Children in pre-K classrooms, randomly assigned to the experimental group, who viewed WordWorld in school benefited significantly in:
• Learning oral vocabulary featured in WordWorld and
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• Reading or recognizing written words featured in WordWorld
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as compared to children in pre-K classrooms randomly assigned to the control group who did not participate in viewing WordWorld in school.
Full report:
http://www.mcgrc.com/EEWW.html
Certified teachers+modern instruction=better public-school math scores
In another “Freakonomics”-style study that turns conventional wisdom about public- versus private-school education on its head, a team of University of Illinois education professors has found that public-school students outperform their private-school classmates on standardized math tests, thanks to two key factors: certified math teachers, and a modern, reform-oriented math curriculum.
Sarah Lubienski, a professor of curriculum and instruction in the U. of I. College of Education, says teacher certification and reform-oriented teaching practices correlated positively with higher achievement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) exam for public-school students.
“According to our results, schools that hired more certified teachers and had a curriculum that de-emphasized learning by rote tended to do better on standardized math tests,” Lubienski said. “And public schools had more of both.”
To account for the difference in test scores, Lubienski and her co-authors, education professor Christopher Lubienski (her husband) and doctoral student Corinna Crane, looked at five critical factors: school size, class size, parental involvement, teacher certification and instructional practices.
In previous research, the Lubienskis discovered that after holding demographic factors constant, public school students performed just as well if not better than private schools students on standardized math tests.
“There are so many reasons why you would think that the results should be reversed – that private schools would outscore public schools in standardized math test scores,” she said. “This study looks at the underlying reasons why that’s not necessarily the case.”
Of the five factors, school size and parental involvement “didn’t seem to matter all that much,” Lubienski said, citing a weak correlation between the two factors as “mixed or marginally significant predictors” of student achievement.
They also discovered that smaller class sizes, which are more prevalent in private schools than in public schools, significantly correlate with achievement.
“Smaller class size correlated with higher achievement and occurred more frequently in private schools,” Lubienski said. “But that doesn’t help explain why private schools were being outscored by public schools.”
Lubienski said one reason private schools show poorly in this study could be their lack of accountability to a public body.
“There’s been this assumption that private schools are more effective because they’re autonomous and don’t have all the bureaucracy that public schools have,” Lubienski said. “But one thing this study suggests is that autonomy isn’t necessarily a good thing for schools.”
Another reason could be private schools’ anachronistic approach to math.
“Private schools are increasingly ignoring curricular trends in education, and it shows,” Lubienski said. “They’re not using up-to-date methods, and they’re not hiring teachers who employ up-to-date lesson plans in the classroom. When you do that, you aren’t really taking advantage of the expertise in math education that’s out there.”
Lubienski thinks one of the reasons that private schools don’t adopt a more reform-minded math curriculum is because some parents are more attracted to a “back-to-basics” approach to math instruction. The end result, however, is students who are “prepared for the tests of 40 years ago, and not the tests of today,” she said.
Tests like NAEP, Lubienski said, have realigned themselves with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics standards for math instruction, which have moved away from the brute-force memorization of numbers to an emphasis on “geometry, measurement and algebra – things that private school teachers reported they spent less time teaching,” Lubienski said.
“The results do seem to suggest that private schools are doing their own thing, and that they’re less likely to have paid attention to curricular trends and the fact that math instruction and math tests have changed,” she said.
Lubienski cautioned that the relationships found between the two factors and public-school performance might not be directly causal.
“The correlations might be a result, for example, of having the type of administrator who makes teacher credentials and academics the priority over other things, such as religious education,” she said. “That's often not the case for private religious schools, where parents are obviously committed to things beside academic achievement.”
The schools with the smallest percentage of certified teachers – conservative Christian schools, where less than half of teachers were certified – were, not coincidentally, the schools with the lowest aggregate math test scores.
“Those schools certainly have the prerogative to set different priorities when hiring, but it just doesn’t help them on NAEP,” Lubienski said.
Lubienski also noted that public schools tend to set aside money for teacher development and periodic curriculum improvements.
“Private schools don’t invest as much in the professional development of their teachers and don’t do enough to keep their curriculum current,” she said. “That appears to be less of a priority for them, and they don’t have money designated for that kind of thing in the way public schools do.”
Lubienski hopes that politicians who favor more privatization would realize that the invisible hand of the market doesn’t necessarily apply to education.
