bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Can Two Tongues Live in Harmony: Analysis of the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS88) Longitudinal Data on the Maintenance of Home Language
Authors: Yeung Alexander Seeshing , Marsh Herbert W. , Suliman Rosemary
Published: June 2007

Using the nationally representative National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS88) database, the relations of first language (L1, non-English) proficiency to subsequent use of that language (home language maintenance), English proficiency, and academic achievement were examined. Structural equation modeling (SEM) results showed that LI proficiency in tenth grade (T2) did not affect subsequent English test scores, school grades, or English proficiency in twelfth grade (T3), but had a strong positive effect on T3 L1 use and also positive effects on T3 standardized tests in English, math, and history. Use of L1 up to twelfth grade had almost no effect on T3 English outcomes or on T3 achievements other than English. Negative impacts of frequency in L1 use on perceived English proficiency were found only in the early years of high school and did not persist over time. The results did not support speculations that home language proficiency would have persistent negative effects on English and other academic outcomes, but suggest the need for support in L1 enhancement for home language maintenance.
Low-Income Parents: How Do Working Conditions Affect Their Opportunity to Help School-Age Children At Risk?
Authors: Heymann S. Jody , Earle Alison
Published: June 2007

Numerous studies have documented the importance of parental involvement to children's success at school. Much of the discussion about what influences the outcomes of poor children has assumed that low-income parents have the same opportunity to help with their children's education. Yet, parents' availability to be involved with their children's education is often determined by job benefits and working conditions. The goal of this article is to examine empirically whether low-income working parents face significantly different nonfinancial barriers to parental involvement than those faced by higher income working parents. In particular, we examine the working conditions faced by parents who have at least one child who is in need of help because of educational or behavioral problems. Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth––Mother and Child Surveys (NLSY) on 1, 878 families where mothers worked more than 20 hr per week were analyzed.
Group Discussion and Large-Scale Language Arts Assessment: Effects on Students' Comprehension
Authors: Fall Randy , Webb Noreen M. , Chudowsky Naomi
Published: June 2007

Large-scale assessment programs are beginning to design group assessment tasks in which small groups of students collaborate to solve problems or complete projects. Little is known, however, about the effects of collaboration on students' cognitive processes and performance on such tests. The present study compared, student performance on language arts tests in which they either were or were not permitted to discuss the story they were required to read and interpret. The analyses compared the quality of student responses on test forms with and without collaboration, examined qualitative changes in students' responses before and after collaboration, and examined students' reflections about the impact of collaboration on their understanding of the story. The results show that a 10-min discussion of the story in three-person groups had a substantial impact on students' understanding of the story. Implications for the design of instructional and assessment contexts with peer collaboration are discussed.
Employment During High School: Consequences for Students' Grades in Academic Courses
Authors: Warren John Robert , LePore Paul C. , Mare Robert D.
Published: June 2007

High school students who work intensively at paid jobs tend to have lower grades in academic courses. Prior research has not properly tested theories about the source of the relationship between student employment and grades (or other outcomes), and has not explicitly modeled the potentially reciprocal nature of this relationship. We focus on both the short- and long-term effects of adolescent employment on grades in academic courses and simultaneously consider the extent to which grades may influence employment behaviors. We find no evidence that high school employment has either short-or long-term effects on grades in academic courses or that grades in these courses influence employment activities. Pre-existing differences between more and less intensively employed students fully account for the association between employment intensity and grades in academic courses.
Educational Standards, Assessment, and the Search for Consensus
Authors: Moss Pamela A. , Schutz Aaron
Published: June 2007

In this article, we critically examine the nature of the “consensus” reflected in educational standards used to orient high-stakes assessment programs. We analyze two complementary cases of practice in the assessment of teaching. One focuses on the discourse of standards creation and one examines how standards like these are typically used to orient assessment development and judgments about individual performance. We offer two (partially competing) theoretical perspectives that might illuminate and guide our practices in this currently undertheorized and underexamined area of standards development. One is based in the discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas and one is based in critical elaborations of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. We argue that conventional consensus-seeking approaches to the development and public review of educational standards tend to mask diversity and relinquish authority for consequential decisions to assessment developers who work in far less public circumstances. We draw on hermeneutic philosophy to offer a more pluralist approach that allows dissensus to be represented and taken into account in the assessment process.
Is October Brown Chinese? A Cultural Modeling Activity System for Underachieving Students
Authors: Lee Carol D
Published: June 2007

