bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Crossing the Borders Again: Challenges in Comparing Quality Instruction in Mathematics and Reading
Authors: Graeber Anna O. , Newton Kristie J. , Chambliss Marilyn J.
Published: November 2021

Context

Although many studies have looked at the teaching of mathematics or at the teaching of reading, few have looked at teaching in both subjects and attempted to discuss characteristics of quality instruction across these two domains. In this article, we reflect on our attempts to do so. We focus on one aspect of instruction, the extent of cognitive demand that characterizes reading and mathematics instruction in fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms.

Purpose

We pursued this work to share the difficulties faced in working across the two subject areas and how the differences and similarities in the two subject areas influenced data collection and the interpretation of results. We also wanted to explore whether the instructional styles of teachers who teach in both subject areas exhibited similar amounts of cognitive demand.

Research Design

After discussing the struggles faced in data collection, terminology used, and the comparability of research bases in the two domains, we report on an exploratory analysis of classroom observation data from the High-Quality Teaching study. Three aspects of cognitive demand were assessed through the classroom observations of approximately 550 lessons in reading and 600 lessons in mathematics: demand of tasks posed by the teacher, demand of students’ responses, and demand of the lesson content. Using data related to these aspects of cognitive demand, we also compared the level of cognitive demand in the reading and mathematics classes of the 69 teachers who taught both subjects.

Conclusions

Our findings suggest that the level of cognitive demand exhibited in the tasks teachers pose and the responses and work of students are similar in mathematics and reading. However, we found that the cognitive demand associated with content was higher in reading than in mathematics. For teachers who teach both reading and mathematics, only a small percent demonstrated the same demanding instruction for tasks, responses, or content regardless of subject area. Are the differences real, or an artifact of the definitions and protocols used to compare the subject areas? In either case, we raise issues related to teacher education, professional development, and evaluation. Should teacher policies incorporate information about potential differences in quality instruction across disciplines, and, if so, how? If quality instruction across subjects differs, what are implications for policies that shape expectations for teachers who teach both reading and mathematics?
Emasculation Blues: Black Male Teachers’ Perspectives on Gender and Power in the Teaching Profession
Authors: Brockenbrough Ed
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Over the past decade, a growing chorus of educational stakeholders has called for the recruitment of more Black men into the American teaching profession, casting these men as ideal surrogate father figures for Black youth who may lack adult male role models in their families or communities. Although a small body of scholarly work has begun to examine the gendered forms of culturally relevant pedagogies enacted by Black male teachers, critical analyses have yet to emerge on how these men negotiate the gendered power dynamics and professional culture of a traditionally female workplace.

Focus

This article presents several sets of findings from a more broadly framed study on the identities, pedagogies, and experiences of Black male teachers. Using Black masculinity studies as a conceptual framework, this article focuses specifically on Black male teachers’ negotiations of workplace gender politics with women colleagues and administrators.

Participants

The 11 Black male teachers whose narratives are explored in this article were middle or high school teachers in a predominantly Black urban school district on the East Coast of the United States.

Research Design

The study described in this article was grounded in life history narrative inquiry and employed a three-interview regimen for in-depth interviewing to enable participants to construct rich and nuanced narratives of their lived experiences as Black men and as Black male teachers. Focus groups also allowed participants to co-construct understandings of the challenges and opportunities they faced as Black men in the teaching profession. Transcriptions were coded and analyzed for recurrent themes within each participant's narrative as well as across participant narratives.

Findings

Participants’ life narratives revealed patriarchal gender ideologies that produced an inattention to male privilege, fueled conflictual encounters with women colleagues and administrators, and informed a desire for more male-centered spaces and interactions within the profession.

Conclusions and Recommendations

Patriarchal gender ideologies contributed to contentious gender politics in the workplace for the men in this study. Future research should attempt to develop deeper understandings of how these ideologies may influence the experiences of Black men throughout the American teaching profession. Additionally, inquiry efforts should explore strategies for engaging Black male teachers in examinations of their complicated relationships to patriarchy and for applying a critical awareness of gender to their negotiations of gender politics in the workplace.
A Legacy of Neglect: George I. Sánchez, Mexican American Education, and the Ideal of Integration, 1940–1970
Authors: Blanton Carlos Kevin
Published: November 2021

