ethanporcaro/eric-fulltext-meta huggingface dataset:
A Typology for Analyzing Digital Curricula in Mathematics Education
Author: Choppin, Jeffrey
Date: 2014-01-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Mathematics Instruction,Electronic Publishing,Computer Software,Costs,Teaching Methods,Guidelines,Mathematics Curriculum,Transformative Learning,Multimedia Materials,Communities of Practice,Mathematics Education,Program Evaluation,Instructional Materials,Student Evaluation,Mathematics Achievement,Socialization,Learning Experience,Individualized Instruction

Digital content is increasingly present in U.S. K-12 classrooms, with a current push by federal officials to increase the rate at which digital textbooks are adopted. While some teachers' use of electronic resources involves locating activities and lessons from various internet sites, textbook and educational software companies have begun to develop comprehensive programs that can supplement if not fully replace traditional paper textbooks. Digital platforms can be transformative, with possibilities for frequent updating, access to multimedia resources, connection to virtual communities, lower production and distribution costs, and customized instruction. However, there have been no attempts to analyze specific programs in mathematics education with respect to these and other features, a gap we seek to address. In this article, we developed and applied a framework to analyze a representative sample of digital curriculum programs in order to help educators better understand characteristics of these materials. We documented two distinct curriculum types, individualized learning programs and digitized versions of traditional textbooks. While the programs offered some of the features identified as transformative, particularly with respect to assessment systems that rapidly and visually report student performance, there were many features that did not take full advantage of the digital medium.
The Psychophysics of Algebra Expertise: Mathematics Perceptual Learning Interventions Produce Durable Encoding Changes
Author: Bufford, Carolyn A.
Date: 2014-07-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Algebra,Expertise,Perceptual Motor Learning,Intervention,Mathematics Instruction,Cognitive Processes,Undergraduate Students,College Mathematics,Accuracy,Equations (Mathematics),Pretests Posttests,Instructional Effectiveness,Transformations (Mathematics)

Mathematics requires thinking but also pattern recognition. Recent research indicates that perceptual learning (PL) interventions facilitate discovery of structure and recognition of patterns in mathematical domains, as assessed by tests of mathematical competence. Here we sought direct evidence that a brief perceptual learning module (PLM) produces changes in basic information extraction. Accuracy and speed of undergraduate participants' encoding of equations was assessed in a psychophysical task at pretest and delayed posttest. In between, the experimental group completed an &quot;Algebraic Transformations PLM,&quot; which involved identifying valid transformations of equations. Relative to controls, PLM participants showed reliable changes in encoding equations, detectable psychophysically 24 hours later. Encoding improvements were shown robustly by participants who were initially less proficient at algebra and were negligible for participants who were initially proficient. These results provide direct evidence for durable changes in information encoding produced by a PL intervention targeting a complex mathematical skill.
Gearing up to Teach the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics in the Rural Northeast Region. Stated Briefly. REL 2015-066
Author: Kirk, Walters
Date: 2014-12-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: State Standards,Mathematics Instruction,Rural Education,Mathematics Teachers,School Districts,Teacher Surveys,Teacher Attitudes,Educational Practices,Instructional Materials,Educational Quality,Needs Assessment,Curriculum Implementation,Professional Development,Interviews

This study describes key challenges and necessary supports related to implementation of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) identified by rural math educators in the Northeast. The research team interviewed state and district math coordinators and surveyed teachers in Maine, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont, to assess their most pressing challenges and associated needs. Key challenges included time and support for teachers to change their instructional practices to meet the CCSSM, availability of high-quality instructional materials, and opportunities for collaboration. The report was produced in response to input from the Northeast Rural Districts Research Alliance (NRDRA), one of eight research alliances working with REL Northeast &amp; Islands. This &quot;Stated Briefly&quot; report is a companion piece that summarizes the results of another report entitled &quot;Gearing up to teach the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics in rural Northeast Region schools,&quot; released on November 12, 2014. [For companion piece &quot;Gearing up to teach the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics in rural Northeast Region schools,&quot; see ED548005.]
Review of Research on Student Nonenrollment and Chronic Absenteeism: A Report for the Pacific Region. REL 2015-054
Author: Black, Aime T.
Date: 2014-12-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Educational Research,Enrollment,Attendance,Foreign Countries,Elementary Secondary Education,Enrollment Rate,Influences