This article analyzes the quality of intellectual reasoning of a class of high school students with standardized reading scores in the bottom quartile. The analysis situates the intellectual work on 1 day of instruction in terms of the history of the activity system out of which the dispositions of these students were constructed over time. The analysis deconstructs the historical dimensions of the cultural practices these students learned to acquire. Using a framework of cultural-historical activity theory, the article examines the knowledge base of the teacher, in this case the researcher, to coach and scaffold a radically different intellectual culture among students who were underachieving. The framework for the curricular design implemented and the strategies modeled explicitly aligned the cultural funds of knowledge of the African American students with the cultural practices of the subject matter, in this case, response to literature.
Measuring Educators’ Beliefs About Diversity in Personal and Professional Contexts
Authors: Pohan Cathy A , Aguilar Teresita E
Published: June 2007

This study describes the development of two empirical measures designed to assess educators’ personal and professional beliefs about diversity. A review of related studies and existing beliefs and/or attitudinal measures on diversity is provided. Steps utilized for instrument development and revisions are presented. Summaries of pilot, preliminary, and field testing developmental stages are provided, including results of our assessment of reliability and construct validity of the scales. These results provide promising support for internal consistency and (face and construct) validity of the instruments. Recommendations for educational and research uses of the measures are also provided.
Distinguishing Between Good (Useful) and Bad Workloads on Students’ Evaluations of Teaching
Authors: Marsh Herbert W
Published: June 2007

Multidimensional students’ evaluations of teaching (SETs), Workload, Grades, Perceived Learning, and background variables were evaluated with confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) of previously published data (Greenwald, A. G., & Gillmore, G. M., Journal of Educational Psychology, 89, 743– 751, 1997b). Competing CFA models demonstrated multiple SET dimensions like those identified in previous research (Marsh, H. W., International Journal of Educational Research, 11, 253 (3), 1987) and two nearly uncorrelated Workload factors: Good Workload (valuable in advancing education) had substantial positive effects on SETs and Perceived Learning, whereas the effects of Bad Workload were negative. SETs had nonlinear relations with Good Workload (the positive Good Workload-SET correlation became smaller for higher Workloads) and Grades (the positive grade-SET correlation became smaller for higher grades). The positive grade-SET correlation was completely eliminated by controlling for Good and Bad Workloads and other background variables. In contrast to misguided suggestions that teachers can improve SETs by decreasing Workload (at the likely expense of effective teaching), these results show that SETs and teaching effectiveness can both be improved by increasing Good Workload and decreasing Bad Workload.
Subverting Swann: First- and Second-Generation Segregation in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools
Authors: Mickelson Roslyn Arlin
Published: June 2007

For more than 40 years, communities across the United States have grappled with Brown’s mandate to provide equality of educational opportunities to Black children by ending school segregation. Despite considerable unambiguous evidence that desegregation enhances students’ long-term outcomes such as educational and occupational attainment, the situation with respect to short-term outcomes is more ambiguous and more highly contested. Using survey data from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, a North Carolina district that used mandatory busing to desegregate its schools, the author demonstrates the direct and indirect negative effects of segregation on academic achievement in ways not employed previously. The distinctive research design includes a longitudinal measure of exposure to racially isolated Black elementary education, multiple indicators of educational outcomes, measures of track placement, and a large representative sample of grade 12 students from the entire school system. By demonstrating how both direct and indirect effects of segregated education impair Blacks’ academic outcomes, and how—even in an ostensibly desegregated school system—Whites retain privileged access to greater opportunities to learn, this article increases our understanding of the role of segregated schooling in maintaining the racial gap in academic achievement. Future research in other school districts once believed to be successfully desegregated will allow us to judge whether the situation in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School district reflects a more general pattern.
Policy Is Not Enough: Language and the Interpretation of State Standards
Authors: Hill Heather C
Published: June 2007

Words have no inherent meaning. Instead, they signify ideas or actions ascribed to them by communities, and meanings for specific words often vary across those communities. Words that carry specialized meanings in one community can be interpreted differently by another, particularly where individuals in the second community have little access to dialogues in the first, or when forces in the second community compete to assign meaning to key words. Observations of one district’s mathematics curriculum writing committee suggested a disconnect of this sort occurred along the policymaker/teacher divide in one state. Where state standards used words like “construct” and “concept” to imply certain mathematics teaching methods, teachers reading these documents imputed more local, and sometimes conventional, definitions to these words. As a result, state standards lost their force. This article describes and analyzes the work of state-local policy reconciliation as it occurred in this committee, and appraises that work’s implications for reform efforts that rely on language as a medium for communication.
The Effects of Peer-Assisted Literacy Strategies for First-Grade Readers With and Without Additional Computer-Assisted Instruction in Phonological Awareness
Authors: Mathes Patricia G , Torgesen Joseph K , Allor Jill Howard
Published: June 2007

