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1. Long-term Effects of STEM Enrichment Programs on Wage Differentials Among Under-Represented Minority Students

   https://doi.org/10.18060/26063  

   Ghazzawi, Dina; Pattison, Donna; Horn, Catherine (February 2023, Metropolitan Universities)

   Holton, Valerie (Ed.)

   This study focuses on the increasing disparities in STEM education achievement and long-term wage earnings of under-represented minority groups. As part of national efforts to improve the diversity of the STEM workforce, this study uses longitudinal data from the University of Houston’s Education Research Center (UH-ERC) to examine the effect of participation in a STEM focused intervention program (Houston-Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation) on wage earnings across students from traditionally under-represented groups. Data analysis consisted of propensity score matching analysis, followed by an ordinal logistic regression model to measure program participation effects on wage earnings. Findings indicate a significant negative association between participation in STEM intervention program and long-term wage earnings. Results highlight the role of structural racism and human capital on perpetuating achievement and wage gaps across race and socio-economic status. Recommendations focus on career-preparedness as a tool to increase the human capital of under-represented groups, and institutional shifts in policy and program components that strive to reduce the impact of structural racism on this subpopulation of students. 

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2. Glottalizing at word junctures: Exploring bidirectional transfer in child and adult Spanish heritage speakers

   https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728923000160  

   Repiso-Puigdelliura, Gemma (January 2023, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition)

   Abstract While research in heritage language phonology has found that transfer from the majority language can lead to divergent attainment in adult heritage language grammars, the extent to which language transfer develops during a heritage speaker's lifespan is understudied. To explore such cross-linguistic transfer, I examine the rate of glottalization between consonant-to-vowel sequences at word junctures produced by child and adult Spanish heritage speakers (i.e., HSs) in both languages. My results show that, in Spanish, child HSs produce greater rates of vowel-initial glottal phonation than their age-matched monolingually-raised Spanish counterparts, suggesting that the Spanish child HSs’ grammars are more permeable to transfer than those of the adult HSs. In English, child and adult HSs show similarly low rates of glottal phonation when compared to their age-matched monolingually-raised English speakers’ counterparts. The findings for English can be explained by either an account of transfer at the individual level or the community level. 

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3. Mentored Undergraduate Research at Community Colleges

   https://doi.org/10.18833/spur/7/2/7  

   Swanik, Jackie; Rollins, Stephanie; Horstman, Sarah; Hoffman, Carolyn; Fishback, Kimberly (January 2023, Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research)

   This study investigates the impact of community college students’ participation in mentored undergraduate research, with an emphasis on STEM transfer students. The STEM Academic Research and Training (START) program at Wake Technical Community College was designed and implemented by community college faculty and staff and was evaluated in a randomized control trial. Early evidence showed statistically significant positive effects on students’ attitudes toward STEM. 

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4. Wage Insurance and Labor Market Trajectories

   https://doi.org/10.1257/pandp.20211093  

   Hyman, Benjamin G.; Kovak, Brian K.; Leive, Adam; Naff, Theodore (May 2021, AEA Papers and Proceedings)

   Wage insurance provides income support to displaced workers who find reemployment at a lower wage. We study the effects of the wage insurance provisions of the US Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program using administrative data from the state of Virginia. The program includes an age-based eligibility cutoff, allowing us to compare earnings and employment trajectories for workers whose ages at the time of displacement make them eligible or ineligible for the program. Our findings suggest that wage insurance eligibility increases short-run employment probabilities and that wage insurance and TAA training may yield similar long-run effects on employment and earnings. 

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5. Pre-training on high-resource speech recognition improves low-resource speech-to-text translation

   Bansal, S.; Kamper, H.; Livescu, K.; Lopez, A.; Goldwater, S. (January 2019, NAACL 2019)

   We present a simple approach to improve direct speech-to-text translation (ST) when the source language is low-resource: we pre-train the model on a high-resource automatic speech recognition (ASR) task, and then fine-tune its parameters for ST. We demonstrate that our approach is effective by pre-training on 300 hours of English ASR data to improve SpanishEnglish ST from 10.8 to 20.2 BLEU when only 20 hours of Spanish-English ST training data are available. Through an ablation study, we find that the pre-trained encoder (acoustic model) accounts for most of the improvement, despite the fact that the shared language in these tasks is the target language text, not the source language audio. Applying this insight, we show that pre-training on ASR helps ST even when the ASR language differs from both source and target ST languages: pre-training on French ASR also improves Spanish-English ST. Finally, we show that the approach improves performance on a true low-resource task: pre-training on a combination of English ASR and French ASR improves Mboshi-French ST, where only 4 hours of data are available, from 3.5 to 7.1 BLEU. 

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