In some areas of the Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Pacific Region, between one-fourth and a half of secondary school-age students are not enrolled in school. Not being enrolled in school or being chronically absent can have lasting effects on students' economic and social development. This REL Pacific report summarizes research on nonenrollment and chronic absenteeism from the United States and emergent nations that share characteristics with Pacific island nations. Four types of factors influence student nonenrollment and absenteeism: student-specific, family-specific, school-specific, and community-specific. Many of these potential factors are interconnected, and the effects of these factors may vary by region. Therefore, educators, policymakers, and family and community members in the Pacific Region may need to gather additional data in order to explore these factors in their own communities. Stakeholders can also use this review to begin to identify the root causes for why students are not in school in order to develop and implement targeted strategies to support student enrollment and attendance. The following are appended: (1) Calculating the net enrollment rate; (2) Net enrollment rates in Pacific island nations; and (3) Data collection and methodology.
About the REL Pacific Region
Author: Regional Educational Laboratory Pacific (ED)
Date: 2014-11-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Educational Research,Federal Programs,Regional Programs,Regional Characteristics,Teacher Effectiveness,Family School Relationship,School Community Relationship,Career Readiness,College Readiness,Information Systems,Elementary Secondary Education,Higher Education,Community Colleges,Profiles

REL Pacific is one of ten Regional Educational Laboratories established and funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. Their region encompasses approximately 4.9 million square miles and serves seven Pacific island entities, including American Samoa; the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands; the Federated States of Micronesia (Chuuk, Kosrae, Pohnpei and Yap); Guam; Hawai'i; the Republic of the Marshall Islands; and the Republic of Palau. REL Pacific is housed at McREL International's Pacific Center for Changing the Odds (PCCO) in Honolulu, Hawai'i, a private nonprofit corporation that draws upon the best of education research to translate what works into innovations and results. REL Pacific supports &quot;research alliances&quot; that bring together key stakeholders to work collaboratively to address problems and questions of high priority and relevance to Pacific education, including: (1) Strengthening Teacher Effectiveness: a focus on increasing teachers' qualifications, determining characteristics of effective teachers, and identifying the best classroom practices to impact student outcomes; (2) Engaging Families and Communities in Education: a focus on connecting schools, families, and communities to work together to support learning; (3) Ensuring Career and College Readiness: a focus on preparing students to enter the workforce or to pursue college or technical education upon exiting Pacific high schools; and (4) Optimizing Data Systems: a focus on developing, maintaining, and use using data systems effectively and efficiently. REL Pacific, gathers information on the needs in the region from these research alliance members, the Governing Board, the community at large, and through reviews of education research and practice data and reports. Within each entity, REL Pacific has also partnered with a &quot;locally-based consultant,&quot; an on-the-ground education expert who helps coordinate services within the entity. The following geographic profiles provide information on the history, demographics, and education statistics of REL Pacific's unique service region, as well as the focus of the work being conducted in each entity. A list of resources is provided.
Presented by REL Pacific at McREL: Available Resources and Work in Progress. Research Digest. [Volume 1]
Author: Regional Educational Laboratory Pacific (ED)
Date: 2014-02-00
Type: Reference Materials - Bibliographies
Subjects: Regional Characteristics,Educational Resources,Education Service Centers,Research Projects,Management Information Systems,Foreign Countries,Conference Papers

REL Pacific at McREL, one of 10 Regional Educational Laboratories (RELs) funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), serves educators in American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia (Chuuk, Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Yap), Guam, Hawai'i, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau. REL Pacific is committed to providing educators with resources that support the development of a deep and cohesive body of knowledge in the priority topic areas of strengthening teacher effectiveness, engaging families and communities in education, ensuring college and career readiness, and optimizing data systems. In this Research Digest, the reader will find information on the purpose and design of several REL Pacific studies, the laboratory Ask-a-REL service, and available REL Pacific resources. [For Volume 2, see ED550091.]
Getting to Know Education in the Pacific Region
Author: McREL International
Date: 2014-00-00
Type: Guides - General
Subjects: Demography,Population Distribution,Official Languages,Language of Instruction,Institutional Characteristics,Regional Characteristics,Educational Practices,Maps,Concept Mapping,Foreign Countries,Comparative Analysis,Educational Facilities

The Pacific region is comprised of American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI); the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM)-Chuuk, Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Yap; Guam; Hawai'i; the Republic of the Marshall Islands; and the Republic of Palau. This document begins by providing a map of the REL Pacific region overlaid on a map of the United States for comparison. It then goes on to show the work that REL addresses within each entity along with the following information collected for each entity: (1) Number of Students per Teacher; (2) Population Demographics; (3) Official Languages, and Language of Instruction; and (4) Institutions of Learning.
The Factors Influencing the Motivational Strategy Use of Non-Native English Teachers
Author: Solak, Ekrem
Date: 2014-02-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Foreign Countries,Motivation Techniques,Foreign Nationals,English Teachers,Second Language Instruction,College Preparation,Secondary Education,Sex Role,Teaching Experience,Study Abroad,Universities,High Schools,Private Schools,Self Esteem,Questionnaires,Statistical Analysis,Correlation

