African Americans' Educational Expectations: Longitudinal Causal Models for Women and Men

The long‐term educational development of African American adolescents was investigated using a national longitudinal sample. The dependent variable was the highest level of education that participants ever expected to achieve. These expectations were assessed when participants were 2 years beyond high school. Background variables and family variables were assessed when students were in the 8th grade. High school behavior variables were assessed when students were high school seniors. Path models revealed differing processes for women and men. Overall, effects of early academic performance variables were strongest, followed by effects of family variables and high school behavior variables. Implications for theory and practice are included.     

Coherence and coreference

Coherence in conversations and in texts can be partially characterized by a set of coherence relations, motivated ultimately by the speaker's or writer's need to be understood. In this paper, formal definitions are given for several coherence relations, based on the operations of an inference system; that is, the relations between successive portions of a discourse are characterized in terms of the inferences that can be drawn from each. In analyzing a discourse, it is frequently the case that we would recognize it as coherent, in that it would satisfy the formal definition of some coherence relation, if only we could assume certain noun phrases to be coreferential. In such cases, we will simply assume the identity of the entities referred to, in what might be called a “petty conversational implicature,” thereby solving the coherence and coreference problems simultaneously. Three examples of different kinds of reference problems are presented. In each, it is shown how the coherence of the discourse can be recognized, and how the reference problems are solved, almost as a by-product, by means of these petty conversational implicatures.