Education Research Report
THIS WEEK'S EDUCATION RESEARCH REPORT
Investigating the Effects of Teacher Characteristics and Student Teaching
Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 hour ago
Some believe the solution to improving instructional quality in K-12 schools lies in identifying and recruiting certain kinds of individuals to the profession (e.g., academically talented, stronger commitment). Others believe that talented or committed individuals cannot become effective or enduring teachers without adequate preparation. Most prior literature examines either recruitment or preparation, rather than weighing evidence for both simultaneously. In addition, most prior research investigates the effects of either approach on only a single outcome, rather than considering... more »
CDC issues first comprehensive report on children’s mental health in the United States
Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 day ago
R Children’s mental disorders affect boys and girls of all ages, ethnic/racial backgrounds, and regions of the United States. Previous studies estimate up to 1 in 5 children have mental disorder and a new CDC MMWR Supplement finds that millions of American children live with depression, anxiety, ADHD, autism spectrum disorders, Tourette syndrome or a host of other mental health issues. The MMWR Supplement titled, “Mental Health Surveillance Among Children in the United States, 2005-2011,” is the first-ever report to describe federal efforts on monitoring mental disorders, and prese... more »
Colleges Using Financial Aid to Woo Wealthy Students Rather Than Help Low-Income Students Afford Tuition
Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 day ago
In their relentless pursuit of prestige and revenue, American private and public four-year colleges and universities are increasingly using financial aid to attract the best and most affluent students rather than to help low-income and working-class families pay for college, according to a *new report* released by the New America Foundation’s Education Policy Program. The report presents a brand new analysis of little-examined U.S. Department of Education data showing the “net price” the lowest-income students pay after all grant aid has been exhausted. *The analysis shows that hund... more »
Pre-K Assessments Fall Short on Teacher Performance
Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 day ago
Student achievement is playing an increasing role in teacher evaluations, even in the earliest years of school when children do not participate in state standardized testing. As a result, states and school districts are struggling to find sound methods to measure young students’ achievement and rushing to implement evaluation systems without thinking through the risks, according to a *new report* released today by the New America Foundation’s Early Education Initiative. As of 2012, 20 states and D.C. require student learning to play a significant role in evaluating all teachers' pe... more »
Most Math Being Taught in Kindergarten Is Old News to Students
Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 day ago
Kindergarten teachers report spending much of their math instructional time teaching students basic counting skills and how to recognize geometric shapes—skills the students have already mastered before ever setting foot in the kindergarten classroom, new research finds. The findings reveal a misalignment between what the students are being taught and what they already know. “This study is one of the first to raise the question: Is the content that teachers report teaching in kindergarten meeting the needs of the majority of their students?” Mimi Engel, assistant professor of publi... more »
Playworks recess program reduced bullying, enhanced feelings of safety at school, increased vigorous physical activity during recess, and provided more time for classroom teaching
Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 2 days ago
A new study from Mathematica Policy Research and the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at Stanford University suggests that there may be more to recess than just a break in the school day. The randomized controlled trial of Playworks, a nonprofit organization that delivers a safe, healthy recess in low-income elementary schools in 22 U.S. cities, found that the program reduced bullying, enhanced feelings of safety at school, increased vigorous physical activity during recess, and provided more time for classroom teaching. The research raises the possibility tha...more »
Hispanics Pass Whites in Rate of College Enrollment
Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 week ago
[image: PHC-2013-05-college-enrollment-01] A record seven-in-ten (69%) Hispanic high school graduates in the class of 2012 enrolled in college that fall, two percentage points higher than the rate (67%) among their white counterparts,1 according to a Pew Research Center analysis of new data from the U.S. Census Bureau.2 This milestone is the result of a long-term increase in Hispanic college-going that accelerated with the onset of the recession in 2008 (Fry and Lopez, 2012). The rate among white high school graduates, by contrast, has declined slightly since 2008. The positive t... more »
ALEC ‘Report Card’ Gets ‘A’ for Ideological Fealty, Fails on Research Quality
Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 week ago
The recent education “report card” on the states put out by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) claims to rely on “high quality research” but gets a failing grade in a new review. Professor Christopher Lubienski and doctoral candidate T. Jameson Brewer, both of the University of Illinois, reviewed ALEC’s 18th Report Card on American Education: Ranking State K-12 Performance, Progress, and Reformfor the Think Twice think tank review project. The review is published today by the National Education Policy Center, housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Educa... more »
Some Textbook Visuals Can Hurt Learning
Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 week ago
Adding captivating visuals to a textbook lesson to attract children’s interest may sometimes make it harder for them to learn, a new study suggests. Researchers found that 6- to 8-year-old children best learned how to read simple bar graphs when the graphs were plain and a single color. Children who were taught using graphs with images (like shoes or flowers) on the bars didn’t learn the lesson as well and sometimes tried counting the images rather than relying on the height of the bars. “Graphs with pictures may be more visually appealing and engaging to children than those witho... more »
Early Math and Reading Ability Linked to Job and Income in Adulthood
Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 week ago