This biographical study of Dr. George I. Sánchez, a leading Mexican American educator, intellectual, and activist from the 1930s through the 1960s, opens up the idea of compensatory education—the prevalent notion of the 1960s that schools use specialized instructional programs to combat the alleged cultural deprivation of some children, particularly minorities—to a wider focus. While George Sánchez addressed key themes of compensatory education in critical and even predictive ways since at least the 1940s, he was not known to the compensatory education movement, nor was his most passionate subject, Mexican Americans, much of a factor in compensatory education thinking. And this was most unfortunate. No one captured more forcefully the tension between liberal sympathy to offer special schooling to Mexican Americans and how such innovative educational programs maintained and perpetuated the widespread practice of racial segregation. I focus on several discrete, illustrative episodes of Sánchez's life and activism over a three-decade period: first, Sánchez's New Deal-era idealism from the late 1930s and early 1940s in which he used stricter sociological definitions of Mexican American culture as deficient and in need of government action; second, his efforts of the 1940s and 1950s to desegregate public schools in Texas and the Southwest on behalf of the nascent Mexican American civil rights movement; third, his support for bilingual education in the 1960s for reasons of civic and political equality, but not from the perspective of sociolinguistic theory; and finally, Sánchez's surprisingly persistent and pugnacious opposition throughout the 1960s to a preschool compensatory program that originated from within the Mexican American community. These four phases of Sanchez's career illustrate the degree to which Sánchez wrestled with, and even predicted, some key points of later criticism of the entire compensatory education intellectual project. These aspects of Sanchez's work also document just how invisible Mexican American struggles were to national intellectual and policy circles. But most of all, George I. Sánchez recognized that the Mexican American people in the United States, his people, suffered greatly from a sad legacy of neglect. One of the central consistencies to his pedagogical thinking regardless of the decade was his willingness to call attention to that tragic legacy in the hopes of correcting it. This underlying principle to Sánchez's life and work, as well as his sharp diagnosis of the leading educational theories of the day, makes his marginal, almost invisible position among compensatory education thinkers of the 1960s, who also sought to correct legacies of injustice, just as tragic. Educational thinkers today should know more about George I. Sánchez as well as his perspectives on Mexican Americans, schools, and justice.
From “Cultural Deprivation” to Cultural Capital: The Roots and Continued Relevance of Compensatory Education
Authors: Spencer John
Published: November 2021

This article is a case study of compensatory education as it was developed and implemented by an innovative urban school principal in the early 1960s. I argue that while the compensatory education movement was often marred by pejorative-sounding language and inegalitarian ideas, especially as it was shaped and expanded by policy makers and district administrators, it also had roots in the work of school-based educators such as Marcus Foster, who approached it as a mechanism for raising academic achievement in urban schools. Foster won acclaim in the 1960s for his work as a principal and superintendent, only to be assassinated in 1973 by the Symbionese Liberation Army as a protest against an allegedly racist school system. I focus here on his tenure as principal of the Dunbar Elementary School in North Philadelphia from 1958 to 1963. Under Foster's leadership, Dunbar participated in the Ford Foundation's Great Cities School Improvement Program, which helped shape compensatory education approaches taken in the federal War on Poverty and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Even as it quickly became a centerpiece of federal policy, compensatory education was denounced by some critics for blaming low achievement on the alleged “cultural deprivation” of students and families rather than on the schools themselves. I suggest that the Dunbar School's pilot project bridged this divide between “blaming the victim” and “blaming schools.” As practiced in such schools, compensatory education confronted both home and school factors in an effort to raise academic achievement for all urban students. In doing so, this brand of compensatory education anticipated subsequent research on the importance of the “cultural capital” that students bring from home and the quality of the teaching, curriculum, and support they receive once they arrive at school. I conclude by suggesting that, from a historical perspective, the most significant problem with compensatory education was not its emphasis on social and economic disadvantages among some students, but the fact that policy makers promised too much for it as a solution to those and other urban problems. I also suggest that this tendency is evident once again in current enthusiasm for the Knowledge Is Power Program, the Harlem Children's Zone, and other charter school movements that share some common characteristics with the compensatory programs of the 1960s. As some policy makers and pundits point to these movements as solutions for achievement gaps, racial inequality, and poverty, it is instructive to revisit both the strengths and the limitations of the compensatory education movement of the 1960s.
Learning to Attend to Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Learners through Teacher Inquiry in Teacher Education
Authors: Athanases Steven Z. , Wahleithner Juliet Michelsen , Bennett Lisa H.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Learning to meet students’ needs challenges new teachers often focused on procedures, management, materials, and curriculum. To avoid this development pattern, student teachers (STs) need opportunities to concentrate especially on needs of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students. Teacher inquiry (TI) holds promise as one such opportunity.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

We sought to understand how STs in a teacher credential program with a history of attention to diverse learners were learning about their CLD students through TI.