“You can give schools greater autonomy, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to use that autonomy to implement an innovative curriculum or improve the academics of the students,” she said.
Instead, some private schools try to attract parents by offering a basic skills curriculum, or non-academic requirements, such as students wearing uniforms.
Privatization also assumes that parents can make judgments about what schools are the best for their children.
“With schools, it’s tough to see how much kids are actually learning,” Lubienski said. “Market theory in education rests on the assumption that parents can see what they’re buying, and that they’re able to make an informed decision about their child’s education. Although parents might be able to compare schools’ SAT scores, they aren’t able to determine whether those gains are actually larger in higher scoring schools unless they know where students start when they enter school. People don’t always pick the most effective schools.”
The results were published in a paper titled “Achievement Differences and School Type: The Role of School Climate, Teacher Certification, and Instruction” in the November 2008 issue of the American Journal of Education. The published findings were based on fourth- and eighth-grade test results from the 2003 NAEP test, including data from both student achievement and comprehensive background information drawn from a nationally representative sample of more than 270,000 students from more than 10,000 schools.
New research offers guidance for improving primary grade writing instruction
New research from Vanderbilt University's Peabody College offers guidance for teachers to help them improve writing instruction in the primary grades and develop stronger student writers.
The two new studies by Steve Graham, professor and Curry Ingram Chair in Special Education, were recently published in the Journal of Educational Psychology.
"The primary purpose of both articles is to inform teachers about writing practices that work with a wide variety of students," Graham said. "We're hoping to help give teachers the opportunity to creatively incorporate effective writing strategies in the classroom to improve the writing of their students."
The National Commission on Writing has stated that writing should be placed at the center of the school agenda.
In "A Meta-Analysis of Single Subject Design Writing Intervention Research," Graham and Leslie Rogers, a current Vanderbilt University doctoral student in special education, identified effective writing practices for all students including students who struggle within the classroom. This research focuses on the current writing practices in grades 1 through 12, including some suggestions for improvement.
"Among the more important findings is the need for students to be taught how to plan, revise and set clear and specific goals for their writing," Graham said. "Students also need to be taught the skills to write clear and effective paragraphs."
Graham's other paper, "Primary Grade Writing Instruction: A National Survey," co-authored with Laura Cutler, a graduate student in Special Education at the University of Maryland when the research was conducted and currently a teacher in Florida, provides more direct recommendations to improve classroom writing practices.
"Primary grade teachers need to focus on increasing the time spent writing, balancing the time spent writing with the time spent learning how to write, boosting their students' motivation for writing, making computers a more integral part of their writing curriculum, and improving their own preparation for teaching writing," Graham said. "These recommendations offer educators the opportunity to focus on their weakest areas to improve instruction and the quality of student writers produced in our classrooms."
Unraveling bias from student evaluations of their high school science teachers
In this study, the evaluation of high school biology, chemistry, and physics teachers by their students is examined according to the gender of the student and the gender of the teacher. Female teachers are rated significantly lower than male teachers by male students in all three disciplines, whereas female students underrate female teachers only in physics. Interestingly, physics is also the field that suffers the greatest lack of females and has been criticized most for its androcentric culture.
The gender bias in teacher ratings persists even when accounting for academic performance, classroom experiences, and family support. Furthermore, male and female teachers in each discipline appear equally effective at preparing their students for future science study in college, suggesting that students have a discipline-specific gender bias. Such a bias may negatively impact female students and contribute to the loss of females in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields.
Full report:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/121627924/PDFSTART
The 2008 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students Learning?
New Study Shows Selective Use of Data and Political Bias in International Test
Report Also Finds Encouraging Progress in Big City Districts, Despite Continued Achievement Gaps
A new report from the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution finds serious flaws in a prominent international test and concludes that the test should not be used as a benchmark for state assessments.
The report zeroes in on an international testing program known as PISA, short for the Programme for International Student Assessment, which is administered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Although the United States participates in PISA, Tom Loveless, senior fellow at the Brown Center on Education Policy and author of the new study, said it has generally “flown below the radar” in this country. That may soon change, however, as the National Governor’s Association, backed by other powerful groups in Washington, pushes for states to use PISA as an international benchmark of student performance. Loveless concludes that without major reform, serious deficiencies in PISA’s approach to student assessment make it “inappropriate for benchmarking against U.S. tests.”
