Education Research Report TODAY

Education Research Report

Education Research Report TODAY

Gifted Students Aren't Perfectionistic

by Jonathan Kantrowitz / 47min

There is a rich literature on perfectionism among gifted individuals, but the results of these individual studies are ambiguous. This meta-analysis aimed to clarify the nature of the relationship between perfectionism and giftedness by focusing on quantitative studies that compared the perfectionism levels of gifted and nongifted students. Hedge’s unbiased g was used as the effect size metric and

Work-Based Learning

by Jonathan Kantrowitz / 55min

This Policy Outline provides a high-level overview of the key agencies, funding sources and common state policy components that make up a work-based learning continuum in any state.

Employment Outcomes for Associate’s Degree Completers and Noncompleters

by Jonathan Kantrowitz / 1h

Three years after beginning their postsecondary education in 2011–12, 72 percent of certificate students who attained a credential and 59 percent of certificate students who left without a credential were employed. Among associate’s degree students, the percentages were 77 and 70 percent, respectively. Today , July 8, the National Center for Education Statistics released First-time Subbaccalaurea

Relations Between Achievement and Self-Concept

by Jonathan Kantrowitz / 3h

According to the internal/external frame of reference model, academic achievement has a strong impact on people’s self-concept, both within and between subjects. This article describes a series of meta-analyses of k = 505 data sets containing the six bivariate correlations between achievement and self-concept in two subjects. Negative paths from achievement to noncorresponding self-concept, indic

Book Giveaway Programs Promote the Home Literacy Environment and Children’s Literacy-Related Behavior and Skills

by Jonathan Kantrowitz / 3h

Full article Book giveaway programs provide free books to families with infants to encourage caregivers to begin reading to their children during infancy. This meta-analysis of 44 studies retrieved from 43 articles tests the effects of three major book giveaway programs: Bookstart (n = 11), Reach Out and Read (n = 18), and Imagination Library (n = 15). Effect sizes were aggregated within two doma

Investigating Efficacy of an Online Mathematics Homework Intervention

by Jonathan Kantrowitz / 3h

Full article The authors report on a randomized controlled trial of an intervention that leverages the availability of laptops for all public-school students in the state of Maine. The intervention, called “ASSISTments,” provides feedback to students as they solve mathematics homework problems and automatically prepares reports for teachers about student performance on daily assignments. Teachers

Impacts of an Early Childhood Mathematics and Science Intervention on Teaching Practices and Child Outcomes

by Jonathan Kantrowitz / 3h

This randomized controlled trial examined effects of the MyTeachingPartner-Math/Science intervention on the quality and quantity of teachers’ mathematics and science instruction, and children’s mathematics and science outcomes in 140 pre-kindergarten classrooms. Teachers participated in the intervention for two years with consecutive cohorts of children. Results from Year 1 are considered experim

Targeted taxes and school lunch policies benefit low-income populations

by Jonathan Kantrowitz / 15h

Targeted taxes on sweetened beverages and policies that strengthen nutritional standards for meals and beverages at schools may be effective tools for decreasing the purchase of sweetened drinks and reducing obesity among children living in poverty, according to two studies led by researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The studies will be published online July 7, 2020 in Heal

Colleges that emphasize activism have more civically engaged students X

by Jonathan Kantrowitz / 15h

Students tend to be more engaged in activism if the school that they attend emphasizes social and political issues, according to new research featuring faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York. A research team including Binghamton University Assistant Professor of Student Affairs Administration John Zilvinskis examined survey responses to an experimental itemset of the Natio

Early childhood education centers can boost parents' engagement at home X

by Jonathan Kantrowitz / 15h

COVID-19 has temporarily shuttered many early childhood education centers across the country, shifting full-time child care and teaching responsibilities largely to parents. As some of those centers look toward reopening, they can play an important part in ensuring that parents continue to be engaged in their 

Education Research Report

Jeff Bryant: After Years of Underfunding, Now Public School Teachers Are Supposed to Save the Nation’s Economy? - Citizen Truth

After Years of Underfunding, Now Public School Teachers Are Supposed to Save the Nation’s Economy? - Citizen Truth

After Years of Underfunding, Now Public School Teachers Are Supposed to Save the Nation’s Economy?
It’s taken a pandemic to make people realize public schools are a key to prosperity, but so far they’re bringing too little, too late.

“After 9/11, New York City police and firefighters were hailed as heroes,” said Mary Parr-Sanchez, president of the New Mexico affiliate of the National Education Association, when I spoke with her about how educators have responded to the pandemic in her state. “After this, I hope teachers will be viewed as the community pillars that they really are,” she said.