This research examined the efficacy and feasibility of (a) Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies for First-Grade Readers (1st-Grade PALS) conducted for 35-min sessions, three times per week for 16 weeks with first-grade children of varying reading ability, and (b) the impact of adding 8–10 hr of phonological awareness instruction via the computer to the curriculum already including 1st-Grade PALS with low-performing children. Conducted in naturally constituted academically heterogeneous first-grade classrooms, 36 first-grade teachers in eight schools in a southeastern medium-sized school district participated: 12 conducted 1st-Grade PALS, 12 conducted 1st-Grade PALS and computer-assisted instruction (CAI), and 12 continued their typical instruction. Within these classrooms, the impact of the interventions was investigated with 183 first-grade students (118 low-, 33 average-, and 32 high-achieving students). Data collected included (a) time-series phonological awareness and reading fluency data and (b) pre- and post-measures of concepts of print, decoding, fluency, and comprehension. Students and teachers also were asked to rate their satisfaction with various aspects of the interventions. The results indicate that 1st-Grade PALS enhanced reading performance both in terms of statistical significance and in terms of educational relevance, although not equally for all learner types. Results also indicate that CAI in phonological did not impact student performance beyond that achieved with 1st-Grade PALS alone. Both students and teachers implemented 1st-Grade PALS with relative ease, demonstrated high fidelity, and reported high levels of satisfaction.
Changes in Student Social Attitudes, Activism, and Personal Confidence in Higher Education: The Role of Women’s Studies
Authors: Stake Jayne E , Hoffmann Frances L
Published: June 2007

Goals of higher education have included the development of understanding and acceptance of diverse groups, commitment to working for social justice, and personal confidence. The effectiveness of women’s studies (WS) and non-women’s studies (NWS) classes in bringing about these student outcomes was assessed on 32 college campuses; 548 WS and 241 NWS students participated. Both repeated (pretest, posttest, and follow-up) and subjective change measures indicated that WS students increased more than NWS students in egalitarian attitudes toward women and other stigmatized groups, awareness of sexism and other forms of discrimination, activism for social causes, and intention to engage in social activism. Teachers’ pedagogical practices, as assessed by students, related to student outcomes but accounted for only a small portion of the difference between WS and NWS classes. Implications for higher education are considered.
A Quadripolar Need Achievement Representation of Self-Handicapping and Defensive Pessimism
Authors: Martin Andrew J. , Marsh Herbert W. , Debus Raymond L.
Published: June 2007

From need achievement and self-worth motivation perspectives, self-handicapping and defensive pessimism (comprising defensive expectations and reflectivity) are integrated into a quadripolar model reflecting the motives to avoid failure and approach success. Consistent with hypotheses, defensive expectations and self-handicapping reflected failure avoidance (with self-handicapping bordering failure acceptance); reflectivity was marked by high failure avoidance and high success orientation; and, self-concept essentially reflected success orientation. This quadripolar model was consistent across students’ (n = 328) first and second years at university. Interpretation of these constructs in terms of failure avoidance and success orientation was validated through structural equation modeling in which self-handicapping, defensive pessimism, and self-concept differentially predicted a variety of academic outcomes.
The Motivational and Academic Consequences of Elementary Mathematics Environments: Do Constructivist Innovations and Reforms Make a Difference?
Authors: Hickey Daniel T. , Moore Allison L. , Pellegrino James W.
Published: June 2007

This study examined the effects of a videodisc-based mathematical problem-solving series known as The Adventures of Jasper Woodbury, as implemented by one school district within a constructivist-inspired reform of its math curricula. The motivational and academic consequences of both the specific innovation and the broader reforms were examined in 19 fifth-grade classrooms in two pairs of closely matched schools. One pair of schools served higher-achieving high-socioeconomic status (SES) students while the other pair served relatively lower-achieving low-SES students. Significantly larger gains on the Mathematical Problem-solving subtest of the ITBS were documented in the 10 classrooms where the Jasper activities were implemented, and in the 10 classrooms that were ranked as relatively more consistent with the broader curricular reform goals. The largest relative gains were found in the five classrooms that both used the Jasper activities and were ranked more consistent with the broader reforms. The positive consequences of both the Jasper activities and the broader reforms were documented in both pairs of schools. The implications of these results are discussed relative to current proposals for curricular reform and research on educational innovations
High Access and Low Use of Technologies in High School Classrooms: Explaining an Apparent Paradox
Authors: Cuban Larry , Kirkpatrick Heather , Peck Craig
Published: June 2007