Research Design

We examined data collected from 80 STs over a 6-year period, including 80 TIs; STs’ data analysis field memos; questionnaires with reflections on TI processes and products; and taped ST peer discussions and conferences with instructor. Data also documented TI instruction, classroom culture, and opportunities to develop learning related to conducting TI. Drawing on research and theory, we developed, tested, and used a rubric of 17 indicators of attention to CLD learners as a means to examine the range of ways and the extent to which STs attended to CLD students through TI.

Findings/Results

STs took actions of various kinds to learn about diverse students: researching contexts and histories; examining student work and performance at full-class, subgroup, and individual levels; and asking and listening beneath the surface to students’ reasoning, attitudes, beliefs, and concerns about school learning and other issues. Various assessment and inquiry tools supported the process, helping STs develop data literacy to attend to CLD learners. However, TI elements were used to varying degrees, in various ways, and with varying levels of success. Two cases illustrate the range of TI tools that STs used to learn about their CLD learners, to generate data and evidence about learning, and to act in ways responsive to what they learned about students.

Conclusions/Recommendations

Those interested in studying multiple STs’ inquiries for attention to CLD learners may need to develop frames and analytic methods to examine a corpus of cases. This study was grounded in an assumption that such crosscutting analyses accumulate knowledge to disseminate to larger audiences, challenging conceptions that values of TI are purely local, serving only those directly involved. Teacher inquiry can help focus attention on individual student learners by allowing a teacher to compare data among individual students, giving a clearer, organized format in which they can observe growth and improvement or a decline in performance. In my own project, I observed lower performance among specific students concurrent with assignments in which instructions may have been difficult to decode for English learners or students with disabilities. (Tracey, preservice English language arts teacher)
Interventions Promoting Educators’ Use of Data: Research Insights and Gaps
Authors: Marsh Julie A.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

In recent years, states, districts, schools, and external partners have recognized the need to proactively foster the use of data to guide educational decision-making and practice. Understanding that data alone will not guarantee use, individuals at all levels have invested in interventions to support better access to, interpretation of, and responses to data of all kinds. Despite the emergence of these efforts, there has been little systematic examination of research on such efforts.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

This article synthesizes what we currently know about interventions to support educators’ use of data—ranging from comprehensive, system-level initiatives, such as reforms sponsored by districts or intermediary organizations, to more narrowly focused interventions, such as a workshop. The article summarizes what is what is known across studies about the design and implementation of these interventions, their effects at the individual and organizational levels, and the conditions shown to affect implementation and outcomes.

Research Design

Literature review.

Data Collection and Analysis

This review entailed systematic searches of electronic databases and careful sorting to yield a total of 41 books, peer-reviewed journal articles, and reports. Summaries of each publication were coded to identify the study methods (design, framework, sample, time frame, data collection), intervention design (level of schooling, focal data and data user, leverage points, components), and findings on implementation, effects, and conditions.

Findings/Results

The review uncovers a host of common themes regarding implementation, including promising practices (e.g., making data “usable” and “safe,” targeting multiple leverage points) and persistent challenges (e.g., developing support that is generic but also customized, sustaining sufficient support). The review also finds mixed findings and levels of research evidence on effects of interventions, with relatively more evidence on effects on educators’ knowledge, skills, and practice than on effects on organizations and student achievement. The article also identifies a set of common conditions found to influence intervention implementation and effects, including intervention characteristics (capacity, data properties), broader context (leadership, organizational structure), and individual relationships and characteristics (trust, beliefs and knowledge).

Conclusions/Recommendations

The review finds that the current research base is limited in quantity and quality. It suggests the need for more methodologically rigorous research and greater attention to the organizational and student-level outcomes of interventions, comparative analyses, interventions that help educators move from knowledge to action, and specific ways in which the quality of data and leadership practices shape the effectiveness of interventions.
The Timing of Teacher Hires and Teacher Qualifications: Is There an Association?
Authors: Engel Mimi
Published: November 2021

Background

Case studies suggest that late hiring timelines are common in large urban school districts and result in the loss of qualified teachers to surrounding suburbs. To date, however, there has been no large-scale quantitative investigation of the relationship between the timing of teacher hires and teacher qualifications.

