This annotated bibliography is reformatted and customized by the Center for Positive Practices. Some of the authors featured on this page include Tony Lund, Brant G. Miller, Elisabeth Hensley, Emily Terwelp, Steven M. Kimball, Elizabeth Barkowski, Bradley Carl, Henry S. Kepner, Louisa Kramer-Vida, and Diane Santori.
(2012). Gold Standards?: State Standards Reform and Student Achievement. Program on Education Policy and Governance Working Papers Series. PEPG 12-05, Program on Education Policy and Governance, Harvard University. Proponents of the recent and widely adopted Common Core State Standards argue that high quality curricular standards are critical to students' educational success. Little clear evidence exists, however, linking the quality of such standards to student achievement. I remedy this by connecting data on state-level student achievement from 1994-2011 with measures of the quality of states' curricular standards as judged by two independent organizations at three different moments in time. I show that, within states, changes in the quality of standards have little impact on overall student achievement. Improved standards do, however, raise achievement of 8th graders in low-scoring states, particularly for low-scoring students. Given the known weaknesses of U.S. middle schools, this result suggests that standards may be beneficial in settings where pedagogy would otherwise be poor. [More] Descriptors: Core Curriculum, State Standards, Academic Standards, Evidence
(2012). Assessing Students' Mathematical Proficiencies on the Common Core, Journal of Mathematics Education at Teachers College. The "Common Core State Standards for Mathematics" presents challenges and opportunities to contribute to a common understanding of the mathematical proficiencies expected of our students. This paper discusses the movement to establish multi-state assessment consortia in the United States based in the standards movement set in motion by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the increased accountability of student learning through the "No Child Left Behind Act". The consortia intend to assess the full range of student learning expectations to include both standards for mathematical content and mathematical practices through construction of comprehensive systems of assessments that accurately measure student progress toward college and career readiness. The systems are to include interim and summative assessments primarily taken in an online environment that allows for automated or timely scoring. [More] Descriptors: Common Core State Standards, Mathematics, Mathematics Skills, Consortia
(2012). Using Cross-Segmental Data Effectively to Support Alignment: How K-12 and Postsecondary Educators Can Access, Examine, and Use Cross-Segmental Data to Frame Discussions about Student Transition and Success in College. Advocacy & Policy Center Affinity Network Background Paper, College Board Advocacy & Policy Center. The implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) over the coming years will provide an opportunity for K-12 and postsecondary educators to share and use data effectively to support alignment between the sectors and reduce the need for remedial education. This brief describes how these groups can work together to make the most of data and their shared expertise to increase the proportion of students who are college ready. It also provides a framework for collecting data and information on the critical goal of improving college readiness, including data on related outcomes, processes, and inputs. In an upcoming report, the authors will provide recommendations for key data and other information that can be used to support specific goals and strategies being developed by Affinity Network teams. [More] Descriptors: Elementary Secondary Education, State Standards, Alignment (Education), Incidence
(2015). The Community Connection, Science Teacher. In a regional gathering called the Youth Water Summit, high school students present projects that respond to the driving question behind their science curriculum: "How can you address a significant water resource challenge in your community's watershed?" Students exhibit scientific posters, interactive presentations, films, art projects, and game simulations to judges representing the community from government agencies, businesses, nonprofits, and academic research groups. The Youth Water Summit is the culminating event for The Confluence Project (TCP), a year-long, project-based science (PBS) model implemented in five schools, including three biology classes, one International Baccalaureate Environmental Systems and Societies class, and one elective environmental science club. In this article, the authors demonstrate two PBS approaches that bring science and engineering to life. First, they immerse students in science and engineering to identify local challenges and design solutions. Then, they showcase examples of student-produced solutions and rubrics aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States 2013) and Common Core State Standards (NGAC and CCSSO 2010) to assess the projects. Throughout the article, the authors discuss how to adapt and scale this framework based on resources and how it can apply to various disciplinary core ideas. [More] Descriptors: High School Students, Student Projects, Active Learning, Exhibits
