ethanporcaro/eric-fulltext-meta huggingface dataset:
Proposed Legislation for Teacher Incentives for School Excellence and Equity
Author: Bauries, Scott R.
Date: 2012-01-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Policy Formation,Teacher Effectiveness,Federal Legislation,Incentives,Policy Analysis,Educational Legislation,Excellence in Education,Teaching Conditions,Disadvantaged Schools,Professional Development,Teacher Persistence,Teacher Recruitment,Teacher Behavior,State Legislation,Educational Policy

Pursuant to the recommendations and findings in Dr. Barnett Berry's policy brief, the proposed set of legislative enactments presented in this paper offers both monetary incentives and positive working conditions requirements likely to further three goals: (a) cause more effective teachers to choose to work in high-need schools and fields, (b) allow teachers already working in such contexts to develop and flourish professionally, and (c) decrease the attrition rate of such teachers from high-need schools, and indeed from teaching in general. The accompanying policy brief contains analyses and recommendations on a variety of topics, each of which adds important contextual information helpful in thinking about incentives for teachers in the areas of recruitment, retention, and effectiveness. The model legislation itself is targeted specifically at goals in these three areas. While some of the policy recommendations in the brief relate to federal, rather than state, efforts and policies, the model legislation that follows is tailored for adoption by states. Accordingly, policy recommendations that appear in Dr. Berry's brief but that fall outside the focused goal of providing incentives for desirable teacher behaviors are not reflected in the model legislation that follows. The same is true more generally of recommendations in the brief that can only be realized through federal legislation. Nevertheless, all of the recommendations and policy analysis contained in the accompanying brief informed the legal judgments that went into crafting the model legislation. Because it is a model legislation, an effort has been made to choose language that is adaptable to differing state policy environments. Where specific policy language choices have been made that may not be compatible with all states' constitutional and/or pre-existing policy requirements, a footnote is inserted in order to explain the ways in which the language may be modified. (Contains 7 footnotes.) [For related report, &quot;Creating Teacher Incentives for School Excellence and Equity,&quot; see ED528716.]
Playgrounds and Prejudice: Elementary School Climate in the United States. A Survey of Students and Teachers
Author: Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN)
Date: 2012-00-00
Type: Numerical/Quantitative Data
Subjects: Bullying,Playgrounds,Homosexuality,Educational Environment,Elementary School Teachers,Gender Issues,Teacher Attitudes,Safety,Incidence,Social Bias,Student Attitudes,Family Characteristics,Faculty Development,Language Usage,Surveys,School Policy

Students' school education consists of not only what they are explicitly taught in the classroom, but also what they implicitly learn through the language, attitudes and actions of other students and teachers. When these attitudes, remarks and actions are unsupportive or hostile, they create a school climate that can negatively impact students' feelings of safety and their interest in school and learning. Understanding school climate is an important first step in ensuring that all students feel safe and supported in their learning environments. Previous research conducted by GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network) has documented the prevalence of biased language, name-calling and bullying, as well as supportive resources, at the secondary school level; yet, the precursors to secondary school climate are less understood. The current study examines school climate, student experiences and teacher practices at the elementary school level. In this study, students in elementary school were asked about their school climates, including hearing biased remarks, witnessing and experiencing bullying as well as lessons they received on bullying, gender issues and family diversity. Elementary school teachers were asked similar questions about school climate, as well as questions about attitudes and efforts toward students with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) parents and students who may not conform to traditional gender norms, their schools' anti-bullying or harassment efforts and their own professional development experiences. The findings from this study provide an important context for the discussion of bullying and harassment across school grades and insight into the precursors of the types of biased language and bullying that characterize secondary schools, particularly the middle school years when bullying and harassment are most prevalent. (Contains 52 figures, 61 tables and 22 footnotes.) [For related report, "Ready, Set, Respect! GLSEN's Elementary School Toolkit," see ED528733.]
Ready, Set, Respect! GLSEN's Elementary School Toolkit
Author: Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN)
Date: 2012-00-00
Type: Guides - Classroom - Teacher
Subjects: Cues,Dramatic Play,Playgrounds,Young Children,Homosexuality,Elementary Schools,Guides,Elementary School Teachers,Educational Environment,Consciousness Raising,Student Attitudes,Student Behavior,Developmentally Appropriate Practices,Social Attitudes

