2016年7月14日(周四)yy英语讲义-拓展阅读(四).docx

2017年YY在线同等学力英语拓展阅读课程（四）For years, studies have found that first-generation college students- those who do not have a parent with a college degree- lag vi. 滞后；缓缓而行；蹒跚other students on a range of education achievement factors. Their grades are lower and their dropout rates are higher. But since such students are most likely to advance economically if they succeed in higher education, colleges and universities have pushed for decades to recruit more of them. This has created “a paradox一个悖论” in that recruiting first- generation students, but then watching many of them fail, means that higher education has “continued to reproduce and widen, rather than close” an achievement gap based on social class, according to the depressing beginning of a paper forthcomingadj. 即将来临的in the journal Psychological Science.But the article is actually quite optimistic, as it outlinesvt.概述；略述 a potential可能性solution to this problem, suggesting that an approach (which involves a one-hour, next-to-no-cost program) can close 63 percent of the achievement gap (measured by such factors as grades) between first-generation and other students.The authors of the paper are from different universities, and their findings are based on a study involving 147 students (who completed the project) at an unnamed private university. First generation was defined as not having a parent with a four-year college degree.Most of the first-generation students(59.1 percent) were recipients收件人of Pell Grants, a federal grant for undergraduates with financial need, while this was true only for 8.6 percent of the students with at least one parent with a four-year degree.Their thesis- that a relatively modest intervention could have a big impact- was based on the view that first-generation students may be most lacking not in potential but in practical knowledge about how to deal with the issues that face most college students. They cite past research by several authors to show that this is the gap that must be narrowed to