The study closely examines the science portion of the test and argues that PISA’s architects make unwarranted leaps between student attitudes and academic performance. It contrasts PISA’s educational philosophy with that of another international test, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). While TIMSS aims simply to assess how well students have learned mathematics and science taught in school, PISA defines knowledge more broadly and views social environment and attitude, not just instruction, as crucial to how much students learn. The study casts doubt on PISA’s claim that “building students‘ confidence in their ability to tackle scientific problems is an important part of improving science performance.”
When the Brown Center recalculated the correlation between national indices of student attitudes and academic performance, using a methodology more conventional than the one employed in the latest PISA report, in almost every area it found a negative correlation between attitudes and substantive knowledge. This is consistent with a previous Brown Center report that found, for instance, that relatively low-scoring American eighth graders have much higher confidence in their math abilities than much higher-scoring Singaporean eighth graders. On the PISA science test, a similar pattern exists. High scoring nations in science do not necessarily have students with more positive attitudes toward the subject.
The report says, “Nations that launch bold new programs to increase student enjoyment of science may see no benefits from their efforts. Whether changing students’ attitudes, beliefs, and values will help or hinder science learning cannot be determined from PISA data.”
The Brown Centeraalso found ideology in PISA. The test asks students various “attitudinal” questionabout environmental issues. These question the students’ beliefs about issues, not their knowledge of issues. The items that measure sense of responsibility for sustainable development are especially troubling. Students are presented with several environment policies and asked if they agree or disagree with them. Students who astrongly agree with these policies possess “a sense of responsible isustainable developm. Students who strongly disagree with these policies are deemed deficient in such responsibility.
The Brown Center Report argues that the positions students take on environmental policies reflect political judgment, not scientific literacy, and that questions eliciting political beliefs are inappropriate on the PISA assessment. The report concludes that PISA needs nongovernmental participation built into its oversight structure and a thorough review for political bias.
“The OECD routinely scrubs PISA items for gender and cultural bias,” the study says. “It is imperative that PISA be scrubbed for ideological bias as well.” That doesn’t mean attempting political “balance” by including items reflecting different political views, it says. Instead, the Brown Center report concludes, “the solution is to avoid asking such questions altogether. This is a science test. Stick to the science.”
Student Achievement On The Rise in Many Big City Schools
Another section of the new Brown Center report offers positive news about student achievement in many of the nation’s largest urban school districts. While a number of recent reports have given encouraging accounts of improvement in big-city classrooms, this new analysis goes further by comparing large urban schools to their rural and suburban counterparts in the same state.
“Our approach stems from a concern for equity,” says Loveless. While it is always encouraging to see urban schools improve on state tests and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Loveless said, “if more affluent schools are improving even faster, that would raise disquieting questions about whether urban children are receiving an inferior education just because of where they live.”
The study examined test scores for 37 urban districts, using a statistical measure known as a “z-score” to standardize scores between states using different tests. “City districts still lag behind,” Loveless said, “but we were glad to find that twenty-nine of the thirty-seven big city school districts closed the gap between their test scores and state averages.”
For eight districts, the gap did not close, and the report cautions that the positive news must be kept in perspective. “Most big city school districts still trail far behind their suburban and rural peers,” it says. In Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, for instance, test scores are two standard deviations below state averages.
The study is also cautious in attributing improvements in urban schools to a particular policy or practice. It acknowledges a range of possible explanations, including the rise of accountability systems that reward or sanction schools based on gains among low achievers, most notably No Child Left Behind; the spread among urban school reformers of strategies that include school choice, standards, and lower class size; and the growth of mayoral control over city schools.
A third section of the report, which was released in September 2008, documents the trend of placing unprepared eighth-graders into algebra and other advanced math classes.
For a full copy of the report :
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/reports/2009/0225_education_loveless/0225_education_loveless.pdf
Grad Nation: A Guidebook to Help Communities Tackle The Dropout Crisis
America's Promise Alliance recently commissioned Grad Nation, a new tool comprising the best evidence-based practices for keeping young people in school paired with suggestions for effectively preparing them for life after high school.
It is a guidebook that provides a road map to help communities tackle the dropout crisis. It is designed to help communities develop tailored plans for keeping students on track to graduate from high school, prepared for college, work and life. Grad Nation is a natural outgrowth of our local summit work to ensure that solutions are developed to put our youth on a path to success.
Grad Nation also includes ready-to-print tools and links to additional online resources, in addition to research-based guidance. It provides information and tools for developing and implementing a customized program that’s right for individual communities.
