ethanporcaro/eric-fulltext-meta huggingface dataset:
Lifestyle and Learning Habits of Croatian College Students: Self-Directed Learners
Author: Roberson, Donald N., Jr.
Date: 2012-01-30
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: College Students,Independent Study,Life Style,Study Habits,Student Experience,Anxiety,Time Management,Leisure Time,Student Attitudes,Interviews,Foreign Countries

The purpose of this study was to understand more about the activities and learning habits of Croatian College students through the lens of self-directed learning. This research took place in the National Library of Zagreb University over a two year period. Researchers would ask available students for their opinion on a questionnaire; approximately 75 interviews took place. The findings indicated that self-directed learning is supported by leisure activity, community of friends, and comfortable surroundings.
Error Analysis in Composition of Iranian Lower Intermediate Students
Author: Taghavi, Mehdi
Date: 2012-01-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Error Analysis (Language),English (Second Language),Writing (Composition),Spelling,Verbs,Form Classes (Languages),Word Order,Learning Problems,Second Language Learning,Males,Middle School Students,Foreign Countries

Learners make errors during the process of learning languages. This study examines errors in writing task of twenty Iranian lower intermediate male students aged between 13 and 15. A subject was given to the participants was a composition about the seasons of a year. All of the errors were identified and classified. Corder's classification (1967) and Keshaverz's classification (1997) of errors were assumed for analyzing it. The results of the study showed that most common errors were spelling, word choice, verb tense, preposition, subject-verb agreement and word order. Sources of errors were examined, too. This study has pointed out that interlingual transfer and interalingual transfer are the sources of errors. Having such an understanding into language learning problems is useful for teachers because it provides information on common problems in process of language learning. Also it can be used to predict and reduce problems of learning English. (Contains 2 figures and 13 tables.)
Means to an End: A Guide to Developing Teacher Evaluation Systems That Support Growth and Development
Author: Curtis, Rachel
Date: 2012-01-00
Type: Guides - Non-Classroom
Subjects: Teacher Evaluation,Public School Teachers,Goal Orientation,Faculty Development,Administrative Organization,Program Development,Program Implementation,Capacity Building,Accountability,Organizational Communication

Teacher evaluation has emerged as a key strategy for improving student outcomes in public education. The rationale is compelling: teachers vary widely in their effectiveness, and evaluation systems need to identify and address this variation. Performance evaluations have historically been largely perfunctory: no meaningful feedback is provided, no improvement expectations are established, and no positive or negative consequences flow from high or low ratings. In the last two years, most states have adopted new policies governing teacher evaluations, including requirements to factor student achievement gains into individual teacher evaluations. The field is consumed with implementing these policies, moving quickly from design to pilot to full-scale implementation. This guide is designed as a practical toolkit for organizing the process, elevating important issues, and elucidating the tensions and trade-offs that need to be resolved. Appended are: (1) Categories of Evaluation Information; and (2) Participant List. (Contains 16 templates.) [For the companion report, &quot;Means to an End: A Guide to Developing Teacher Evaluation Systems That Support Growth and Development. Templates and Worksheets,&quot; see ED528903.]
Means to an End: A Guide to Developing Teacher Evaluation Systems That Support Growth and Development. Templates and Worksheets
Author: Aspen Institute
Date: 2012-01-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Teacher Evaluation,Worksheets,Public School Teachers,Goal Orientation,Faculty Development,Administrative Organization,Program Development,Program Implementation,Capacity Building,Accountability,Organizational Communication

"Means to an End" is a practical toolkit for structuring the design process, elevating important issues, and identifying tensions and trade-offs that need to be resolved. The guide was conceived at a 2011 Aspen Institute workshop that brought together leading educators, researchers, and policymakers to share strategies for designing and implementing new teacher evaluations. This paper presents the templates and worksheets included in the "Means to an End" guide. (Contains 16 templates.) [For the main report, "Means to an End: A Guide to Developing Teacher Evaluation Systems That Support Growth and Development," see ED528902.]
Reflections on a Half-Century of School Reform: Why Have We Fallen Short and Where Do We Go from Here?
Author: Jennings, Jack
Date: 2012-01-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Public Education,Educational Quality,Educational History,Educational Change,Educational Legislation,Civil Rights,Equal Education,Social Justice,Academic Standards,School Choice,Charter Schools,Teacher Effectiveness,Curriculum Evaluation,Instructional Effectiveness,Educational Finance,Financial Support,Politics of Education