Purpose

This study examines the pervasiveness of late teacher hiring in urban and suburban school districts and explores the association between the timing of teacher hires and teacher qualifications, including certification, master's degree, and selectivity of undergraduate institution.

Research Design

Nationally representative cross-sectional data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics are used.

Data Analysis

The study uses data on school districts, public schools, and teachers from the 1999–2000 Schools and Staffing Survey. Secondary data are analyzed using multiple regression, including labor market fixed effects, to estimate the relationship between the timing of teacher hires and teacher qualifications.

Results

On average, districts hire 45% of their new teachers late—during the second half of summer and once the school year has already begun. Late hiring is more pervasive in urban and low-socioeconomic-status districts where over half of new hires take place during this late period. In urban districts, fully one fifth of new hires are made once the school year has already begun. The proportion of teachers hired late, however, does not predict the Barron's ratings of teachers’ undergraduate institutions, certification, or master's degree.

Conclusions

Although descriptive results indicate that late hiring is pervasive and more pronounced in urban districts, analyses do not provide evidence supporting the notion that earlier hiring is associated with hiring better credentialed teachers. Despite these null results, it is important to remember that late hires are still likely to cause problems for students, as well as for teachers, schools, and districts.
School Segregation and Math Achievement: A Mixed-Method Study on the Role of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
Authors: Agirdag Orhan , Van Avermaet Piet , Van Houtte Mieke
Published: November 2021

Background

In educational research on children's academic performance, few topics have received more attention than the consequences of school segregation and the impact of self-fulfilling prophecies. However, virtually no research has investigated whether self-fulfilling prophecies account for the impact of school composition on academic achievement.

Purpose & Research Objectives

This study aims to integrate research on the effects of school segregation with that on self-fulfilling prophecies by examining the mediating role of teacher expectancies regarding the impact of school composition on pupils’ math achievement. First, we investigate whether teachers’ teachability expectations are related to the socioe-conomic and ethnic composition of the school. Second, we investigate whether and how the effects of school composition can be explained by self-fulfilling prophecies. Because it is theorized that teacher expectancies might have an impact on pupils’ academic achievement through pupils’ perceptions of control over their achievement, we investigate the role of pupils’ sense of academic futility.

Sample & Research Design

Quantitative data from a survey of 2,845 pupils and 706 teachers in 68 Flemish (Belgian) primary schools and qualitative data obtained through in-depth interviews with 26 teachers in five schools are analyzed. A complementary mixed- method design is used: Findings from the quantitative data are strengthened and illustrated with qualitative data.

Results

The multilevel analysis shows that teachers’ teachability expectations are lower in schools with a high share of nonnative and working-class pupils and that these teachability expectations have an indirect impact on pupils’ achievement through pupils’ feelings of academic futility. The qualitative analysis reveals that the low teacher expectations in these schools are largely triggered by alleged linguistic deficiencies and problematic language use of the pupils and that school staff persistently communicate their preference for Dutch mono-lingualism to pupils.

Recommendations

The results of this study indicate that socioeconomic desegregation may not be needed if it is possible to reform schools with a larger share of working-class pupils. Schools that produce more favorable teachability expectations are recommended. In particular, teachers’ attitudes and beliefs regarding pupils’ linguistic backgrounds might be the focus of educational reforms.
A Re-Analysis of the Effects of KIPP and the Harlem Promise Academies
Authors: Yeh Stuart S.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Existing evaluations of the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) and the Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ) charter school programs suggest that these programs may potentially be very effective in closing the academic achievement gap.

Purpose/Objective

The purpose of the current study is to investigate the possibility of an internal contradiction in the assumptions underlying the KIPP and HCZ models that would prevent the models from being scaled up with the same positive results.

Research Design

The method involves: (1) review of the results of the key impact studies; (2) review of empirical evidence of high teacher attrition; (3) review of statements by the founders of the HCZ and KIPP models articulating the core assumption; (4) a narrative explanation of the internal contradiction in these models; and (5) a formal analysis demonstrating the consequences of this contradiction.

Findings/Results

The analysis suggests that gains from the KIPP and HCZ models would fall to zero once these programs are implemented in every school across the nation. The analysis suggests why existing impact results are likely due to artifacts stemming from high teacher attrition and hoarding of a disproportionate share of the nation's limited pool of highly dedicated teachers, rather than gains that could be sustained when the programs are scaled up and implemented nationwide.

