2015考研英语二真题及标准答案,标准答案,作文有范本,

education, colleges and universities have pushed for decades to recruit more of them. This has created "a paradox" 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" achievement gap based on social class, according to the depressing beginning of a paper forthcoming in the journal Psychological Sciense.

But the article is actually quite optimistic, as it outlines a potential 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 findins are based on a study involving 147 students(who completed the project)at an unnamed private unive rsity．First generation was defined as not having a parent with a fou r-year college degree Most of the first-generation students(59.1 percent) were recipients of Pell Grants，a federal g rant for undergraduates with financial need，while this was true only for 8.6 percent of the students wit at least one parent with a four-year degree

Their thesis-that a relatively modest inte rvention could have a big impact-was based on the view that first-gene ration 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 resea rch by several authors to show that this is the gap that must be na rrowed to close the achievement gap.

Many first-gene ration students"struggle to navigate the middle-class culture of higher education，learn the'rules of the game，'and take advantage of college resou rces," they write And this becomes more of a problem when collages don't talk about the class advantage and disadvantages of different groups of students Because US colleges and universities seldom acknowledge how social class can affect

students' educational expe rience，many first-gene ration students lack sight about why they a re struggling and do not unde rstand how students' like them can improve

26. Recruiting more first-generation students has

[A]reduced their d ropout rates

[B]narrowed the achievement gao