whereas buying children 12 books for the summer, like was done in the study, would cost about $45. He said workbooks simply make teaching easier and allow the principal to exert more authority on the school. Meanwhile, test preparation — after so many hours — reaches a point where its positive effect on test performance levels off and even becomes negative. "It's not that schools don't have the money," he said. "They just don't have the brains." Allington proposes additional ways to encourage reading in the summer months, such as making school libraries open and altering the schedules of librarians and reading specialists to 11-month, fourday-a-week plans to cover most of the summer. McGill-Franzen said it was imperative to honor children's choices in order to foster those that are engaged in reading and want to read independently. "I think it might be a middle-class phenomenon to tell your kids, 'Oh no, you can't go out. Turn off the TV, no video games. You have to read,'" she said. "... And they set the egg timer. Parents wouldn't have to do that if kids were engaged in their reading."