Motivation can be considered one of the most important factors determining success in language classroom. Therefore, this research aims to determine the variables influencing the motivational strategies used by non-native English teachers in Turkish context. 122 non-native English teachers teaching English at a state-run university prep school participated in this research and Motivational Strategies Questionnaire prepared by Cheng &amp; Dörnyei (2007) was used as a data collection instrument. The questionnaire was composed of two sections. In the first section, demographic data were collected about the gender, years of experience, types of schools served and the state of attendance abroad of the participants. The second section involved ten scales and totally 48 items ranging from often to never. The results of the study revealed that English teachers used each motivational strategy more than average and there was no significant difference between motivational strategy use and gender, the year of experience, the type of school of served and the state of attendance abroad. An appendix presents the Motivational Strategy Questionnaire (Cheng and Dörnyei, 2007) Scale and Constituents.
Incremental Learning of Difficult Words in Story Contexts: The Role of Spelling and Pronouncing New Vocabulary
Author: Vadasy, Patricia F.
Date: 2014-09-24
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Spelling,Vocabulary,Pronunciation,Difficulty Level,Kindergarten,English Language Learners,Story Reading,Receptive Language,Definitions,Reading Aloud to Others,English (Second Language),Second Language Learning,Instructional Effectiveness,Pretests Posttests,Second Language Instruction

In this exploratory study the researchers examined examine the value of exposure to the spelling and pronunciation of word forms when introducing the meanings of new and difficult vocabulary words. Researchers randomly assigned kindergarten English learners to one of two types of storybook reading delivered by tutors. Students received individual storybook reading. Students in both treatments listened to short stories containing novel target words. In both groups, students were told the meanings of the difficult words when they first appeared in the stories. However, in one of the groups (Definitions-Plus), students were also shown the printed words when they first appeared in the stories, and were asked to pronounce and spell the words aloud. Vocabulary learning was assessed with three researcher-designed measures including receptive vocabulary, vocabulary definitions, and spelling. Results showed that both groups made significant gains on all three custom measures, with average gains of 8%, 4%, and 3%, respectively. Moreover, the Definitions-Plus group had significantly greater spelling gains (d = 0.57), and exhibited similar, albeit nonsignificant, trends on vocabulary gains (ds = 0.30 and 0.41 for receptive and definitional vocabulary, respectively). Results extend previous studies' results to younger English learner students on general benefits of novel word exposure in story contexts, and specific benefits for spelling and pronunciation practice in learning new words. Two appendixes provide supplemental tables on &quot;Target and Distractor Word Characteristics&quot; and &quot;Story Characteristics.&quot;
Predicting Semantic Changes in Abstraction in Tutor Responses to Students
Author: Lipschultz, Michael
Date: 2014-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Intelligent Tutoring Systems,Natural Language Processing,Semantics,Abstract Reasoning,Lexicology,Predictor Variables,Discourse Analysis,Dialogs (Language),Learning Processes,Task Analysis,Gender Differences,Physics,Introductory Courses,College Students,Problem Solving

Post-problem reflective tutorial dialogues between human tutors and students are examined to predict when the tutor changed the level of abstraction from the student's preceding turn (i.e., used more general terms or more specific terms); such changes correlate with learning. Prior work examined lexical changes in abstraction. In this work, we consider semantic changes. Since we are interested in developing a fully-automatic computer-based tutor, we use only automatically-extractable features (e.g., percent of domain words in student turn) or features available in a tutoring system (e.g., correctness). We find patterns that predict tutor changes in abstraction better than a majority class baseline. Generalisation is best-predicted using student and reflection features. Specification is best-predicted using student and problem features.
A Tutoring System That Simulates the Highly Interactive Nature of Human Tutoring
Author: Katz, Sandra
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Rhetorical Theory,Tutoring,Intelligent Tutoring Systems,Secondary School Science,Science Instruction,Physics,Scaffolding (Teaching Technique),Linguistics,Interaction,Academic Discourse,Prediction,Interpersonal Communication,Teacher Student Relationship,High School Students,Pretests Posttests,Natural Language Processing