Most policy makers, corporate executives, practitioners, and parents assume that wiring schools, buying hardware and software, and distributing the equipment throughout will lead to abundant classroom use by teachers and students and improved teaching and learning. This article examines these assumptions in two high schools located in the heart of technological progress, Northern California’s Silicon Valley. Our qualitative methodology included interviews with teachers, students, and administrators, classroom observations, review of school documents, and surveys of both teachers and students in the two high schools. We found that access to equipment and software seldom led to widespread teacher and student use. Most teachers were occasional users or nonusers. When they used computers for classroom work, more often than not their use sustained rather than altered existing patterns of teaching practice. We offer two interrelated explanations for these challenges to the dominant assumptions that guide present technological policy making.
Beating the Odds: Teaching Middle and High School Students to Read and Write Well
Authors: Langer Judith A
Published: June 2007

This study investigated the characteristics of instruction that accompany student achievement in reading, writing, and English. It focused on English language arts programs in schools that have been trying to increase student performance, comparing those whose students perform higher than demographically comparable schools with schools whose scores are more typical. The study took place in four states and included 25 schools, 44 teachers, and 88 classes studied over a 2-year period each. Although the sample was diverse, including urban and suburban sites, schools with poor and diverse student bodies predominated. Analyses specified six features that permeated the environments and provided marked distinctions between higher and more typically performing schools. Although some of these features were present to varying degrees in the English programs in the more typical schools, they were all present all of the time in the higher performing schools, forming a consistently supportive environment for student learning.
Early Child Care and Children’s Development Prior to School Entry: Results from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care
Authors:   NICHD Early Child Care Research Network
Published: June 2007

Effects of early child care on children’s functioning at the age of 41/2 years were examined in the NICHD (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development) Study of Early Child Care, a prospective longitudinal study of more than 1,000 children. Even after controlling for multiple child and family characteristics, children’s development was predicted by early child-care experience. Higher-quality child care, improvements in the quality of child care, and experience in center-type arrangements predicted better pre-academic skills and language performance at 41/2 years. More hours of care predicted higher levels of behavior problems according to caregivers. Effect sizes associated with early child-care experiences were evaluated in relation to effect sizes obtained for two other well-recognized influences on early development: parenting and poverty. The findings indicated the importance (and relative independence) of quantity, quality, and type of child care for children’s development just prior to the time that children initiate formal schooling.
Tracing Teachers’ Use of Technology in a Laptop Computer School: The Interplay of Teacher Beliefs, Social Dynamics, and Institutional Culture
Authors: Windschitl Mark , Sahl Kurt
Published: June 2007

Research on ubiquitous computing in schools has documented that teachers often change instructional practices over time when using technology with students and has further suggested that teachers’ use of technology may play a role in their shifting toward more constructivist pedagogy. Our two-year study takes an ethnographic perspective in examining how three middle school teachers learned to use technology in the context of a laptop computer program. The ways in which those teachers eventually integrated computers into classroom instruction were powerfully mediated by their interrelated belief systems about learners in their school, about what constituted “good teaching” in the context of the institutional culture, and about the role of technology in students’ lives. The condition of ubiquitous technology did not initiate teachers’ movement toward constructivist instruction. Rather, the laptops were a catalyst that enabled one participant, who had a pre-existing dissatisfaction with teacher-centered practices, to transform her classroom through collaborative student work and project-based learning.
Democracy’s High School? Social Change and American Secondary Education in the Post-Conant Era
Authors: Rury John L.
Published: June 2007

In this article I discuss James Conant’s ideas about the democratic role of the comprehensive high school and address just how those ideas have been treated by history. I consider the historical context of the post–World War II United States, focusing on several issues: (a) race and the growth of school segregation, (b) the rise of a youth culture and the movement for students’ rights, and (c) the changing national economy, especially with respect to rising educational expectations. Drawing on the work of Amy Gutmann and other treatments of democratic education, I assess how these factors changed the prospects for democracy in American high schools. I also examine major policy statements and commission reports concerning secondary education from the 1970s and 1980s. Altogether, it appears that these major historical events converged in the postwar period to make Conant’s vision of the democratic high school problematic, at least in the nation’s large metropolitan areas. Thus the future of democratic education is an open question for the great variety of U.S. youth to be educated in the coming century.
Globalization, Education, and Citizenship: Solidarity Versus Markets?
Authors: Torres Carlos Alberto
Published: June 2007