Over the past fifty years, U.S. school reform has been dominated by three major movements, aimed at promoting equity, increasing school choice, and using academic standards to leverage improvement. These reforms are equity-based reform, school choice, and standards-based reform. While all three have changed schooling in notable ways, none has brought about the needed level of general improvements because they mostly sought to improve education from the outside rather than the inside. To make real progress, individuals will have to think and act much more audaciously. The next round of reform must focus on the essentials of education--the quality of teaching and curriculum, and the means of funding them. Moreover, if individuals truly want to improve schools sooner than later, then they must declare a good education to be a civil right for every child. This article explains the shortcomings of the three major reforms and proposes a bolder approach for future school reform. The current campaign for the presidency presents an opportunity to discuss this improvement agenda.
The Evolution of the Center on Education Policy: From an Idea to a Major Influence
Author: Lewis, Anne
Date: 2012-01-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Educational Policy,Role of Education,Information Centers,Organizations (Groups),History,Time Perspective,Democracy,Politics of Education,Political Attitudes,Observation,Reports,Public Education,Federal Legislation,Information Dissemination,Reliability,Institutional Mission,School Turnaround,Educational Improvement,Academic Achievement,Federal Programs,Bias

During hearings in the late 1980s on education legislation, the frustrated chairman of the Education and Labor Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. Gus Hawkins (D-CA), would sometimes lean over to his chief counsel and ask: "Why can't these people agree on the facts? If they did that, we could solve these problems quickly." That question planted an idea in the counsel, John (Jack) Jennings, which took him into a second long career as founder and CEO of a unique fact-gathering initiative, the Center on Education Policy (CEP). Launched in January 1995, CEP began with ambitious, if somewhat unformed, intentions and little money. Its first forays into educating the public about public education were modest and almost totally grassroots. Seventeen years later, a December 2011 report on Adequate Yearly Progress under the No Child Left Behind Act reached millions of listeners and readers through media channels that stretched from Maine to Alaska, from the "New York Times" to the local newspaper for San Francisco's Russian community. This paper describes the beginning and the development of the Center on Education Policy from 1995 to 2012. Appended are: (1) CEP Board Members; and (2) List of foundations providing support.
A Contextualized Intervention for Community College Developmental Reading and Writing Students. CCRC Working Paper No. 38
Author: Perin, Dolores
Date: 2011-01-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Community Colleges,Remedial Reading,Remedial Instruction,Writing Instruction,Intervention,Two Year College Students,Writing Skills,Reading Comprehension,Instructional Effectiveness,Knowledge Level,Science Interests,Scoring,Science Materials,Textbooks,Transfer of Training

Instructors in community college developmental education programs are constantly seeking new ways to improve outcomes for their students, but, to date, there has been a shortage of empirical studies on the effectiveness of such efforts. The current study provides evidence on the potential efficacy of an approach to helping students develop an important academic skill, written summarization. In two experiments, a contextualized intervention was administered to developmental reading and writing students in two community colleges. The intervention was a 10-week curricular supplement that emphasized written summarization, as well as vocabulary knowledge, question generation, reading comprehension, and persuasive writing. The intervention was based on reading passages from science textbooks, with generic text from developmental education textbooks added in the second experiment. In Experiment 1 (n = 322), greater gain was found for intervention than for comparison participants along three dimensions of written summarization: the proportion of main ideas from the source text included in the summary, accuracy, and word count (ES = 0.26-0.42). Experiment 2 (n = 246) set out to replicate and extend Experiment 1. Results were replicated for three of five summarization measures (ES = 0.36-0.70), but it was also found that intervention participants showed higher amounts of copying from the source text at posttest than the comparison group. In extending the intervention to a different text condition, it was found that students receiving science text outperformed students receiving generic text on the inclusion of main ideas, as well as on accuracy (ES = 0.32-0.33), providing moderate support for contextualization. Although summarization gains did not transfer to a standardized reading comprehension test in either experiment, the findings of this study suggest that the intervention had utility for academically underprepared postsecondary students. Appended are: (1) Scoring Criteria for Science Summarization Test, Accuracy, Conventions, and Paraphrasing Measures; and (2) Science Interest Items. (Contains 8 tables.)
Predicting First Graders' Development of Calculation versus Word-Problem Performance: The Role of Dynamic Assessment
Author: Seethaler, Pamela M.
Date: 2011-00-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Mathematics Education,Word Problems (Mathematics),Grade 1,Computation,Predictor Variables,At Risk Students,Mathematics Skills,Measurement Techniques,Evaluation Methods

