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Eric.ed.gov – Threshold Concepts: From Personal Practice to Communities of Practice. Proceedings of the National Academy’s Sixth Annual Conference and the Fourth Biennial Threshold Concepts Conference [E-publication] (Dublin, Ireland, June 27-29, 2012)

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: The 6th Annual Conference of the National Academy for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (NAIRTL) and the 4th Biennial Threshold Concepts Conference was held at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, on June 27-29, 2012. The NAIRTL is a collaborative initiative between University College Cork, Cork Institute of Technology, National University of Ireland Galway, Trinity College Dublin, and Waterford Institute of Technology. It is supported by the Higher Education Authority under the Strategic Innovation Fund. The proceedings from the 2012 NAIRTL conference bring together “key insights” on the topic of Threshold Concepts. This publication includes a selection of papers from the conference. The papers provide insights into how to apply the Threshold Concepts idea to gain a deeper understanding of how students learn, and also how to… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – East School: Movement and Growth. A Case Study for the Vermont Institute of Science, Math and Technology.

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: This case study of East School, a central Vermont K-2 school with 125 students, describes the early stages of changing instruction and learning in a school with established district-wide standards. Changes in teaching at the local level were led by example, modeled by a dynamic principal as she encouraged the teachers to move towards a more integrated teaching framework. The case study also describes the contributions and struggles of a dedicated volunteer who felt a deep ownership of the project and yet was not allowed to truly work with the team, which brings forth questions around the inner-workings of the team, the role of outside facilitators, and team understanding of project goals and objectives. The findings of this case study lead to the conclusion that the principal’s… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Educators Challenging Poverty and Latino Low Achievement: Extending and Enriching the School Day

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: Latino students, as children of historically underachieving populations, often have their academic success in jeopardy. For many schools, after-school programs complement the regular school day, with more than half of the 49,700 U.S. elementary schools having one or more on-site programs. Such programs vary in intent, purposes, and resources and typically emphasize remediation rather than developing interests or competencies in curricular areas beyond language arts and math. This qualitative case study explores the practices of one dual language elementary school in a high poverty Latino community and its academic/enrichment extended day program. Wenger’s (1998) community of practice framework captures the mutual engagement, joint enterprise, and shared repertoire of practices tightly woven between the regular school day’s classroom teachers and the after-school instructional assistants. This investigation provides insight… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Enacting Common Core Instruction: How Intermediate Unit 13 Leveraged Its Position as an Educational Service Agency to Implement and Scale the LDC Initiative

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: Funded by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) and Math Design Collaborative (MDC) offer a set of instructional and formative assessment tools in literacy and math, which were developed to help educators better prepare all students to meet the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and succeed beyond high school. Following three years of extensive data collection in LDC study sites throughout the country, Research for Action (RFA) has produced three case studies to illustrate how the LDC and MDC tools have been adopted in different settings and contexts, and which approaches and supports have contributed to the successful adoption and use of the tools. The case studies provide a set of “road maps” for other sites that will be adopting or scaling… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Promising Practices in Professional Growth & Support: “Case Study of Agile Mind”

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: Four organizations with promising practices in teacher Professional Growth & Support have significantly raised outcomes for low-income students. The charter management networks, Achievement First and Aspire Public Schools, and the two reform organizations, Teach Plus and Agile Mind, have successfully increased student achievement with a sustained focus on teaching effectiveness and capacity. As these organizations respond to the challenges of Common Core standards, invest heavily in teaching capacity through teacher leadership and collaborative planning time, and capitalize on assessment and evaluation data and technology, they exemplify best practices in Professional Growth & Support. They also reinforce what Education Resource Strategies (ERS) terms the Eight Principles of a Strategic Professional Growth & Support System which are presented here. The eight principles summarize ERS research and work with partner… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Assessing Academic Rigor in Mathematics Instruction: The Development of the Instructional Quality Assessment Toolkit. CSE Technical Report 672

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: The development of an assessment tool to measure the quality of instruction is necessary to provide an informative accountability system in education. Such a tool should be capable of characterizing the quality of teaching and learning that occurs in actual classrooms, schools, or districts. The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of the Academic Rigor in Mathematics (AR-Math) rubrics of the Instructional Quality Assessment Toolkit and to share the findings from a small pilot study conducted in the Spring of 2003. The study described in this paper examined the instructional quality of mathematics programs in elementary classrooms in two urban school districts. The study assessed the reliability of the AR-Math rubrics, the ability of the AR-Math rubrics to distinguish important difference between districts, the… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Testing the Test: A Study of PARCC Field Trials in Two School Districts. Policy Brief

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: The potential use of computer-based assessments has raised concerns from educators, policymakers, and parents about information technology infrastructure in school districts and the preparation of staff and students to use new technologies for assessment purposes, and the potential impact of testing activities on core school functions, particularly teaching and learning. This case study documents lessons learned in the district- or school-wide administration of computer-based student assessments in the Burlington and Revere School Districts during the spring 2014 Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) field test. The case study focused on three research questions: (1) What was the preparation process for district- and school-wide implementation of an online student assessment, including decision making on scheduling, staffing, professional development, technology and hardware, and test materials… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – A Final Case Study of SCALE Activities at California State University, Northridge: How Institutional Context Influenced a K-20 STEM Education Change Initiative. WCER Working Paper No. 2009-5

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: This qualitative case study reports on processes and outcomes of the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded System-Wide Change for All Learners and Educators (SCALE) project at the California State University, Northridge (CSUN). It addresses a critical challenge in studying systemic reform in complex organizations: the lack of methodologies that incorporate technical, social, cultural, and cognitive elements. Guiding questions include (a) how the institutional context influenced the project, (b) whether project activities affected science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) instruction, interdisciplinary collaboration on preservice programs, and inter-institutional collaboration on in-service programs, and (c) if and how change initiatives are accepted and incorporated. In-depth interviews (N = 34), relevant documents, and observation data were collected in 2006 and 2007. Findings identified several factors that supported and several that inhibited achievement… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Case Studies of Schools Receiving School Improvement Grants. Final Report. NCEE 2016-4002

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: The Study of School Turnaround (SST) examines the change process in a diverse, purposive sample of schools receiving federal School Improvement Grants (SIG) from 2010-11 to 2012-13. With the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), the SIG program underwent three major shifts. First, ARRA boosted total SIG funding in fiscal year 2009 to approximately 6.5 times the original 2009 appropriation through Title I, section 1003(g) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). SIG funds were distributed to states by formula based on each state’s Title I share. States then had to competitively make SIG awards to districts with eligible schools. Second, ARRA targeted funds at only the very worst schools–those that were in the bottom 5 percent of performance and had… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – You Asked Open-Ended Questions, Now What? Understanding the Nature of Stumbling Blocks in Teaching Inquiry Lessons

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: Undergraduate preservice teachers face many challenges implementing inquiry pedagogy in mathematics lessons. This study provides a step-by-step case analysis of an undergraduate preservice teacher’s actions and responses while teaching an inquiry lesson during a summer math camp for grade 3-6 students conducted at a university. Stumbling blocks that hindered achievement of the overall goals of the inquiry lesson emerged when the preservice teacher asked open-ended questions and learners gave diverse, unexpected responses. Because no prior thought was given to possible student answers, the preservice teacher was not equipped to give pedagogically meaningful responses to her students. Often, the preservice teacher simply ignored the unanticipated responses, impeding the students’ meaning-making attempts. Based on emergent stumbling blocks observed, this study recommends that teacher educators focus novice teacher preparation in… Continue Reading