This article suggests that globalization places limits on state autonomy and national sovereignty, affecting education in various ways. Those limits are expressed in tensions between global and local dynamics in virtually every policy domain. Globalization not only blurs national boundaries but also shifts solidarities within and outside the national state. Globalization cannot be defined exclusively by the post-Fordist organization of production; therefore, issues of human rights will play a major role affecting civic minimums at the state level, the performance of capital and labor in various domains, and particularly the dynamics of citizenship and democracy in the modern state. However, educational policy and its contributions to citizenship, democracy, and multiculturalism will face unprecedented challenges if the logic of fear, exacerbated by the events of September 11, prevails.
Learning From the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute: Documenting Teacher Development
Authors: Gregg Madeleine , Leinhardt Gaea
Published: June 2007

This study explores the extent to which experiences designed to help preservice teachers take advantage of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute moved them to acquire deeper knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement. The pre-service teachers came from two teacher education programs that differ with respect to situated activity, discourse communities, and authentic practice.

Before and after a visiting the museum, undergraduate preservice teachers (n = 49) created concept maps, or “webs,” of the Civil Rights Movement, responded to discussion prompts in small groups, and prepared field-trip activities and follow-up lessons. Analyses of the webs, conversations, activities, and lesson plans revealed that all students gained a considerable amount of information, appreciation, and understanding. Differences in the two groups support the idea of teacher education frameworks that build from the “community of learners” model.
Confronting History’s Interpretive Paradox While Teaching Fifth Graders to Investigate the Past
Authors: VanSledright Bruce
Published: June 2007

This article reports on one facet of a researcher–practitioner project undertaken with class of 23 diverse fifth graders. The project was rooted in taking recent history education reforms seriously. It was premised principally on reforms dealing with teaching practices found in the history standards and the research literature. As the researcher–practitioner, the author engaged the students in historical investigations to help them learn to think historically and better understand the past. He operated from a theoretical framework based on how he believed historical thinking and understanding occur for such novice learners. During the first three lessons, on Jamestown’s “Starving Time,” the author and class encountered history’s interpretive paradox. The article begins with an analogy drawn from the discipline of history. It then describes classroom events. The analysis focuses on a teaching dilemma that the encounter with the paradox provoked and conveys how the author’s pedagogical thinking and decision making were influenced by that encounter. The discussion of the dilemma suggests how research and reform in history education and the theories that underpin them mingle, in promising but unpredictable ways.
The Production of Achievement Inequality in High School English
Authors: Carbonaro William J. , Gamoran Adam
Published: June 2007

Does unequal access to high quality English instruction lead to unequal achievement outcomes for students? Four key aspects of high quality instruction—quantity of assignments, coherence of instruction, student voice in curricular and pedagogical issues, and the content of instruction—are examined to see whether each aspect affects growth in reading achievement from grades 8 to 12. Analyses indicate that some aspects of student voice enhance achievement growth, but quantity and coherence do not. Content has the most substantial impact on achievement growth: greater emphasis on analytical writing is associated with greater growth in reading scores. Overall, these measures of instructional practices partially explain why students’ track position and reading achievement are related.
Short Circuits or Superconductors? Effects of Group Composition on High-Achieving Students’ Science Assessment Performance
Authors: Webb Noreen M. , Nemer Kariane Mari , Zuniga Stephen
Published: June 2007

Although many cooperative learning methods advocate grouping students heterogeneously in order to maximize the diversity of perspectives, skills, and backgrounds, past research shows that heterogeneous grouping generally ben-efits low-ability students but does not necessarily benefit high-ability students. This study investigates the effects of group ability composition (homogeneous versus heterogeneous) on group processes and outcomes for high-ability students completing science performance assessments. High-ability students working in homogeneous groups uniformly performed well, and high-ability students in some heterogeneous groups performed as well as high-ability students in homogeneous groups; but high-ability students in other heterogeneous groups did not perform as well. The quality of group functioning served as the strongest predictor of high-ability students’ performance and explained much of the effect of group composition.
Less Like a Robot: A Comparison of Change in an Inner-City School and a Fortune 500 Company
Authors: Skilton-Sylvester Paul
Published: June 2007

This study—a comparison of change in an inner-city school and a Fortune 500 company—investigates how the work that we are asking our children to do in elementary school relates to the ways that work is changing in the information economy. The findings for this study are both striking in their simplicity and practical in their implications, showing that the traditional contradiction between socially progressive education and preparation for work is, at least in some areas, waning; that work done by many different specialists in the past is being put back together, allowing workers to do “more of the whole job” and leaving them feeling “less like a robot.”
The Production of Margin and Center: Welcoming–Unwelcoming of Immigrant Students
Authors: Gitlin Andrew , Buendía Edward , Crosland Kristin , Doumbia Fode
Published: June 2007