Conclusions/Recommendations

The article recommends that national implementation of the KIPP and HCZ models should be delayed until research has been performed that would substantiate the assumption that there is a sufficient supply of highly dedicated teachers to fill the large number of vacant teaching positions that arise as a consequence of these models.
Learning to Resist: Educational Counter-Narratives of Black College Reentry Mothers
Authors: Sealey-Ruiz Yolanda
Published: November 2021

Background

College reentry women are often older than the traditional college student, and in this study are distinguished from other students because of their parental status as mothers (Johnson-Bailey, 2000; Sealey-Ruiz, 2007). As one of the the fastest growing populations in colleges and universities across the nation, it is alarming that many Black college reentry women, despite their educational gains, continue to face stereotypes about who they are socially, politically, and educationally.

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to examine the schooling experiences of Black college reentry mothers (n = 5) and explicate the ways in which they theorize and make meaning of the complexities of their lives, particularly in regard to the intersections of race, college reentry, and motherhood.

Research Design

Employing qualitative case study and narrative analysis methods, the larger study from which some data for this article derive (Sealey-Ruiz, 2005) examined the educational narratives of Black college reentry women. The original study investigated the influence the participants’ college reentry had on their lives and their daughters’ educational choices. The study reported in this article, then, includes data from individual interviews with the 5 mothers from the original study as they focus on their college reentry experience and motherhood.

Findings/Results

Contrary to what some researchers assert about schools not providing welcoming spaces for Black women to develop an optimistic sense of self, the reentry mothers in this study viewed college enrollment as a crucial step toward positive self-definition. Their efforts to become educated represent their resistance to public stereotypical images of themselves as Black mothers. In other words, they believed their college reentry served as counterpoint to the three stereotypes about Black mothers discussed in this article: the mammy, the matriarch, and the welfare mother/welfare queen.

Conclusions/Recommendations

The counter-narratives these mothers offered to the three stereotypes suggest that there are psychological barriers (fear of belonging, self-doubt, fear of marginalization, racism, sexism, negative stereotyping) to their academic success. This conclusion has the strong potential to move educational researchers toward a deeper investigation of challenges to the college reentry experienced by Black mothers, in the hope of creating institutional support structures, systems, and policies that can propel the academic success of this population.
Same Contract, Different Day? An Analysis of Teacher Bargaining Agreements in Louisville since 1979
Authors: Cowen Joshua M. , Fowles Jacob
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Recent political efforts to minimize the influence of teacher unions have called new attention to collective bargaining in American education. Such attention has only heightened a longstanding controversy within the realms of both research and practice. A renewed scholarly literature has systematically considered the relationship between teacher unionization and educational outcomes. The current paper provides additional context for such work by considering teacher contracts over time.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question

In this study we examine the ways in which the collective bargaining agreements in a large, Midwestern American school district have changed during more than 30 years of policymaking.

Research Design

The paper presents an historical content analysis/case study of every contract in Louisville, Kentucky since 1979. We focus on several areas of current interest to researchers studying teacher quality. These include salary schedules, transfer and assignment policies, teacher evaluation, dismissal, and working conditions. To fix our analysis within a theoretical framework, we consider an interpretation of our evidence suggested by the perspective of New Institutionalism.

Conclusions/Recommendations

We show that these contracts have changed very little in more than three decades, and most key provisions are identical. The time period we examine covers important educational reforms at the state and federal levels, as well as a number of popular movements such as efforts to reduce class size and enhance teacher quality through new evaluation schemes and tenure reform. If confirmed in other districts, our evidence would suggest limited potential for policy change to be reflected in individual bargaining agreements.
“Weg Da—Wir Wollen Lernen!” Education Reform in Hamburg, Germany in Neoliberal Times
Authors: Bale Jeff
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

This paper is in dialogue with critical policy scholarship that has developed a certain consensus about what neoliberalism is and what its impact has been on recent education policy. A substantial part of the paper comprises a synthesis of recent German scholarship on neoliberal education policies in that country.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

Drawing on critical analysis of neoliberal education policy, this paper examines a recent education reform measure in Hamburg, Germany. A key component of the intended reform measure was defeated by a ballot initiative spearheaded by a coalition of Hamburg residents widely understood to represent the city's wealthy elite. Making sense of the controversy over this reform measure is the central goal of this paper. To do so, I identify five features of neoliberal education policy in Germany and use them as a framework within which to read the specific reform measure in Hamburg and the resistance to it.

