This Week's Education Research Report 1-26-13 #SOSCHAT #EDCHAT #P2

Education Research Report:

THIS WEEK'S EDUCATION RESEARCH REPORT

Content-focused literacy coaching is markedly more effective

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 19 hours ago

The language and reading comprehension skills of low-income upper elementary-school students—especially English-language learners—can improve markedly if trained literacy coaches engage teachers in conducting interactive text discussions with students, according to a three-year University of Pittsburgh study. The Pitt researchers report in the journal Learning and Instruction that language and reading comprehension showed measurable improvement for young students when their teachers had worked “at-elbow” with content-specific literacy coaches to foster a more interactive learning e...more »

Diet, Parental Behavior, and Preschool Can Boost Children’s IQ

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 19 hours ago

Supplementing children’s diets with fish oil, enrolling them in quality preschool, and engaging them in interactive reading all turn out to be effective ways to raise a young child’s intelligence, according to a new report published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Using a technique called meta-analysis, a team led by John Protzko, a doctoral student at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, combined the findings from existing studies to evaluate the overall effectiveness of each type... more »

ENDOWMENT SHOCKS AND CHARITABLE DONATIONS TO HIGHER EDUCATION

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 day ago

* In the year after a university experiences a negative shock equal to 10 percent of its annual operating budget, donors increase giving by 1 percent. * ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Educational institutions are the second largest recipients of charitable donations in the United States. In The Supply of and Demand for Charitable Donations to Higher Education (NBER Working Paper No. 18389), Jeffrey Brown, Stephen Dimmock, and Scott Weisbenner estimate that in the 2008-9 academic year about $12 billion in capital gifts -- money for long-run ... more »

Children’s complex thinking skills begin forming before they go to school

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 day ago

New research at the University of Chicago and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill shows that children begin to show signs of higher-level thinking skills as young as age 4 1/2. Researchers have previously attributed higher-order thinking development to knowledge acquisition and better schooling, but the new longitudinal study shows that other skills, not always connected with knowledge, play a role in the ability of children to reason analytically. The findings, reported in January in the journal *Psychological Science*, show for the first time that children’s executiv... more »

African-American, Hispanic students' grades not as negatively affected by working long hours after school

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 day ago

African-American and Hispanic students may be less likely than non-Hispanic white students to hold a job during the school year, but when they do, they tend to work somewhat longer hours and seem less likely to see their grades suffer than non-Hispanic white students with jobs, according to new researchpublished by the American Psychological Association. A study involving nearly 600,000 students from around the country also found that among high school students who work long hours at a part-time job, black and Hispanic students from lower income households may be less inclined to sm... more »

School system favors pupils driven by worry and conscientiousness

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 day ago

In one of three studies, Pia Rosander carried out personality tests on 200 pupils in southern Sweden when they entered upper secondary school at 16. Three years later, when they received their final grades, she was able to observe a strong link between personality and grades. In personality psychology one talks of "the big five" – the five most common personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. These qualities influence how a person behaves and are relatively stable qualities, which means that they do not change greatly over time or... more »

Vocabulary instruction in the early years is not challenging enough

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 day ago

Vocabulary instruction in the early years is not challenging enough to prepare students for long-term reading comprehension, argues a study led by a Michigan State University education researcher. The study, which appears in Elementary School Journal, analyzed commonly used reading curricula in U.S. kindergarten classrooms. It found that, generally, the programs do not teach enough vocabulary words; the words aren’t challenging enough; and not enough focus is given to make sure students understand the meaning of the words. “Vocabulary instruction does not seem to have an important ... more »

'Cool' kids in middle school bully more, UCLA psychologists report

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 day ago

* Study of seventh and eighth graders finds no difference between boys, girls* Bullying, whether it's physical aggression or spreading rumors, boosts the social status and popularity of middle school students, according to a new UCLA psychology study that has implications for programs aimed at combatting school bullying. In addition, students already considered popular engage in these forms of bullying, the researchers found. The psychologists studied 1,895 ethnically diverse students from 99 classes at 11 Los Angeles middle schools. They conducted surveys at three points: during t... more »

Close Achievement Gap by Addressing School Health

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 day ago

Health in Mind, a new report from Healthy Schools Campaign (HSC) and Trust for America's Health (TFAH), details immediate solutions that can help close the achievement gap and create a healthy future for all children. American children are struggling academically and the nation faces a growing achievement gap that is increasingly tied to health disparities—today's children could become the first generation to live shorter and less healthy lives than their parents, notes the report. Health in Mind offers a strong framework for addressing the nation's most urgent health and education... more »

Early retirement of older teachers raises test scores

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 day ago

Given the prevalence of districts offering older teachers incentives to retire early in order to fill budget gaps and the rising average age of the teachers, the composition of teachers will change dramatically in coming years. However, there currently is no information on how these changes in the teacher workforce will affect student achievement. In this study, researchers examined early retirement incentive program in Illinois in the mid-1990s to identify the effects of large-scale teacher retirements on student achievement. They found the program did not reduce test scores; lik... more »