The authors of this article investigated a middle school in the United States, named Kousanar, and documented how Mexicans, Bosnians, and other immigrants were caught in institutional practices that simultaneously welcomed and “unwelcomed” them. To explain this contradiction, their data suggest that particular discourses and forms of materiality, in part, motivated and encouraged individuals and groups to make certain decisions and act in certain ways. Specifically, the authors found that teachers, students, and the local White community surrounding the school often were motivated by employment issues, the concerns of local businesses, fear of potential violence, and the wish to maintain an academic advantage. Conversely, immigrant students attending Kousanar and their parents often were motivated by family cohesion, a “good parent” discourse, safety concerns, and the wish for economic and academic opportunities. The authors conclude that discursive and contextual influences limit many opportunities for immigrant students and place them on the margins of school life.
Practicing Democracy in the Margins of School: The Teenage Parents Program as Feminist Counterpublic
Authors: Kelly Deirdre M.
Published: June 2007

Many barriers to realizing a vision of inclusive and deliberative democracy exist. But even in stratified societies, one can find relatively safe discursive arenas within schools where members of subordinated groups can explore who they are and want to become and can prepare to voice their needs, concerns, and issues in wider public realms. Nancy Fraser (1997) conceptualizes such arenas as “subaltern counterpublics” capable of expanding our “actually existing democracy.” Drawing on ethnographic data, this article analyzes the Teenage Parents Program as a feminist counterpublic within a Canadian public high school. It argues that youths need to learn to recognize the power of dominant as well as alternative or oppositional discourses and to articulate and strategically pursue their needs and interests.
Using Novel Tasks in Teaching Mathematics: Three Tensions Affecting the Work of the Teacher
Authors: Herbst Patricio G.
Published: June 2007

Novel (as opposed to familiar) tasks can be contexts for students’ development of new knowledge. But managing such development is a complex activity for a teacher. The actions that a teacher took in managing the development of the mathematical concept of area in the context of a task comparing cardstock triangles are examined. The observation is made that some of the teacher’s actions shaped the mathematics at play in ways that seemed to counter the goals of the task. This article seeks to explain a possible rationality behind those contradictory actions. The hypothesis is presented that in managing task completion and knowledge development, a teacher has to cope with three subject-specific tensions related to direction of activity, representation of mathematical objects, and elicitation of students’ conceptual actions.
Innovation in Education Markets: Theory and Evidence on the Impact of Competition and Choice in Charter Schools
Authors: Lubienski Christopher
Published: June 2007

Charter schools elevate choice and competition to foster educational innovations. Indeed, these market-style mechanisms are intended to challenge standardized practices associated with district administration of schools. However, a comprehensive review of practices in charter schools indicates that, although some organizational innovations are evident, classroom strategies tend toward the familiar. Drawing on organizational and economic theory, this article considers the forces shaping educational innovation in market-oriented reforms. Although reformers assume that competition and choice necessarily lead to innovations within schools, a more complex examination of competitive institutional environments suggests that mechanisms employed by reformers may actually undercut their intended purposes. The discussion highlights the potential for choice and competition to constrain opportunities for educational innovation and to impose pedagogical and curricular conformity.
Integrating Curriculum, Instruction, Assessment, and Evaluation in a Technology-Supported Genetics Learning Environment
Authors: Hickey Daniel T. , Kindfield Ann C. H. , Horwitz Paul , Christie Mary Ann T.
Published: June 2007

This article describes an extended collaboration between a development team and an evaluation team working with GenScope, an open-ended exploratory software tool. In some respects, this was a routine evaluation, documenting substantial gains (of roughly 1 SD) in genetics reasoning ability in all but 1 of 17 classes, despite challenges presented by school computer-lab settings. Relative to matched comparison classes, larger gains were found in technical biology and general science courses but not in college prep or honors biology courses. In other respects, our effort illustrates the value of new views of assessment, technology, and research. The alignment of a sophisticated research assessment and simple classroom assessments shed light on initial failures, spurring revision. By refining the GenScope activities and extending the classroom assessments, we supported worthwhile whole-class discourse around the shared understanding of the software. A follow-up study in a laptop-equipped classroom yielded the absolute and relative gains (3.1 SD and 1.6 SD) that proponents of such innovations have long promised. In retrospect, the strengths and weakness of the study illustrate the value of newer “design-based” approaches to educational research.
Unpacking Detracking: When Progressive Pedagogy Meets Students’ Social Worlds
Authors: Rubin Beth C.
Published: June 2007