For some time, it has been clear that students who are tutored generally learn more than students who experience classroom instruction (e.g., Bloom, 1984). Much research has been devoted to identifying features of tutorial dialogue that can explain its effectiveness, so that these features can be simulated in natural-language tutoring systems. One hypothesis is that the highly interactive nature of tutoring itself promotes learning--that is, the &quot;interaction hypothesis.&quot; Although reasonable and agreeing with much research, the interaction hypothesis raises the question of what linguistic mechanisms are involved: that is, which features of &quot;highly interactive&quot; dialogues trigger what processes that are conducive to learning? Our overall strategy in the research described in this article was to inform this question by identifying co-constructed discourse relations in tutorial dialogues whose frequency of occurrence predicts learning, identify the context in which these relations occur, and use this knowledge to formulate decision rules to guide automated dialogues. We used Rhetorical Structure Theory to identify and tag co-constructed discourse relations in a large corpus of physics tutoring dialogues. Our analyses suggest that the effectiveness of human tutoring might well lie in the language of tutoring itself. Moreover, the types of co-constructed discourse relations that predict learning seem to vary based on students' ability level. We describe Rimac, a natural-language tutoring system that implements an initial set of decision rules based on these analyses. These rules guide reflective dialogues about the concepts associated with physics problems. Rimac is being pilot tested in high school physics classes.
The Growing Need for Social, Emotional and Behavioral Skills Programs in Our Nation&apos;s Schools
Author: West, Melanie L.
Date: 2014-12-21
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Interpersonal Competence,Behavior Development,Emotional Development,Program Implementation,Program Development,Self Esteem,Daily Living Skills,Lesson Plans,Values Education,Elementary Education

The needs of our students have drastically changed over the years and school districts are increasingly finding themselves in need of new programs and curricula to address the social, emotional, and behavioral needs of their students. Student achievement and readiness is impacted due to a lack of basic skills needed in the classroom. This paper proposes that a Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Skills Program either created by the school or purchased from an education reform company can lead to student positive self-esteem and self-confidence, which in turn helps to create a positive and healthy environment for the entire school. Two such programs are Positive Action and LifeSkills. Both programs have lessons and curriculum ready for schools to use on a grade level basis and can help students to prepare themselves for the classroom.
Bringing Technology to Students' Proximity: A Sociocultural Account of Technology-Based Learning Projects
Author: Mukama, Evode
Date: 2014-00-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Foreign Countries,College Students,Documentaries,Electronic Learning,Student Projects,Focus Groups,Educational Technology,Proximity,Sociocultural Patterns,Communities of Practice,Problem Solving,Social Environment,Reflection,Concept Formation,Service Learning,Qualitative Research,Observation

This paper depicts a study carried out in Rwanda concerning university students who participated in a contest to produce short documentary films. The purpose of this research is to conceptualize these kinds of technology-based learning projects (TBLPs) through a sociocultural perspective. The methodology included focus group discussions and field notes to collect empirical data. The findings reveal that the more educational technologies capture objects of learning positioned in the students' sociocultural proximity, the more focused learners' attention are on these objects. The study shows also that a change in learning projects may depend to a large extent on whether the technology relates to the students' sociocultural proximity, i.e. taking into consideration students' physical, cultural and contextual real world. The study recommends a community of learning/inquiry embedded in a collaborative, problem-solving dynamic involving cognitive support from peers, teachers, external specialists and the wider community.
Growth Models: Issues and Advice from the States. A Guide of the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems Grant Program
Author: Institute of Education Sciences (ED)
Date: 2012-07-00
Type: Guides - Non-Classroom
Subjects: Models,Longitudinal Studies,Information Systems,Best Practices,Achievement Gains,Academic Achievement,Federal Legislation,Educational Legislation,Elementary Secondary Education,Accountability,Teacher Evaluation,Compliance (Legal),Educational Indicators,Federal Programs,Metadata,Barriers

The content of this guide was derived from ongoing work of a working group on growth models coordinated and facilitated by the SLDS Grant Program's State Support Team. The Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) Grant Program was asked by several states to review current growth models with the goal of determining the impact of different models on longitudinal data systems and capturing some best practices that states are using in the implementation process. From July 2011 through February 2012, representatives from Colorado, Arkansas, Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Florida participated in a working group session and follow-up discussions facilitated by members of the State Support Team (SST). This working group allowed states to more easily discuss and share strategies, best practices, and challenges related to the use of growth models. Specifically, these states have provided the following information to the SST in response to questions about their specific growth model(s) related to: (1) types and purposes of growth model(s) used; (2) description of model(s) used; (3) data elements required for each model; and (4) issues and barriers experienced during development, implementation, or use.