Math and reading ability at age 7 may be linked with socioeconomic status several decades later, according to new research published in *Psychological Science*, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The childhood abilities predict socioeconomic status in adulthood over and above associations with intelligence, education, and socioeconomic status in childhood. In light of ongoing debates about the impact that education standards have on children’s lives, psychological scientists Stuart Ritchie and Timothy Bates of the University of Edinburgh wanted to investigate ... more »
Dyslexia is not the same in men and women, boys and girls
Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 week ago
Using MRI, neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center found significant differences in brain anatomy when comparing men and women with dyslexia to their non-dyslexic control groups, suggesting that the disorder may have a different brain-based manifestation based on sex. Their study, investigating dyslexia in both males and females, is the first to directly compare brain anatomy of females with and without dyslexia (in children and adults). Their findings were published online in the journal Brain Structure and Function. Because dyslexia is two to three times more prev... more »
The Recession's Impact on Teacher Salaries
Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 week ago
Teacher salary growth took a hit post-recession, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality's new report The Recession's Impact on Teacher Salaries. The report finds that teacher raises for experience and market forces like inflation were one-third to one-half of what they were at the beginning of the recession. While this slow-down in teacher salary growth was on par with that of comparable professions, some districts were hit particularly hard. Eighty percent of the school districts in our 41-district sample had a total pay freeze or pay cut in at least one school year... more »
Geographic Knowledge and Values Survey: Report of Results for the United States
Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 week ago
The American Geographical Society (AGS) conducted a nationwide survey of public attitudes toward and knowledge about geography. The survey ran online from December 12, 2011 through March 31, 2012 with volunteers constantly soliciting adult U.S. residents to participate. The AGS Geographic Knowledge and Values Survey received 4,021 valid responses from people throughout the United States. While not a true random sample, the results are indicative of a sizable segment of the U. S. population: more educated, more female, and less ethnically and racially diverse than the general popula... more »
Camaraderie of sports teams may deter bullying, violence
Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 week ago
As schools around the country look for ways to reduce violence and bullying, they may want to consider encouraging students to participate in team sports, according to a study presented Sunday, May 5, at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Washington, DC. Researchers analyzed data from the 2011 North Carolina Youth Risk Behavior Survey to see if athletic participation was associated with violence-related behaviors, including fighting, carrying a weapon and being bullied. A representative sample of 1,820 high school students in the state completed the survey, wh... more »
Schools may help close gap to mental health services for adolescents with mental disorders
Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 week ago
A study published in the May 2013 issue of the *Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry* found that mental health resources provided by schools are significantly associated with whether adolescents with mental disorders receive needed mental health services. In particular, adolescents with disorders attending schools that engage in early identification of emotional problems, are significantly more likely to receive mental health services. Using data from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication Adolescent Supplement (NCS-A), a group of researchers led... more »
Poll of 800 Teachers Finds Strong Support for Common Core Standards and a Moratorium on Stakes for New Assessments Until Everything Is Aligned
Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 week ago
Three-quarters of public school teachers surveyed support the Common Core State Standards, yet just 27 percent said their district has provided them with the tools and resources necessary to teach the standards, according to the results of a poll released by the American Federation of Teachers today. The AFT surveyed 800 kindergarten- through 12th-grade teachers on the Common Core State Standards for math and English language arts, which 45 states and the District of Columbia have adopted. At least two states—Kentucky and New York—already have given Common Core-aligned assessments ...more »
Cyberbullying rampant among high school students
Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 week ago
* Nearly one-third of youths also report playing video/computer games for more than 3 hours a day* Step into a class of 30 high school students and look around. Five of them have been victims of electronic bullying in the past year. What's more, 10 of those students spend three or more hours on an average school day playing video games or using a computer for something other than school work, according to a study to be presented Sunday, May 5, at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Washington, DC. "Electronic bullying of high school students threatens the self-e... more »
Preventing Youth Violence and Dropout: A Randomized Field Experiment
Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 week ago
Improving the long-term life outcomes of disadvantaged youth remains a top policy priority in the United States, although identifying successful interventions for adolescents - particularly males - has proven challenging. This paper reports results from a large randomized controlled trial of an intervention for disadvantaged male youth grades 7-10 from high-crime Chicago neighborhoods. The intervention was delivered by two local non-profits and included regular interactions with a pro-social adult, after-school programming, and - perhaps the most novel ingredient - in-school programming d... more »
Idiosyncrasies and Discrepancies in States' Implementation of NCLB
Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 week ago
The No Child Left Behind (NLCB) Act required states to adopt accountability systems measuring student proficiency on state administered exams. Based on student test score performance in 2002, states developed initial proficiency rate targets and future annual benchmarks designed to lead students to 100% proficiency on state exams by 2014. Any year a school fails to meet these targets, either across all students or by various subgroups of students, the school does not make Adequate Yearly Progress. While the federal government's legislation provided a framework for NCLB implementation, it...