Despite heated debate over detracking, little research exists on how the reform plays out in the classroom. This article, based on a year-long interpretive study of a detracked ninth-grade program at a diverse urban high school, focuses on the encounter between the “official” practices of the detracked classrooms under study and the “unofficial” social worlds of the students taking part in those practices. The author describes how aspects of the overall school context framed and permeated students’ interactions in their detracked classes, at times leading to a reiteration of the very inequalities that detracking was designed to address.
Pursuing a “Sense of Success”: New Teachers Explain Their Career Decisions
Authors: Johnson Susan Moore , Birkeland Sarah E.
Published: June 2007

This article, based on a longitudinal interview study of 50 new teachers in Massachusetts, presents respondents’ reasons for staying in their schools, moving to new schools, or leaving public school teaching within their first 3 years of teaching. Although the respondents’ prior career orientations, financial situations, and preparation played a role in their career decisions, their experiences at the school sites were central in influencing their decisions. Teachers who felt successful with students and whose schools were organized to support them in their teaching—providing collegial interaction, opportunities for growth, appropriate assignments, adequate resources, and schoolwide structures supporting student learning—were more likely to stay in their schools, and in teaching, than teachers whose whose schools were not so organized.
Pulling Together: Civic Capacity and Urban School Reform
Authors: Shipps Dorothy
Published: June 2007

Educators often ignore the political requirements of urban reform in their focus on the research and models that guide it. Conversely, political scientists frequently miss the differences among reforms in their focus on coalitions and resources. Integrating Clarence N. Stone’s concept of “civic capacity” with an educator’s view of reform types creates a typology of urban school regimes that helps to explain which local political arrangements and coalitions are compatible with various versions of reform. This article applies the typology to Chicago schools, revealing that the civic capacity associated with some reform agendas involves narrow, rather than broad, coalitions; that multiple coalitions compete for the same civic resources; that subtle coalition changes can alter a reform agenda; and that reform itself produces unpredictable political consequences.
Making It Work: Low-Income Working Mothers’ Involvement in Their Children’s Education
Authors: Weiss Heather B. , Mayer Ellen , Kreider Holly , Vaughan Margaret , Dearing Eric , Hencke Rebecca , Pinto Kristina
Published: June 2007

This article explores the complex relation between employment and family involvement in children’s elementary education for low-income women. Mixed-method analyses showed work as both an obstacle to and opportunity for involvement. Mothers who worked or attended school full time were less involved in their children’s schooling than other mothers, and mothers who worked or attended school part time were more involved than other mothers. Yet subtle and positive associations between maternal work and educational involvement also emerged. Working mothers described several strategies for educational involvement. The findings reframe current ecological conceptions of family involvement and call for policy and research consideration of the dilemma of work and family involvement.
These Deadly Times: Reconceptualizing School Violence by Using Critical Race Theory and Disability Studies
Authors: Watts Ivan Eugene , Erevelles Nirmala
Published: June 2007

Most pragmatic responses to school violence seek to assign individual blame and to instill individual responsibility in students. The authors of this article argue that school violence is the result of the structural violence of oppressive social conditions that force students (especially low-income, male African American and Latino students) to feel vulnerable, angry, and resistant to the normative expectations of prison-like school environments. From the vantage point of the intersection of critical race theory and materialist disability studies, the authors examine the impact of social, political, economic, and institutional structures on the social construction of the “deviant” student. They raise questions regarding violent “normalizing” structures and argue for more empowering alternatives.
Persuasion As a Dynamic, Multidimensional Process: An Investigation of Individual and Intraindividual Differences
Authors: Murphy P. Karen , Alexander Patricia A.
Published: June 2007

Persuasion is an interactive process through which a given message alters individuals’ perspectives by changing the knowledge, beliefs, or interests that underlie those perspectives. Although persuasion is seen as central to effective teaching and learning, there is still much to understand about the characteristics of learners, texts, and tasks that result in such changes. In this study, persuasion was tested as undergraduates read three compelling, popular-press texts on varied topics. Differences across and within readers were examined by means of multivariate and path analytic techniques. Texts written to persuade did, in fact, change readers’ knowledge, beliefs, and interest, and preexisting differences in knowledge, beliefs, and interest directly and indirectly influenced the degree of change. Furthermore, different texts elicited varied levels of knowledge, beliefs, and interest in individual readers.
Adapting Teacher Interventions to Student Needs During Cooperative Learning: How to Improve Student Problem Solving and Time On-Task
Authors: Chiu Ming Ming
Published: June 2007