In education, the goal of forecasting development is to understand and identify risk for poor learning outcomes so that intervention may be designed effectively and initiated early. Tests of learning potential may be categorized along two dimensions. The first is domain specificity. Domain-general abilities, such as reasoning and language ability, are expected to effect performance across academic domains; by contrast, domain-specific capabilities are linked to performance in a single area of academic competence. The second dimension along which tests of learning potential may be characterized is whether a measure assesses static performance, indicating an individual's present state, or dynamic performance, reflecting the degree of scaffolding an individual needs to learn new material. Screening students for risk for math difficulty (MD) typically relies on static measures of learning potential, in which students respond without examiner assistance and demonstrate either unaided success or failure (Sternberg, 1996; Tzuriel &amp; Haywood, 1992). Unfortunately, static measures mask differences between children who are unable to perform a task independently but can succeed with assistance. Vygotsky (e.g., 1934/1962) proposed dynamic assessment (DA) as an alternative, with which the examiner provides feedback or instruction to help a student learn a task, indexing responsiveness to that instruction as a measure of the student's learning potential. As demonstrated in prior work in mathematics (e.g., Fuchs et al., 2008; Swanson &amp; Howard, 2005) and reading (e.g., D. Fuchs et al., in press), results suggest the potential value of dynamic measures of learning potential over and beyond domain-specific and domain-general static measures of learning potential. Findings are however complicated by the fact that the relative value of these various types of learning potential differs as a function of whether skill with procedural calculations (CA) or word problems (WP) is the predicted outcome. The purpose of this study is to assess the contribution of static domain-specific, static domain-general, and dynamic domain-specific measures of learning potential for predicting individual differences in the development of two important aspects of first-grade school mathematics learning: (CA) and (WP). Participants include 184 students enrolled in first grade and for whom the authors have complete fall and spring data. Results of this study suggest that development of CA and WP depend on different measures of learning potential and that dynamic assessment (DA) may be useful in predicting 1st-grade mathematics development, especially WP.
Effects of Cognitive Strategy Interventions on Word Problem Solving and Working Memory in Children with Math Disabilities
Author: Swanson, H. Lee
Date: 2011-00-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Sentences,Intervention,Learning Disabilities,Problem Solving,Short Term Memory,Word Problems (Mathematics),Computation,Grade 2,Reading Skills,Cognitive Processes,Learning Strategies,Verbal Communication,Visual Stimuli,Spatial Ability,Mathematics Skills,Grade 3,Elementary School Mathematics,Program Effectiveness

Although current categories of learning disabilities include as specific disabilities calculation and mathematical problem solving [see IDEA reauthorization, 2004, Sec. 300.8(c)(10)], the majority of research focuses on calculation disabilities. Previous studies have shown, however, that deficits in word problem solving difficulties are persistent across the elementary school years even when calculation and reading skills are in the normal achievement range (Swanson et al., 2008). Previous research shows that growth in working memory (WM) is related to growth in word problem solving accuracy for children with math disabilities (MD e.g., Swanson, 2006, Swanson et al., 2008). However, the research is unclear as to the interventions that compensate for WM limitations in children with MD that in turn positively influence performance on problem solving measures. The purpose of this intervention study was to determine whether children with MD improve in problem solving ability as a function of strategy intervention that emphasizes relevant components of word problems. Children with MD and without MD were randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups: verbal strategies, visual strategies or a combination of both verbal and visual strategies. This study addressed three questions:(1) Do cognitive strategies that direct MD children's attention to relevant components of word problems in the context of distracting or irrelevant information enhance mathematical problem solving accuracy when compared to control conditions? (2) Are visual-spatial strategies in isolation or when combined with verbal strategies more effective than verbal strategies in isolation for children with MD? and (3) Do specific cognitive strategies and increases in WM load (number of irrelevant sentences in word problems) play an independent or interactive role in facilitating solution accuracy and transfer? One hundred and twenty (120) children from grades 2 and 3 in a Southern California public school district participated in this study. The primary findings were: both children with and without MD significantly improved word problem solving accuracy at post-test relative to other conditions, (b) pretest/post-test changes in correctly identifying relevant/irrelevant components mediated the effects of treatment on solution accuracy, (c) transfer (tasks independent of training) occurred on CBM of text word problems, verbal WM and calculation, and (d) individual differences in WM capacity interacted with treatment conditions when predicting overall solution accuracy.
Mathematical Student Motivation
Author: Bacon, Alison
Date: 2012-01-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Focus Groups,Student Surveys,Motivation,Student Journals,Grade 3,Teaching Methods,Mathematics Instruction,Elementary School Mathematics,Learning Problems,Instructional Effectiveness,Goal Orientation,Interviews,Cooperative Learning,Manipulative Materials,Educational Opportunities,Scores,Journal Writing,Student Attitudes,Communities of Practice,Mathematics Tests