(2012). Assignments Matter: Making the Connections that Help Students Meet Standards, ASCD. How do you know when you've made an effective assignment that has strong links to Common Core State Standards? Drawing from over 10 years of her experience as a teacher coach, Eleanor Dougherty answers that question and guides you in crafting assignments that matter. This book will help you to understand the powerful effect that assignments have on teaching and learning and explore the essentials to creating high-quality assignments, including: (1) A seven-step process for designing effective assignments; (2) "Anchor" assignments that promote collaboration and consistency across grades; (3) Enriching assignments with instructional "touchstones"; (4)Classroom and school environments that support assignment making; and (5) Using assignments as a source of data about achievement. Loaded with research-based strategies for ensuring that assignments help improve student achievement, this book is essential reading for teachers across the subject areas. [More] Descriptors: State Standards, Assignments, Educational Change, Academic Standards
(2015). Teaching Vocabulary and Morphology in Intermediate Grades, Preventing School Failure. Direct vocabulary instruction of Tier 2 and Tier 3 words in intermediate-grade curricula is an important tool of literacy instruction because English is a language grafted from many roots and has not developed a one-to-one phoneme-grapheme correspondence. In addition to knowing graphemes and phonemes, students must formally learn words that cross domain knowledge and introduce subject-matter concepts. Intermediate-grade teachers can deal with these curricula demands and help their students advance their reading ability and their subject learning by combining vocabulary instruction with word recognition skills and by incorporating the meaning of vocabulary words with subject knowledge. Teaching vocabulary and morphology improves students' comprehension of text because knowledge of meaningful word components, syllabication, and academic vocabulary improves both word recognition skills and subject specific understanding. In addition, teaching content terminology and Latin and Greek stems improves students' word recognition skills, increases students' academic vocabulary knowledge, and helps students meet Common Core State Standards. Cloze exercises and learning opportunities that engage students in using their newly acquired vocabulary are helpful teaching techniques and support all students' annual reading growth. [More] Descriptors: Morphology (Languages), Vocabulary, Intermediate Grades, Word Recognition
(2015). Constancy and Variability: Dialogic Literacy Events as Sites for Improvisation in Two 3rd-Grade Classrooms, Journal of Research in Childhood Education. This multisite study investigates dialogic literacy events that revolved around narrative and informational texts in two 3rd-grade classrooms. The authors offer a metaphor of musical improvisation to contemplate dialogic literacy events as part of the repertoire of teaching and learning experiences. In literacy learning, where there is much structure and also many degrees of freedom, an improvisation metaphor is helpful for considering attentive listening, contingent responding, and creative interplay in the classroom. This study contributes to literature on dialogic literacy events by explicating how teachers and students are interdependent coparticipants who collaboratively construct meaning as they improvise during text-based discussions. The authors analyze discourse from multiple instances of two focal dialogic literacy events: discussions of fables and folktales in a low-socioeconomic-status school in the northeastern United States and discussions of newspaper articles in a middle-class school in the southwestern United States. In both classrooms, moderately open structures, shared repertoires of predictable talk moves, and precomposed material facilitated improvisation in three forms: teacher soloing, student soloing, and group improvisation. Teachers used constancy and variability to facilitate productive dialogic discussions. Such discussions may help teachers address the Common Core State Standards by providing children opportunities to participate in academic discussions related to diverse texts. [More] Descriptors: Grade 3, Elementary School Students, Figurative Language, Creative Activities
(2015). Principal Roles, Work Demands, and Supports Needed to Implement New Teacher Evaluation, Mid-Western Educational Researcher. Policy makers at the federal level have embraced an educator effectiveness agenda, which in turn has driven many states across the country to rapidly develop and implement new and more complex teacher evaluation systems. It is increasingly clear that the success of these nascent teacher evaluation systems partly depends on the will, skill, and capacity of school principals, individuals who have historically been tasked with evaluating teachers. School principals have traditionally had, and will in most cases continue to have, primary responsibility for evaluating the 3.7 million public school teachers nationwide. While teacher evaluation innovations present several opportunities for improving instructional supervision and teacher quality, they also involve several challenges, especially on the part of principals. Time demands and cognitive challenges will be inevitable as principals learn about and implement new teacher evaluation systems. Simultaneously, other educational changes going to scale, including Common Core State Standards with aligned assessments and state school accountability systems, will compete for the attention of school leaders and teachers. Negotiating these changes to maximize the positive potential of evaluation reforms requires a commitment by states and districts to resources for training and support as well as policy coherence. [More] Descriptors: Teacher Evaluation, Administrator Role, Principals, Organizational Change