Research Design

This paper reports an interpretive policy analysis and draws on document sources from four interpretive communities: (a) Hamburg's education ministry; (b) two pro-reform coalitions; (c) one anti-reform coalition; and (c) news media sources. A total of 389 documents were collected for this study, to which I applied a grounded theory approach for data analysis.

Conclusions/Recommendations

By reading this controversy against previous scholarship on neoliberal education policy, I argue that this specific case of education reform in Hamburg does not follow the pattern such analysis would predict. By stressing this divergence, I neither intend to challenge the consensus on neoliberalism within critical policy scholarship, nor to position this reform policy as a panacea to neoliberal ills. Rather, I argue that the anomalous nature of this specific reform effort in Hamburg provides two unique analytical opportunities: (a) to understand more deeply the constraints imposed by neoliberalism on schooling, especially in a context of policy making that bucks the neoliberal trend; and (b) to identify more clearly what educational policy strategies are required to move beyond neoliberal imperatives for schooling and society.
Integrating Identities: Ethnic and Academic Identities among Diverse College Students
Authors: Walker Lovey H. M. , Syed Moin
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Students of Color continue to be underrepresented at the undergraduate level. Recent research has demonstrated the importance of non-academic psychosocial factors for understanding college experiences. One factor, identity, is a broad, multidimensional construct that comprises numerous distinct domains, including political, religious, gender, ethnic, and academic identities. Two identity domains that are particularly relevant for college Students of Color are ethnic and academic identities.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

In the present study we focused on identity development processes in college and how they differ between Students of Color and White students. Specifically, our study examined four hypotheses: Compared with White students, Students of Color would 1) report higher levels of ethnic identity and 2) endorse higher levels of ethnic-academic identity integration, and that the group difference in ratings of ethnic-academic identity integration would be both 3) mediated and 4) moderated by ethnic identity.

Research Design

This study was a cross-sectional survey of 282 college students in the U.S. (69% women, M age = 19.65, SD =2.78, Range = 18-39; 90% born in the U.S.). Participants were categorized as either White (54%) or as a Student of Color (47%). Participants completed rating-scale measures of ethnic identity exploration and commitment, academic identity, and ethnic-academic identity integration.

Findings/Results

Findings in the study supported our four hypotheses: 1) Students of Color reported higher levels of ethnic identity than White students, 2) Students of Color reported greater integration between their ethnic and academic identities than White students, 3) this difference was partially explained by Students of Color having stronger ethnic identities than White students, and 4) ethnic identity moderated the relation between ethnicity and ethnic-academic identity integration, such that ethnic identity predicts greater ethnicity-academic identity integration for Students of Color and White students, but the association is stronger for Students of Color.

Conclusions/Recommendations

Ethnic minority college students endorse higher levels of integration between their ethnic background and academic major. The ability for students to integrate their ethnic and academic identities may provide students with a sense of belonging during their college years. Both ethnicity and the academic environment play a role in the ways in which students feel belonging and pursue their academic careers. Thus, it is important to examine experiences of belonging in an academic context.
Teacher and Administrator Responses to Standards-Based Reform
Authors: Desimone Laura M.
Published: November 2021

Background

Since the onset of standards-based reform and its continuation in the form of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and now Race to the Top, debates have continued about whether such policies foster desirable change in states, districts, schools and classrooms.

Research Question

The study asks: How do state and district administrators, principals, and teachers describe their responses to standards-based reform, in terms of beliefs, understanding, and attitudes, as well as behavior?

Participants

The analysis uses interview data from 32 schools in 10 districts in 5 states. Data are from 60 fourth- and seventh-grade mathematics teachers, 32 principals, 14 district administrators, and 7 state officials.

Research Design

The overarching five-state study identified a representative probability sample of districts for each state. From those districts, two in each state were chosen for the case study, based on size and poverty.

Data Collection and Analysis

Interviews were transcribed, then coded both inductively and deductively to identify patterns and elicit major themes.