This study tested a model of teacher interventions (TIs) conducted during cooperative learning to examine how they affected students’ subsequent time on-task (TOT) and problem solving. TIs involved groups of ninth-grade students working on an algebra problem; videotaped lessons were transcribed and analyzed. Results showed that teachers initiated most TIs and typically did so when students were off-task or showed little progress. After TIs, students’ TOT and problem solving often improved. Teacher evaluations of student actions had the largest positive effects, serving as gatekeepers for other teacher actions. Higher levels of teacher help content tended to reduce post-TI TOT, while teacher commands reduced post-TI TOT only when a group grasped the problem situation. In summary, TIs can increase TOT and problem solving, especially if teachers evaluate students’ work.
Expanding Schema-Based Transfer Instruction to Help Third Graders Solve Real-Life Mathematical Problems
Authors: Fuchs Lynn S. , Fuchs Douglas , Finelli Robin , Courey Susan J. , Hamlett Carol L.
Published: June 2007

Mathematical problem solving is a transfer challenge requiring children to develop schemas for recognizing novel problems as belonging to familiar problem types for which they know solutions. Schema-based transfer instruction (SBTI) explicitly teaches transfer features that change problems in superficial ways to make them appear novel even though they still require known solution strategies. This study assessed the effects of an expanded version of SBTI incorporating more challenging transfer features for broadening schemas and helping children recognize real-life math problems as solvable. Teachers were assigned randomly to 16-week control, SBTI, or expanded SBTI conditions. Students completed pretests and posttests focusing on increasing transfer distances. On a measure approximating real-life problem solving, the expanded SBTI group outperformed the SBTI group, which in turn outperformed the control group.
Are We Creating Separate and Unequal Tracks of Teachers? The Effects of State Policy, Local Conditions, and Teacher Characteristics on New Teacher Socialization
Authors: Achinstein Betty , Ogawa Rodney T. , Speiglman Anna
Published: June 2007

This article explores the possibility that state educational policies, involving accountability and instructional reform, and local district and school conditions interact with teachers’ personal and professional backgrounds to shape two tracks of new teachers that reinforce existing educational inequities. The present 2-year study incorporated mixed methods and a multilevel design that included state policy, local conditions, and teachers’ beliefs and practices, highlighting two cases from a larger database. The authors report how differences in district capital shape responses to state policy, influence teacher recruitment, interact with teacher characteristics, and create learning opportunities for new teachers that suggest the creation of two classes of teachers for two classes of students. While previous researchers have identified student tracking as reproducing inequities, this article examines the largely unexplored terrain of new teacher tracking: the sorting and socialization of novices.
Accountability in a Postdesegregation Era: The Continuing Significance of Racial Segregation in Florida’s Schools
Authors: Borman Kathryn M. , Eitle Tamela McNulty , Michael Deanna , Eitle David J. , Lee Reginald , Johnson Larry , Cobb-Roberts Deirdre , Dorn Sherman , Shircliffe Barbara
Published: June 2007

In the wake of both the end of court-ordered school desegregation and the growing popularity of accountability as a mechanism to maximize student achievement, the authors explore the association between racial segregation and the percentage of students passing high-stakes tests in Florida’s schools. Results suggest that segregation matters in predicting school-level performance on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test after control for other known and purported predictors of standardized test performance. Also, these results suggest that neither recent efforts by the state of Florida to equalize the funding of education nor current efforts involving high-stakes testing will close the Black-White achievement gap without consideration of the racial distribution of students across schools.
What Are the Effects of Induction and Mentoring on Beginning Teacher Turnover?
Authors: Smith Thomas M. , Ingersoll Richard M.
Published: June 2007

In recent years there has been an increase in the number of programs offering support, guidance, and orientation for beginning teachers during the transition into their first teaching job. This study examines whether such programs—collectively known as induction—have a positive effect on the retention of beginning teachers. The data used in the analysis are from the nationally representative 1999–2000 Schools and Staffing Survey. The results indicate that beginning teachers who were provided with mentors from the same subject field and who participated in collective induction activities, such as planning and collaboration with other teachers, were less likely to move to other schools and less likely to leave the teaching occupation after their first year of teaching.
High-Stakes Accountability and Equity: Using Evidence From California’s Public Schools Accountability Act to Address the Issues in Williams v. State of California
Authors: Powers Jeanne M.
Published: June 2007

In May 2000, a class action lawsuit on behalf of California’s public school students, Williams v. State of California, was filed in state court in an effort to make the state address inequities in its public schools. The central issue of the case was students’ access to the “bare essentials” of public education: qualified teachers, current textbooks, and adequate and safe facilities. The author analyzes the relationship between school and district characteristics and the base year of the Academic Performance Index (API), the state’s main measure of school performance, focusing on variables related to the main issues in the Williams case. The findings support the plaintiffs’ arguments that the basic educational necessities targeted by the case should be the object of state policy in conjunction with accountability policies.