On the left side of each page, the user will find valuable information on the topic being discussed. This is accompanied by “A Deeper Look,” which are references to online resources that provide more information.
On the right side of each page are suggestions for specific action — what you can do — along with links to tools to help get the job done. These tools, identified by a symbol, include:
• informational handouts to build support for community action
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• forms and tables to help you organize and analyze local data
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• charts to guide your decision making
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Complete guidebook:
http://www.americaspromise.org/uploadedFiles/AmericasPromiseAlliance/Grad_Nation/GradNation_020509.pdf
Maryland Takes National Lead to Preserve Foreign Language Assets
A state task force co-directed by the University of Maryland and the State Department of Education concludes in a new report that the state is "uniquely positioned" to help meet national foreign language needs by tapping its abundant pool of well-educated, bilingual speakers.
The Task Force on the Preservation of Heritage Language Skills, created by the Maryland General Assembly, is the first state-sponsored effort of its kind in the nation.
It recommends a series of steps to harness the bilingual abilities of first, second and third generation Americans that thrive at home or in community settings to recruit teachers and translators. A population strong in both English and other languages is essential for the nation's security and commerce, it says.
The report recommends no-cost/low-cost state action to help existing community efforts prevent these skills from withering away as immigrants age and families assimilate.
FINDINGS AND CONCLUSIONS
1. Given the state's demographic profile and proximity to the nation's capital, Maryland is uniquely positioned to take a leadership role in supporting the language needs of government and industry by developing its community-based skills.
"We spoke to businesses, federal agencies and community groups, and heard loud and clear that the unmet need for bilingual speakers harms the nation in its security and business competitiveness," says task force member Del. Joseline Peña-Melnyk (D-College Park). "In a number of cases, religious and community organizations are already doing some of this language preservation work. As a start, we should do everything that's feasible to coordinate and make the most of these existing efforts."
2. In surveys with hundreds of Maryland's cultural heritage speakers and organizations, the task force found a deep commitment to preserve their cultures and languages. For example, task force members learned from private organizations about their programs to teach Chinese, Tamil, Korean and Bengali.
"There's a sense of urgency in heritage communities because they understand how fragile language skills are - especially among their children," says Ingold, the task force chair. "As a result, these community-based groups are highly motivated, often quite skilled and have made significant beginnings."
3. The business sector considers foreign language skills a "valuable asset," but offers little formal training. Also, the task force reported a "strong correlation between many of Maryland's heritage languages and the countries engaged in trade with the State," emphasizing the commercial benefits of heritage language preservation.
4. Federal agencies charged with national security noted a need for specific language skills: Arabic, Pashtu, Russian, Chinese, French, Urdu, Korean, Japanese, Indic, Iranian, and several African languages - areas of strength for Maryland heritage speakers.
TASK FORCE RECOMMENDATIONS
"Heritage speakers are a very large and diverse group in Maryland representing more than 140 languages, and many are extremely well-educated - they have valuable skills to offer that we ought to use and protect," says Sen. Rosapepe. "The main challenges we face in assuring that Maryland benefits from these skills are leadership, coordination, and innovation - not taxpayer dollars. We need to make better use of existing resources."
1. Award high school credit by exam. Maryland school districts have authority to award high school credit for foreign language proficiency gained outside school, but demonstrated through testing. Credit by exam would encourage participation in non-public heritage language programs, the report concludes. This is likely to save taxpayer money, Rosapepe says.
2. Advanced English classes for adults. The task force notes the high number of highly educated heritage speakers who need advanced English proficiency training, though most classes only teach basic literacy. Greater availability of advanced classes would improve Maryland workforce competitiveness, the report says.
3. Increase dual immersion programs in Maryland public schools. Maryland has a few intensive dual immersion programs that concentrate on both English and heritage language proficiency. Research demonstrates their effectiveness, the report says, and recommends increasing the number in the state to 10 by 2012, within existing resources.
4. Expand teacher certification. A shortage of certified language teachers is a main obstacle to the acquisition of critical foreign languages. While Maryland has taken steps to expand options for teacher certification, the report calls for further progress.
Other recommendations include helping community organizations find space for language classes, listing Maryland employment opportunities for heritage speakers, expanding library collections of children's heritage language books, and developing a long-term strategic plan to meet Maryland's language needs.
The full report:
http://www.newsdesk.umd.edu/pdf/heritagereport.pdf
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