The research project will be conducted with a target focus group of six students who have been identified as struggling students in 3rd grade mathematics. The research project will study the effect of using different teaching strategies and methods to increase motivation and focus among these students. The research project will be conducted at Greenfield Elementary School beginning in September 2011 and data collection will continue through the end of November 2011. The data tools consisted of:  student goals, student interviews to discuss student goals, colleague collaboration, student interviews discussing engaging learning opportunities, anecdotal records, student test scores, student journal observation, student surveys and professional learning communities with various colleagues. This research project is being conducted due to the fact that many struggling mathematical students have difficulty with motivation and focus in their learning of basic math concepts. It is desired to understand what strategies will increase their motivation and focus and thus inspire them to be more successful in their learning of mathematics. The following are appended: (1) [Data Collection Matrix]; (2) Student Survey; (3) [Student Summaries of Goals-September 2011]; (4) Summary of Student Goals; (5) Colleague Collaboration List of Strategies to Use with Students; (6) Student Interview Checklist; and (7) Professional Learning Community Meeting Minutes.
Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies. What Works Clearinghouse Intervention Report
Author: What Works Clearinghouse (ED)
Date: 2012-01-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Peer Teaching,Tutoring,Reading Instruction,Reading Programs,Educational Research,Reading Comprehension,Instructional Effectiveness,Elementary School Students,Middle School Students

&quot;Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies&quot; (PALS) is a peer-tutoring instructional program that supplements the primary reading curriculum. Pairs of students work together on reading activities intended to improve reading accuracy, fluency, and comprehension. Students in the pairs--who alternately take on the roles of tutor and tutee--read aloud, listen to their partner read, and provide feedback during various structured activities. This report focuses on &quot;Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies&quot; reading programs for grades 2-6 and high school. Ninety-seven studies reviewed by the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) Adolescent Literacy topic area investigated the effects of Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies. One study (Fuchs, Fuchs, Mathes, &amp; Simmons, 1997) is a randomized controlled trial with randomization problems that meets WWC evidence standards with reservations. The remaining 96 studies do not meet either WWC evidence standards or eligibility screens. Appended are: (1) Research details for Fuchs, Fuchs, Mathes, &amp; Simmons (1997); (2) Outcome measures for each domain; and (3) Findings included in the rating for comprehension domain. (Contains 3 tables and 12 endnotes.)
Odyssey Reading. What Works Clearinghouse Intervention Report
Author: What Works Clearinghouse (ED)
Date: 2012-01-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Evidence,Intervention,Phonics,Program Effectiveness,Elementary Secondary Education,Language Arts,Comparative Analysis,Decision Making,Data,Reading,Reading Instruction,Individualized Instruction,Decoding (Reading),Reading Comprehension,Adolescents,Literacy,Technology Uses in Education,Reading Programs,Teaching Methods,Web Based Instruction,Electronic Learning,Standards

&quot;Odyssey Reading,&quot; published by CompassLearning[R], is a web-based K-12 reading/language arts program designed to allow for instructional differentiation and data-driven decision making. The online program includes electronic curricula and materials for individual or small-group work, assessments aligned with state curriculum standards, and a data management system that allows teachers to develop individualized instruction and assessment tools to track individual student and classroom performance. &quot;Odyssey Reading&quot; can be used as a stand-alone curriculum or as a supplement to other reading and language arts curricula. This report focuses on &quot;Odyssey Reading&quot; programs in grades 4 and higher. &quot;Odyssey Reading&quot; for students in grades 4-8 provides instruction in phonics, context, decoding, and comprehension. The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) identified 27 studies of &quot;Odyssey Reading&quot; for adolescent learners that were published or released between 1989 and 2011. No studies of &quot;Odyssey Reading&quot; that fall within the scope of the Adolescent Literacy review protocol meet WWC evidence standards. The lack of studies meeting WWC evidence standards means that, at this time, the WWC is unable to draw any conclusions based on research about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of &quot;Odyssey Reading&quot; on adolescent learners. Additional research is needed to determine the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of this intervention. (Contains 6 endnotes.)