Children in large urban and rural areas entered kindergarten with less advanced academic skills than children in small urban areas

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 2 days ago

Using nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (N ≈ 6050) this study, Early academic skills and childhood experiences across the urban–rural continuum, examined differences in academic skills at kindergarten entry across large urban, small urban, suburban and rural areas. Additionally, it considered whether home environments and child care experiences explained disparities in early achievement. Results showed that children in large urban and rural areas entered kindergarten with less advanced academic skills than children in small u... more »

Few Detectable Effects of Moving to Opportunity on Youth Outcomes

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 3 days ago

The life chances of children vary dramatically across neighborhoods. Youth who grow up in areas of concentrated poverty tend to have elevated rates of a wide range of adverse outcomes—such as school dropout, low test scores, and delinquency—even after statistically controlling for observable characteristics of the youth and their families (Chalk and Phillips, 1996; Duncan and Murnane, 2011; Ellen and Turner, 1997; Ginther, Haveman, and Wolfe, 2000; Leventhal and Brooks-Gunn, 2008, 2000; Shonkoff and Phillips, 2000). These patterns have led to a longstanding concern that neighborhoo... more »

Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 4 days ago

This report presents the latest release of the Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate (AFGR) and the Event Dropout Rate. These rates are disaggregated by year, race/ethnicity, gender,and, where applicable, grade. Seventy-eight percent of high school students, nationwide, graduated on time; an increase of 2 percentage points from the previous year. This graduation rate is based on the Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate calculated from enrollment and graduation counts reported to the National Center for Education Statistics at the Institute of Education Sciences, part of the U.S. Departm... more »

Childhood Diagnosis of ADHD Increased Dramatically Over 9-Year Period

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 4 days ago

The rate of children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder rose dramatically between 2001 and 2010, with non-Hispanic white children having the highest diagnosis rates, according to a Kaiser Permanente study published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics (formerly Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine). The study also showed there was a 90 percent increase in the diagnosis of ADHD among non-Hispanic black girls during the same nine-year period. The study examined the electronic health records of nearly 850,000 ethnically diverse children, aged 5 to 11 years, wh... more »

Victims of school bullying online are often friends or former friends

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 4 days ago

When we typically think of kids who are the victims of school bullying, what comes to mind are isolated youth who do not fit in. A new study, however, shows that when that harassment occurs online, the victims tend to be in mainstream social groups at the school – and they are often friends or former friends, not strangers. The research is part of a burgeoning field of study into the effects of social media on everyday relationships and behavior. Personality and social psychologists are finding surprising ways in which people's online environments and relationships reflect and infl... more »

The Effects of Guaranteed Admission: the Texas 10% Plan

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 5 days ago

The Texas 10% law states that students who graduated among the top 10% of their high school class are guaranteed admission to public universities in Texas. The authors of this study estimate the causal effects of this admissions guarantee on a sequence of connected decisions: students' application behavior, admission decisions by the university, students' enrollment choices conditional on admission; as well as the resulting college achievement. The authors identify these effects by comparing students just above and just below the top 10% rank cutoff. The authors find that students... more »

Financial Aid Policy: Lessons from Research

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 5 days ago

In the nearly fifty years since the adoption of the Higher Education Act of 1965, financial aid programs have grown in scale, expanded in scope, and multiplied in form. As a result, financial aid has become the norm among college enrollees. The increasing size and complexity of the nation's student aid system has generated questions about effectiveness, heightened confusion among students and parents, and raised concerns about how program rules may interact. In this article, the authors review what is known and what is not known about how well various student aid programs work. They fi... more »

Simplifying the application for federal student aid

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 5 days ago

The application for federal student aid is longer than the tax returns filled out by the majority of US households. Research suggests that complexity in the aid process undermines its effectiveness in inducing more students into college. In 2008, an article in the NBER journal showed that most of the data items in the aid application did not affect the distribution of aid, and that the much shorter set of variables available in IRS data could be used to closely replicate the existing distribution of aid. This added momentum to a period of discussion and activity around simplification in... more »

Extreme student discipline practices

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 week ago

The extreme student discipline practices that led the Department of Justice to sue one Mississippi county are far more widespread than previously thought, cites a new report from a coalition of civil rights organizations. Titled Handcuffs on Success: The Extreme School Discipline Crisis in Mississippi Public Schools, the report details how extreme school disciplinary practices harm tens of thousands of Mississippi students who are removed from school every year for minor misbehaviors, such as violating dress codes and mouthing off to teachers. Many are also criminalized in the proc... more »

Parents' financial help linked to lower college GPAs, higher graduation rates

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 week ago

A new study by University of California, Merced, sociology professor Laura T. Hamilton found that students' GPAs decreased with increased financial support from their parents. The study also found that students with financial aid from their parents were more likely to complete college and earn a degree. The study, "More is More or More is Less? Parental Financial Investments during College," will appear in the February issue of the American Sociological Review and has been posted on the publisher's website. "Students with parental support are best described as staying out of serio... more »