Findings

This study provides evidence that standards-based reform has elicited positive change in four areas: attention to struggling learners, teaching to the test, responsibility for student learning, and classroom content and pedagogy. Respondents said that as a result of standards-based reform policies, they focused more on struggling students, trying new approaches to reach them, and increasing their expectations for them. Respondents also reported increasing their personal and group responsibility for student learning, while at the same time feeling stress and pressure from the testing regime. Respondents reported worrying that teaching to the test was narrowing the curriculum, but they also praised the system for eliciting needed improvements in the curriculum. Some teachers said the new state standards required them only to change the order of topics they taught, but other teachers said the standards required them to cover different content and to focus more on student understanding and knowledge retention.

Conclusions

The findings here of constructive and positive responses stand in stark contrast to a substantial literature that documents negative reactions to NCLB. One explanation might be that earlier attempts at standards-based reform and accountability, such as those documented in this analysis, were much more closely aligned with the theoretical vision of standards-based reform than were later manifestations as codified under NCLB, which have (a) moved away from local discretion, (b) emphasized rewards and sanctions rather than authority (buy-in), and (c) changed the target from standards to focusing on test results, often exclusively.
The Role of Moral and Performance Character Strengths in Predicting Achievement and Conduct among Urban Middle School Students
Authors: Seider Scott , Gilbert Jennifer K. , Novick Sarah , Gomez Jessica
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Performance character consists of the qualities that allow individuals to regulate their thoughts and actions in ways that support achievement in a particular endeavor. Moral character consists of the qualities relevant to striving for ethical behavior in one's relationships with other individuals and communities. A sizable body of research has demonstrated correlations between student achievement and performance character strengths such as self-discipline, while the relationship between achievement, conduct, and moral character strengths such as integrity is more ambiguous. For both types of character, however, the majority of the extant research literature has focused on relatively small samples of elementary school children, university students, and high-achieving students.

Setting

This study took place at three “No Excuses” charter middle schools in a large northeastern city. Charter schools are publicly funded schools that are supervised by state boards of education rather than a local superintendent or school committee. “No Excuses” is a term used to describe high-poverty public schools featuring a strict disciplinary environment, extended school day and year, college preparatory mission, and an intensive focus on traditional reading and mathematics skills.

Participants

This study considered the relationship between achievement, conduct, and several character strengths among 488 early adolescents attending three urban charter schools in a large northeastern city. More than 90% of these students identified as African American, Latino, or multi-racial, and two thirds qualified for free or reduced price lunch (a proxy for low socioeconomic status).

Research Design

This study combines self-reported survey data on participating students’ character strengths with student-level data on grade point average and demerits collected from participants’ schools. We fit quantile regression models to consider the relationships between participating students’ character strengths, academic achievement, and conduct while controlling for select demographic characteristics.

Results

Analyses revealed that students’ perseverance, school connectedness and grade level were positive predictors of academic achievement while integrity and demerits were negative predictors of academic achievement. Student conduct was significantly predicted by grade level, grade point average, gender, race/ethnicity and commitment to integrity. In short, both performance and moral character strengths were unique predictors of key student outcomes.

Conclusions/Recommendations

In recent years, a number of high-profile charter management organizations have identified cultivating students’ performance character as a key level in promoting student success. Our findings suggest that these organizations would do well to expand their character education programming to include students’ moral character strengths as well.
More than a Network: Building Professional Communities for Educational Improvement
Authors: Dolle Jonathan R. , Gomez Louis M. , Russell Jennifer Lin , Bryk Anthony S.
Published: November 2021

This chapter is a case study of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's Pathways™ program. The goal of the Statway®™ and Quantway®™ pathways is to improve the success rate of community college students who place into developmental mathematics. What makes these programs unique is their strategy of building a particular kind of professional network, what Carnegie refers to as a Networked Improvement Community (NIC), to organize and lead an array of continuous improvement processes. NICs are a social mechanism through which the collaborative designs and practical theories produced by design-based implementation research (DBIR) can become live resources for the improvement of systems. NICs are comprised of highly structured groups of education professionals, working in collaboration with designers and researchers, to address a practical problem. Driver diagrams are introduced as a tool for organizing the improvement work of NICs. After briefly describing several drivers behind the Pathways program, the chapter details the main elements of the network organization driver as a distinct approach to building communities aimed at improving education.

Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.

–Dr. Paul Batalden, Dartmouth Medical School
Solving Conceptual and Perceptual Analogies with Virtual Reality among Kindergarten Children of Immigrant Families
Authors: Passig David , Schwartz Timor
Published: November 2021

Background

The ability to think analogically is central to the process of learning and understanding reality and there is a broad consensus among researchers that we can improve this ability. Immigrants who have emigrated from developing to developed countries tend to experience tremendous challenges in their early years as immigrants. Their children often find themselves in a situation where it is clear that their low achievements are the result of cultural mediation, which expresses itself not only in a language gap, but also in cultural and basic technological disorientation.