Parr-Sanchez may get what she wished for.

In the early months of the coronavirus outbreak, the nation relied on health care and grocery store workers for survival, but that labor force couldn’t possibly turn around a crashing economy. Then, conservative governors across the nation, particularly in the South and West, thought bringing back the leisure and hospitality workforce would revive business and commerce. That didn’t turn out so well. So now a broad range of policy makers and political actors are turning to school teachers to get the economy humming again.

In May, as the pandemic was just about to explode from hotspots in the Northeast to a nationwide contagion, Forbes contributor Nick Morrison argued, “Until children go back to school, parents will have to remain at home looking after them, and it will be impossible to fully restart the economy.”

New York Times op-ed writer Spencer Bokat-Lindell, marveling at how European countries were able to reopen schools, wrote, “Restarting classes is essential not only to parents’ mental health and children’s CONTINUE READING: After Years of Underfunding, Now Public School Teachers Are Supposed to Save the Nation’s Economy? - Citizen Truth

Twin Rivers teacher claims retaliation for going public • Sacramento News & Review

Twin Rivers teacher claims retaliation for going public • Sacramento News & Review

Twin Rivers teacher claims retaliation for going public

After he alleged mistreatment of students, district investigation accused him of hostile campus environment

Seven days after Twin Rivers Unified School District teacher Mohamed Bashamak shared allegations that district officials retaliated against him for whistle-blowing over their treatment of students and instructors, the two-time Teacher of the Year received a letter from the district stating it had just concluded an investigation—and determined that he was the one responsible for a hostile work environment on campus.

The letter also informed Bashamak that the district is planning “corrective action” against him.

Bashamak says the district’s investigation is just the latest effort to punish him for standing up to its leadership on issues of student mistreatment and poor academic standards—in this case because he agreed to be interviewed for a March 24 story in SN&R.

The district maintains that the investigation into Bashamak started some 14 months prior to him going public. Bashamak responds that since the district is mandated to complete such investigations within 30 days, the timing stretches credulity.  

“They are getting back at me for speaking up and going all the way,” Bashamak said last week. “It’s become a story outside their control.”

Voicing concerns

Bashamak says most of his problems at the Twin Rivers independent study campus called Keema High School began when he challenged its principal Robert Pope on how math was being taught there. Bashamak is a veteran math instructor who’s received glowing reviews from students and parents.

The mother of one student eventually told Bashamak—and later told SN&R—that Pope had revealed privileged, CONTINUE READING: Twin Rivers teacher claims retaliation for going public • Sacramento News & Review

Mike Klonsky's Blog: Can schools open safely in the fall? Discuss...

Mike Klonsky's Blog: Can schools open safely in the fall? Discuss...

Can schools open safely in the fall? Discuss...

Can schools reopen in the fall? And by open, I mean, children, educators, and staff safely occupy school buildings which are now shuttered because of the pandemic. If we're just talking about distance learning, then we have to say schools are already open and teachers have been hard at work since the outbreak of coronavirus, trying under near-impossible, inequitable conditions to rebuild their learning communities solely via the internet.

And if schools do reopen, which in one form or another now seems likely, will the educational value being offered and received outweigh the risks to the health and very lives of millions of students and their teachers?

It's complicated. But right now, I would say no.

As the end of summer approaches, Trump and his know-nothing ed secretary Betsy DeVos are threatening school districts that don't fully open.

Florida’s Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran, a Republican, issued a sweeping executive order Monday requiring all schools in the state to reopen their buildings for in-person instruction for the coming school year, even as coronavirus cases in the state continue to skyrocket.

A piece in The Atlantic by former Obama Dept. of Homeland Security Asst. Sec. Juliette Kayyem correctly calls reopening schools "an afterthought." 

Schools do not have a simple on-off switch. To reopen schools will not just take a CONTINUE READING: Mike Klonsky's Blog: Can schools open safely in the fall? Discuss...

Just how little U.S. students learn about African American history - The Washington Post

Just how little U.S. students learn about African American history - The Washington Post

Just how little U.S. students learn about African American history — and five steps to start to change that

The nationwide racial and social justice demonstrations led by Black Lives Matter in reaction to the May 25 police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man in Minneapolis, have led to calls for overhauls in policing, criminal justice and, among other things, school curriculums.