(2015). Occupational Control in Education: The Logic and Leverage of Epistemic Communities, Harvard Educational Review. Most current approaches to improving teaching and learning in American public schools rely on either market pressures or bureaucratic controls to leverage performance. In this article, however, authors Joshua Glazer and Donald Peurach examine occupational control as a third approach, whereby the internalization of norms, technical language, and practices among educational professionals drives coordination and knowledge generation and supports the implementation of ambitious instruction. To investigate the dynamics of occupational control, they use the concept of epistemic community to identify the mechanisms that unite practitioners into a community of practice extending beyond the borders of local work environments. They argue that underlying this is a shared set of theory, codes, and tools that govern interpretation and practice and, in their interaction, facilitate the continuous generation of knowledge. Illustrating the utility of this framework are two examples of school networks that employ the principles and mechanisms of an epistemic community and that can be interpreted as systems of occupational control. The authors conclude by arguing that the development of educational epistemic communities is critical to the success of current approaches to improving instruction in schools, most notably the Common Core State Standards and the charter school movement. [More] Descriptors: Public Schools, Teaching Methods, Educational Methods, Epistemology
(2015). Giving Students a Leg Up, Science Teacher. To address the needs of the high population of students with learning disabilities at their school, the author and a colleague created an inclusion science class that focuses on active, hands-on science. The course prepares students of various learning abilities for the state-mandated end-of-course biology assessment. Many of their students have weak executive functioning skills and need numerous accommodations to succeed in school. The term "executive functioning" can address many diagnostic conditions, relating to cognitive functions that activate, integrate, and control other mental functions. When their executive functions are not working properly, students experience significant and varied learning problems. These students not only have difficulties getting work done, but they often lack social skills and have lower self-esteem than their peers. Students with weak executive functioning need help planning, organizing, and managing their time. They also need work with behavior–response inhibition, self-regulation of affect, task initiation, flexibility, and goal-directed persistence. This article provides an assignment checklist, teaching strategies, a sample exam, and connections to the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS Lead States 2013) and "Common Core State Standards" ("NGAC and CCSSO 2010"). [More] Descriptors: Science Instruction, Teaching Methods, Learning Disabilities, Inclusion
(2012). Assessing 21st Century Skills: A Guide to Evaluating Mastery and Authentic Learning, Corwin. The Common Core State Standards clearly define the skills students need for success in college and the 21st century workplace. The question is, how can you measure student mastery of skills like creativity, problem solving, and use of technology? Laura Greenstein demonstrates how teachers can teach and assess 21st century skills using authentic learning experiences and rigorous, varied assessment strategies. Based on the best ideas of renowned experts in education, this book provides a framework and practical ideas for measuring: (1) Thinking skills: critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, and metacognition; (2) Actions: communication, collaboration, digital and technological literacy; and (3) Living skills: citizenship, global understanding, leadership, college and career readiness. Included are numerous rubrics and checklists, a step-by-step model for developing your own classroom assessments, a lesson planning template, and sample completed lesson plans. "Assessing 21st Century Skills" gives you the tools and strategies you need to prepare students to succeed in a rapidly changing world. [More] Descriptors: Creativity, State Standards, Problem Solving, Metacognition