Purpose

The goal of this study is to help find efficient ways of nurturing analogical thinking in children who have emigrated from developing to developed countries and express difficulties in analogical thinking, and to point out the advantages inherent in the use of immersive 3D Virtual Reality technology for this goal.

Population

The participants in this study included 56 children, aged 4 to 7 years, whose parents immigrated to Israel from Ethiopia during the last ten years. The experimental group (n=28) practiced solving analogies that were presented in 3D VR, while the control group (n=28) practiced solving the same analogies with a pictorial version of the items that was presented with cards.

Research Design

The research instrument employed for evaluating Analogical thinking was the CCPAM measure, which includes 10 questions on Conceptual Analogies and 10 questions on Perceptual analogies. We designed the intervention program according to the CCPAM test. The CCPAM test was administered in three intervals: a. Prior to the beginning of the intervention. b. Immediately after the intervention, which included two meetings of 15 minutes each, during which the children were given exercises in solving analogies. c. Three weeks after the end of the intervention, in order to test the ability to preserve the solution strategy (the follow-up test).

Conclusions

The results indicate that both programs of intervention—VR and picture cards— significantly improved the ability to solve both kinds of analogies—perceptual and conceptual. However, the children in the experimental group, who practiced analogies within an immersive VR environment, improved their ability to a statistically significant degree more than did the children who practiced solutions with picture cards. The children in the experimental group preserved the solution strategy three weeks after the intervention significantly better than the control group, and the improvement in solving conceptual analogies was greater than the improvement in solving perceptual analogies.
White Men's Racial Others
Authors: Lensmire Timothy J.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Increasingly, researchers and educators have argued that alternative conceptions of Whiteness and White racial identity are needed because current conceptions have undermined, rather than strengthened, our critical pedagogies with White people. Grounded in critical Whiteness studies, and drawing especially on the writings of Ralph Ellison and Leslie Fiedler on what it means to be a White American, this article describes and theorizes White racial identity in ways that avoid oversimplification, but that at the same time never lose sight of White privilege and a larger White supremacist context.

Focus of Study

The research focused on the social production of racial identity for four White men and explored how their racial identities were dependent on relations with real and imagined racial others.

Research Design

The four men were part of a larger study that investigated race and Whiteness in a rural community in Wisconsin. The study, employing an interpretive methodology, included open-ended, in-depth interviews. Initial interviews lasted one to three hours; follow-up interviews were one to two hours long. The interviews were audiotaped and transcribed. Transcripts were analyzed using inductive methods. Analysis for this article focused on their discussions of racial others and their experiences with them.

Conclusions/Recommendations

The theoretical and empirical work in this article makes three primary contributions. First, this work demonstrates the significance of people of color to the ongoing social production of White racial identities. These men used people of color, imagined and real, to understand themselves and their powers. Second, this research illuminates the persistence, functions, and effects of racial stereotyping and scapegoating, including the emotional costs associated with what Ellison saw as White people's continual need for reassurance of their own superiority. A final contribution of this work is that it complicates and deepens our understanding of why White people take up a colorblind discourse when talking about race. In addition to hiding an underlying racism, colorblind discourse may serve to minimize or manage conflict among White people who disagree about race.
Let's Measure What No One Teaches: PISA, NCLB, and the Shrinking Aims of Education
Authors: Labaree David F.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

PISA has come up with an ingenious solution to the problem of how to measure student achievement across national school systems with different curricula. Instead of measuring how well students learn what they are taught in each system, it measures a set of economically useful skills that no one teaches.

Purpose

The aim is to figure out how this odd situation came about in the current global policy context.

Research Design

This paper explores PISA as one type of educational accountability system, based on how well students demonstrate mastery of particular cognitive skills, and compares it with the current state-level accountability systems in the U.S. (NCLB), which are based on how well students demonstrate mastery of the formal curriculum.

Conclusions/Recommendations

Both PISA and NCLB, I argue, are cases of how we are shrinking the aims of education. One approach focuses on mastery of skills that are relevant but not taught and the other on mastery of content that is taught but not relevant. Neither seems a sensible basis for understanding the quality of schooling or for making educational policy.