Students have demanded — at protests and with petitions — that schools teach a true history of the United States that includes the racial injustice that has been embedded in American institutions since the country’s founding. One petition on Change.org has more than 20,000 signatures.

This post, written by educators Leslie Fenwick and Chike Akua, speaks directly to this issue. They first explain how they took a group of Rhodes Scholars — a prestigious and highly selective international fellowship program — to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., and discovered how little they knew about the subject matter. They write, for example:

During the tour, one of the Rhodes Scholars, a Chicagoan, looked quizzically at a giant wall quote from Ida B. Wells. “Who is that?” he asked. We explained that, among other things, Ida B. Wells documented lynchings and wrote extensively about the white terrorism that blacks experienced in the late 1800s in her book, “The Red Record.” He just shook his head. “My grandmother lived in the Ida B. Wells Homes — a housing project,” he said. “But I never knew who Ida B. Wells was.”

Then they discuss anti-racist curriculums and provide five ways that K-12 and higher education administrators, teachers and students can begin to educate themselves on this subject.

Leslie T. Fenwick is dean in residence at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, dean emeritus of the Howard University School of Education and a member of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture Scholarly Advisory Committee, which was founded by noted historian John Hope Franklin to help set the museum’s intellectual agenda and exhibition content.

Chike Akua is an assistant professor of educational leadership at Clark Atlanta University who specializes in the sociocultural foundations of education. His dissertation research, “The Life of a Policy,” is the first to examine the formulation and implementation of Florida Statue 1003.42 (2)(h), which requires that students learn the history of African Americans. Akua is also a former Teacher of CONTINUE READING: Just how little U.S. students learn about African American history - The Washington Post

SSPI Announces Tool for Assessing Student Learning - Year 2020 (CA Dept of Education)

SSPI Announces Tool for Assessing Student Learning - Year 2020 (CA Dept of Education)

State Superintendent Tony Thurmond Announces Implementation Tool for Assessing Student Learning

SACRAMENTO—State Superintendent Tony Thurmond announced today that the California Department of Education (CDE) has released a new implementation tool on diagnostic and formative assessments as a resource for schools. Being able to identify where students are in their learning within key content areas when they return to school would support educators moving forward as they teach students who missed months of in-class instruction.

The new document—titled “Implementation Tool: Guidance on Diagnostic and Formative Assessments”—offers many tools and strategies for taking a snapshot of students’ learning, but none of the assessments are required.

“Due to the school closures resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, we all have concerns about learning gaps and share educators’ desires to have useful diagnostic assessments when students return,” Thurmond said. “This has especially impacted our most disadvantaged and vulnerable students, many of whom lack access to the technology needed for distance learning. Our set of resources offers multiple ways to measure a student’s learning without exacerbating the trauma they have experienced in recent months, while providing tools educators need to accelerate learning.”

"As they create a safe and welcoming environment, it will be important for schools to take stock of students’ social, emotional, and academic needs when students return to school,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, President of the California State Board of Education and of the Learning Policy Institute. “California has an already-approved list of diagnostic and formative assessment tools that are aligned with our state standards and connected to instructional supports that can help teachers adjust instruction to meet student needs in the fall and throughout the year."

This document describes how LEAs can use California’s approved assessments to evaluate where students are academically at the start of and throughout the school year. In addition to providing summative assessments for English language arts/literacy (ELA), mathematics, science, and English language proficiency, the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) and the English Language Proficiency Assessments for California (ELPAC), assessment programs also provide important resource tools for teachers that are aligned with California standards.

These assessment tools include:

• Smarter Balanced assessment system, developed by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, which is freely available to all public school districts, schools, and teachers in California, focusing on:
  • Interim assessments, designed to support teaching and learning throughout the school year
  • Tools for Teachers, a website designed to support classroom-based formative assessment practices
• Practice and training tests for CAASPP and ELPAC
• Diagnostic assessments approved for grade two which have the capacity to assess student progress across a longer continuum of performance, typically covering the ELA and mathematics domains in K–8 or K–12.

In addition to assessments, teachers may use multiple measures from various data sources such as district, school, and classroom assessments; narrative report cards; essays; and class projects to determine where students are in their learning and identify areas in which they may need additional support.

The Implementation Tool: Guidance on Diagnostic and Formative Assessments for LEAs can be found on the CDE website.

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Tony Thurmond — State Superintendent of Public Instruction
Communications Division, Room 5602, 916-319-0818, Fax 916-319-0100

SSPI Announces Tool for Assessing Student Learning - Year 2020 (CA Dept of Education)