(2015). A Balancing Act: Making Sense of Algebra, Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School. For most students, algebra seems like a totally different subject than the number topics they studied in elementary school. In reality, the procedures followed in arithmetic are actually based on the properties and laws of algebra. Algebra should be a logical next step for students in extending the proficiencies they developed with number topics because algebra is simply a language for exploring and explaining mathematical patterns. In this article, M. Katherine Gavin and Linda Jensen Sheffield state that students need help in developing and making sense of the rules they are using. They need to be shown how to employ a variety of strategies to solve algebraic problems, and they need help in seeing algebra as generalizing computational procedures and operations they use with numbers. Examples explain activities established with grade 6 students learning the concepts of equality and balance and variable tools central to the study of equations. Students made sense of the problems, explained and justified their methods, critiqued one another's reasoning, and gained a stronger grasp of the meaning of equality. In conclusion, Gavin and Sheffield found that Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM)-based algebra investigations with a focus on the Standards for Mathematical Practice were successful in helping students develop a much deeper understanding of equality and variables and their relationships in equations. The authors believe this will give students a strong foundation on which to build algebraic concepts as they progress through middle school and into high school. [More] Descriptors: Mathematics Instruction, Secondary School Mathematics, Middle School Students, Algebra
(2015). The School Age Gender Gap in Reading Achievement: Examining the Influences of Item Format and Intrinsic Reading Motivation, Reading Research Quarterly. The importance of reading competence for both individuals and society underlines the strong need to understand the gender gap in reading achievement. Beyond mean differences in reading comprehension, research has indicated that girls possess specific advantages on constructed-response items compared with boys of the same reading ability. Moreover, it was shown that differences in intrinsic motivation in the tested domain might affect test scores. Differential item functioning was used to analyze the complex relationships among gender, item format, and intrinsic reading motivation in two samples taken from large-scale German assessments of reading comprehension (PIRLS 2011 and PISA 2009). In line with prior research, results showed that compared with equally skilled boys, both 10-and 15-year-old girls performed better on constructed-response items. Furthermore, findings suggest an advantage of 15-year-old but not 10-year-old students with high levels of intrinsic reading motivation when responding to constructed-response items. Results are discussed in relation to the design and interpretation of (large-scale) assessments, the increasing use of constructed-response items in new assessments in response to the Common Core State Standards, and gender-sensitive educational practice. [More] Descriptors: Reading Achievement, Gender Differences, Achievement Gap, Test Items
(2015). Patterns in the Sky: Ways to Make the Most of Planetarium Field Trips for First-Grade Students, Science and Children. Earth and space science deserve the same level of inclusion in early childhood curriculum as the other science disciplines, and research shows that the sooner children are introduced to concepts like those presented in planetarium programs, the stronger their lifelong interest in science will be. Much astronomy visualization outside of planetariums is misleading and difficult–even for adults to comprehend, but by doing simple classroom kinesthetic activities, storytelling, and observation, students will be more engaged not only in Earth and space science but in all realms of science that focus on Patterns. The crosscutting concept described in this article is one that is innate in humans and has been the key to doing good astronomy for thousands of years. This article shares activities that enhance and extend the planetarium experience for elementary students, connecting to both the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS Lead States 2013): 1-ESS1 Earth and Space Science–Space Systems: Patterns and Cycles, and to the "Common Core State Standards" (NGAC and CCSSO). [More] Descriptors: Earth Science, Science Instruction, Observation, Story Telling
(2015). Improving Outcomes for New York City's Disconnected Youth: Lessons from the Implementation of the Young Adult Literacy Program, MDRC. In 2008, New York City's Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO) launched the Young Adult Literacy (YAL) program to improve the academic and work-readiness skills of youth who are not in school, do not have a job, and have very low literacy skills. The YAL program targets 16- to 24-year-old young adults who read at the fourth-through eighth-grade levels, and serves them until they are academically ready to enter a program that prepares them for a high school equivalency (HSE) certificate. In the summer of 2013, MDRC conducted an implementation study of five YAL sites in order to explore factors that facilitate or challenge successful program implementation. This report presents the findings, which are largely based on an analysis of qualitative data from staff interviews, participant focus groups, and observations of classrooms and internships, as well as a review of program participation data. The following are appended: (1) Glossary of Widely Used Terms and Acronyms; (2) Supplementary Tables on the Common Core State Standards and Balanced Literacy; and (3) Side-by-Side Comparison of Program Implementation at the Study Sites. [More] Descriptors: Young Adults, Adult Literacy, Adult Programs, Urban Education