This Week's Education Research Report 2-2-13 #SOSCHAT #EDCHAT #P2

Education Research Report:

THIS WEEK'S EDUCATION RESEARCH REPORT

Gender, Debt, and Dropping Out of College

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 hour ago

For many young Americans, access to credit has become critical to completing a college education and embarking on a successful career path. Young people increasingly face the trade-off of taking on debt to complete college or foregoing college and taking their chances in the labor market without a college degree. These trade-offs are gendered by differences in college preparation and support and by the different labor market opportunities women and men face that affect the value of a college degree and future difficulties they may face in repaying college debt. This study examin... more »

Survey of Secondary Special Educators Regarding Transition From School to Adulthood

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 hour ago

This study examined critical features of secondary special educator’s experiences with transition professional development to predict variables most likely to influence performance of transition planning and services. Results included the extent to which secondary special educators are prepared to perform transition practices, the relationship between preparation and the frequency of performance, and specific variables predictive of higher levels of implementation. The results confirm that training matters if special educators are to implement transition interventions and service... more »

How to to bring about substantial increases in physical activity in youth, within school settings.

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 21 hours ago

*Background * Despite overwhelming evidence of the health benefits of physical activity, most American youth are not meeting the 60 minutes per day recommendation for moderate- to vigorous-intensity physical activity (MVPA). Policy changes have the potential to bring about substantial increases in physical activity in youth, within school and community settings. Purpose The purpose of this study was to quantify the increase in energy expenditure for school-based policies and built environment changes. *Methods* Scientific literature reviews were consulted, and more than 300 publish... more »

Race to the Top Progress Reports

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 22 hours ago

Today the U.S. Department of Education released state-specific reports for 12 Race to the Top grantees, detailing their progress on transforming education at the local level. The reports highlight the second-year work and accomplishments of states awarded funding through the first two phases of Race to the Top: Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island and Tennessee. The 12 reports provide detailed, transparent summaries of each state’s accomplishments and challenges in year two, which covere... more »

School Turnaround Fever

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 22 hours ago

This very interesting exploratory study examines and critiques the current fever for school turnarounds and considers implications of this trending reform approach for urban educators. The authors focus on the following questions: 1. In what ways does turnaround schooling constitute (and not constitute) innovative practice? 2. How successful has turnaround schooling been to-date in accomplishing the outcomes held for it by its advocates and implementers? 3. What is the degree of congruence between turnaround practices and democratic schooling? They present their findings in the form... more »

Students who work together and interact online are more likely to be successful

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 day ago

Students who work together and interact online are more likely to be successful in their college classes, according to a study published Jan. 30 in the journal Nature Scientific Reports and co-authored by Manuel Cebrian, a computer scientist at the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California San Diego. Cebrian and colleagues analyzed 80,000 interactions between 290 students in a collaborative learning environment for college courses. The major finding was that a higher number of online interactions was usually an indicator of a higher score in the class. High achie... more »

High Risk Kids in Head Start: Academic Gains, Improved Relationships

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 day ago

A new study by Oregon State University researchers finds that Head Start can make a positive impact in the lives of some of its highest risk children, both academically and behaviorally. Published in the current issue of the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, the study sheds light on how Head Start has helped children living in non-parental care, or living with someone who is not a parent or step-parent by biology or adoption. "These children tend to have unstable home lives, sometimes transitioning between different relatives, living with their grandma one month, and la... more »

STEM interest has been continually rising in high-school students since 2004

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 day ago

STEMconnector® and My College Options® have released a national report linking student interest in STEM education with STEM job opportunities. The new report — *Where are the STEM Students? What are their Career Interests? Where are the STEM Jobs?* — identifies the STEM interests of more than one million U.S. high school students interested in pursuing STEM careers, and links them to increasing demand for over 16 million STEM jobs by 2018. It also provides in-depth profiles of more than one million students interested in STEM majors and careers with breakouts for all 50 states and ... more »

Charter Schools: Early Decisions In School Development Are Critical

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 day ago

A new report, Charter School Growth and Replication released today by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found that charter schools, as they age or replicate into networks, are very likely to continue the patterns and performance set by their early years of operation, and that for most charter schools their ultimate success or failure can be predicted by year three of a school’s life. “This report’s findings challenge the conventional wisdom that a young underperforming school will improve if given time. Our research shows that if you start wob... more »

