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Eric.ed.gov – Establishing a Strong Foundation: District and School-Level Supports for Classroom Implementation of the LDC and MDC Frameworks. Executive Summary

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has invested in the development and dissemination of high-quality instructional and formative assessment tools to support teachers’ incorporation of the Core Common State Standards (CCSS) into their classroom instruction. Literacy experts have developed a framework and a set of templates that teachers can use to develop content area modules focused on high quality writing tasks closely tied to subject area texts. Math experts have developed formative assessment lessons (FALs) that teachers can incorporate throughout the year’s curriculum. Across both content areas, the tools target the “instructional core” by raising the level of content; enhancing teachers’ skill and knowledge about instruction, content and formative assessment; and catalyzing student engagement in their learning so that they will achieve at high levels. These tools… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – A Teacher for Every Classroom: New Teachers in the Baltimore City Public Schools, 1999-2004

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: This study, commissioned by The Abell Foundation, analyzes new teachers hired by the Baltimore City Public School System (BCPSS) over the past several years. In particular, the study compares different categories of new teachers: those with full professional certification, teachers in alternative certification programs (Teach for America, the BCPSS Teaching Residency Program, and Project SITE SUPPORT), and conditionally (formerly provisionally) certified teachers who were not participating in alternative programs. This preliminary study lays the foundation for future research in which this relationship can be examined. This study sought to address whether alternatively certified teachers provided the school system with: (1) More subject area expertise at secondary level (measured by college major or minor) than available from other new teachers; (2) Higher PRAXIS scores (PRAXIS 1, PRAXIS 2a… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Instructional Interactions of Kindergarten Mathematics Classrooms: Validating a Direct Observation Instrument

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: In this paper, the authors report research focused directly on the validation of the Coding of Academic Teacher-Student interactions (CATS) direct observation instrument. They use classroom information gathered by the CATS instrument to better understand the potential mediating variables hypothesized to influence student achievement. Their study’s purpose is to gather the kinds of validity evidences that match the proposed interpretations and uses of the CATS instrument (Kane, 2008; Messick, 1995). Therefore, they first explore the content aspect of construct validity by collecting information about the content relevance and representativeness of the observation instrument (Messick, 1995). Second, concerned about the consistency of the observation data collected across a number of independent observers, they measure inter-observer agreement. Finally, they focus on the criterion-predictive aspect of construct validity and investigate… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Ambitious Leadership: A Case Study of Aligning English Curriculum to College- and Career-Ready Standards at Cardenas

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: The shift to the Common Core at the Lazaro Cardenas Elementary School, a pre-K to third grade school in a predominantly Latino area in southwest Chicago, rested on instructional improvement efforts Jeremy Feiwell initiated five years earlier in 2006, when he became Cardenas’s principal. Feiwell knew from his years as a teacher at Cardenas that curriculum and instruction at the school varied widely–every teacher was doing something different in his or her classroom. Meanwhile, the school–where 52 percent of students are English language learners and 97 percent come from low-income households–was the lowest performing of the 23 schools in the community. By 2016, the school was the highest performing in math in the south side of Chicago, and one of the top schools for reading. Cardenas’s staff… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Designing Professional Development around Key Principles and Formative Assessments to Improve Teachers’ Knowledge to Teach Mathematics

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: The authors’ hypothesis is that if teachers (as experts) understand and teach concepts from the position of expertise teacher quality will improve. They believe that focusing on the key ideas will deepen both teacher and student understanding and allow learners to build the concepts necessary to form solid foundations for the application of mathematics both in and out of school. But such methods of instruction often require that teachers learn to reorganize and teach fundamental concepts in more expert-like ways. Because many teachers were taught in a system that stressed procedure rather than conceptual understanding, and the dearth of guidance on how teachers might change their teaching in this manner, such change may be difficult. Building on the expert-novice literature, and the findings by Carpenter, Fenamya, Levi,… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Generalizing Expert Misconception Diagnoses through Common Wrong Answer Embedding

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: Misconceptions have been an important area of study in STEM education towards improving our understanding of learners’ construction of knowledge. The advent of largescale tutoring systems has given rise to an abundance of data in the form of learner question-answer logs in which signatures of misconceptions can be mined. In this work, we explore the extent to which collected expert misconception diagnoses can be generalized to held-out questions to add misconception semantics. We attempt this generalization by way of a question-answer neural embedding trained on chronological sequences of learner answers. As part of our study, we collect natural language misconception diagnoses from math educators for a sampling of student answers to questions within four topics on Khan Academy. Drawing inspiration from machine translation, we use a multinomial… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – The Right Trajectory: State Teachers of the Year Compare Former and New State Assessments

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: “The Right Trajectory” brings to the forefront an often-overlooked voice in the debate about new state assessments developed in consortia: that of the best teachers in the country. This research suggests, despite challenges still to overcome, that these front-line experts believe that the new consortia tests are an improvement on the former assessments and so represent movement in the right direction for students and for education in their states. What do great teachers think of the new assessments compared to the previous ones? As part of state transitions to college and career ready (CCR) standards, including the Common Core State Standards in more than 40 states (NGA & CCSSO, 2010), states are for the first time administering new summative assessments aligned to those standards and aiming for… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Increasing Expertise in Earth Science Education through Master’s Education

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: The processes of developing and the results of testing a master’s degree program designed to increase the number and quality of secondary-level earth science teachers are described in this paper. The master’s program is intended to serve practicing secondary-level science and math teachers who lack subject-area endorsement in earth science. There is need for programs such as this because there is a nationwide shortage of qualified earth science teachers. By targeting teachers who are already trained and certified in science or math, the program can focus solely on earth science content and pedagogical content knowledge. The program can be completed in 2 y via online academic-year instruction and on-campus or field-based training during summers. Completion of the master’s program satisfies teachers’ need for ongoing professional development. A… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Not So Elementary: Primary School Teacher Quality in Top-Performing Systems

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: Concerns about inadequate development of subject expertise for American elementary school teachers have been well documented. There are many exceptions to this narrative, and there are many exemplary U.S. teacher preparation programs. However, it is clear that, overall, the preparation of elementary teachers in the United States in key subject areas has been inadequate. So, what are systems that have high-performing learning outcomes in key subjects doing to ensure quality teaching in math, science and literacy? This report analyses whether and how high-performing systems (specifically those in jurisdictions of Japan, Finland, Hong Kong, and Shanghai) have supported the subject expertise of their elementary school teachers. The findings highlight how different parts of these systems constantly reinforce the development of deep subject expertise in their elementary teachers. For… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – A Quest for Increasing Student Math Achievement and Promoting Rigorous Evaluation in Italy: Evidence from the M@t.abel Teacher Professional Development Program

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: Research has proven that teachers have a fundamental influence on student results. Moreover, effective teacher professional development is one of the key mechanisms for improving student achievement. By the most recent OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) definition, “Professional development is defined as activities that develop an individual’s skills, knowledge, expertise and other characteristics as a teacher.” The M@t.abel program suits this definition both in terms of increasing teacher subject knowledge and in terms of providing math teachers with alternative solutions and methods for presenting usual contents. Given that the effects of any professional development program on student achievement are mediated by teacher actual practices in the classroom, it is necessary to verify whether teachers enrolled in the M@t.abel program do follow the training, whether they… Continue Reading