Gates Foundation’s MET Study Challenged

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 day ago

A review by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) of a newly released and long-awaited study on teacher evaluation strongly questions the spin that has been put on the findings. The Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, released its final set of reports this month. Those reports are supposed to advise schools and districts about how to design teacher evaluations. The MET study compared three types of teacher performance measures: Student test scores, classroom observations, and student surveys. The project concluded ... more »

Reducing arrests in schools without compromising safety

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 3 days ago

Several Connecticut towns are dramatically reducing arrests in their schools without compromising safety, a report by the Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance finds. The report, Adult Decisions: Connecticut Rethinks Student Arrests, looks at the national problem of students being arrested for minor misbehavior and profiles three Connecticut towns working to end the overuse of arrest in their schools. Manchester, Windham and Stamford all worked with the Alliance to increase order in their schools while decreasing the number of students arrested. Results were striking. For example,... more »

Ranking State Charter School Laws

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 3 days ago

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) has released its annual rankings of state charter school laws across the country, which found that many states took significant steps to strengthen their state laws. The report, and the NAPCS model charter school law it is based upon, is designed to support the creation of high-quality public charter schools, particularly for those students most in need of better public school options. The rankings now include 43 states and the District of Columbia, due to Washington state voters for the first time ever approving a statewide... more »

Science program: "potentially negative effects on general science achievement for middle school students"

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 3 days ago

*GEMS® The Real Reasons for Seasons* is a curriculum unit for grades 6–8 that focuses on the connections between the Sun and the Earth to teach students the scientific concepts behind the seasons. The WWC identified one study that examined the effects of *GEMS® The Real Reasons for Seasons* on the science achievement of middle school students. The study is a randomized controlled trial that meets WWC evidence standards without reservations and included 4,777 seventh-grade students in 10 middle schools in Maryland. Based on the evidence presented in the study, the WWC found that *... more »

Carnegie Learning Curricula and Cognitive Tutor: mixed effects on HS math achievement

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 3 days ago

*Carnegie Learning Curricula and Cognitive Tutor®* is a secondary math curricula that offers textbooks and interactive software to provide individualized, self-paced instruction based on student needs. The program includes pre-Algebra, Algebra I, Algebra II, and Geometry. The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) reviewed 11 studies that investigated the effects of *Carnegie Learning Curricula and Cognitive Tutor® *on math performance for high school students. Three of these studies are randomized controlled trials that meet WWC standards without reservations, and three are randomized co... more »

Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies: no discernible effects on math achievement

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 3 days ago

Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies is a peer-tutoring program for grades K–6 that aims to improve student proficiency in math and other disciplines. The program supplements regular math instruction by having students work in pairs or small groups, coaching one another, practicing math concepts, and providing encouragement and feedback to their peers. After reviewing 13 studies that examined the effects of Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies on the math performance of elementary school students, the WWC found that one study meets WWC evidence standards without reservations. This rando... more »

Designing professional development systems to support the Common Core State Standards in mathematics

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 3 days ago

This report, Scaling Up Professional Development in an Era of Common State Standards, describes the process and outcomes of a project aimed at bringing together a set of diverse experts to generate a set of design recommendations for what should be considered when creating, sustaining, and assessing professional development systems to support the Common Core State Standards in mathematics. The work of initiating and supporting collaboration among scholars from diverse fields to generate a set of recommendations for professional development was guided by three questions: 1. How can ... more »

Education Choice and Competition Index: Value Questioned

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 4 days ago

The Brown Center of Education Policy at the Brookings Institution advocates for increased choice and competition in US schools and produces an annual Education Choice and Competition Index. A new review of the 2012 Index report concludes that it is merely a long-winded way of stating, ‘we like districts with lots of choice, and here they are’ – thus adding little if any useful information for policy deliberations. The Index, or ECCI for short, was reviewed for the Think Twice think tank review project by David Garcia of Arizona State University, who has researched and published o... more »

Content-focused literacy coaching is markedly more effective

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 week 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 - 1 week 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 week 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 week 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 week 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 week 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 week 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 week 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 week 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 »