"Ready, Set, Respect!" provides a set of tools to help elementary school educators ensure that all students feel safe and respected and develop respectful attitudes and behaviors. It is not a program to be followed but instead is designed to help educators prepare themselves for teaching about and modeling respect. The toolkit responds to elementary educators' suggestion that they rarely teach about the kinds of topics (name-calling and bias, gender roles, and family diversity) addressed in the "Ready, Set, Respect!" toolkit. While educators have said that these topics simply "don't come up" it is known that young children often have their own way of communicating what in fact is coming up, or identifying that which they are ready to explore or learn about. These kinds of issues reveal themselves in dramatic play, student to student dialogue, the informal rules of the playground and in a myriad of other ways. To that end, "Ready, Set, Respect!" asks educators to think comprehensively about "readiness" and in so doing consider what a ready child, ready school, and ready community look and feel like. The toolkit also assists educators in recognizing and understanding the readiness cues that may in fact suggest that these issues are indeed "coming up." To this end, the "Ready, Set, Respect!" poses the following pre-teaching questions: (1) How will I know when my students are ready for explicit learning about respect and how can I get ready to engage them in this learning?; (2) Do my classroom practices set-up and/or reinforce what I hope students will learn?; and (3) What evidence will I have to demonstrate that my students are acquiring respectful attitudes and behaviors? The toolkit provides three sets of thematically developed and grade-span specific (K-2 or 3-5) lessons aligned with both Common Core and McRel standards as well as resources with which educators can extend learning or design other lessons. Each set of lessons is introduced with actual "teachable moments" encountered by educators in schools. Tips for everyday inclusion, respectful recess, and developmentally appropriate responses to disrespectful behaviors complete the kit. [For related report, "Playgrounds and Prejudice: Elementary School Climate in the United States. A Survey of Students and Teachers," see ED528732.]
The Preschool Rating Instrument for Science and Mathematics (PRISM)
Author: Brenneman, Kimberly
Date: 2011-00-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Observation,Rating Scales,Preschool Children,Mathematics Education,Science Education,Preschool Education,Classroom Environment,Validity,Reliability,Factor Structure

Until recently, few valid and reliable assessments were available to measure young children's mathematics and science learning in a &quot;comprehensive&quot; way. Now, a number of mathematics assessments have been developed and subjected to testing (Klein, Starkey, &amp; Wakeley, 2000; Ginsburg, 2008; Clements &amp; Sarama, 2008), and progress has been made in science as well (Greenfield, Dominguez, Fuccillo, Maier, &amp; Greenberg, 2008; Greenfield, Dominguez, Greenberg, Fuccillo, &amp; Maier, 2011). To study the relationship between classroom supports and instruction and learning outcomes requires valid and reliable measures of &quot;classroom quality&quot; along with these measures of children's learning. Recent reviews of assessments for classroom quality in science and math have concluded that few comprehensive measures are yet available for use by researchers or educators and that &quot;science is especially weak&quot; (Brenneman et al., 2011; Snow &amp; Van Hemel, 2009). Among the &quot;under development&quot; instruments identified in the Brenneman et al. review was the Preschool Rating Instrument for Science and Mathematics (PRISM), which is the focus of the present paper. The purpose of this work is to develop and validate a classroom observation instrument that objectively measures the presence of classroom materials and teaching interactions that support mathematics and science learning. The overall question that motivates the effort is  whether an observational tool can be developed to measure classrooms supports for math and science learning that are correlated with child learning outcomes and school readiness in these domains. Such a tool would make a significant contribution to the field, as it would have both research and professional development applications that would contribute to efforts to improve teaching and learning of key STEM concepts and practices in the critical preschool years. The preliminary findings reported here encourage the authors to continue the development process for the PRISM. Correlations with the ECERS-R are moderate as expected, suggesting that the PRISM is picking up general quality, as well as unique information about observed classrooms. The factor structure of the instrument is strong and matches theoretical predictions, although work remains. Specifically, the authors will be working to better integrate supports for numerical operational thinking into the instrument, most likely by combining it with another number item. Efforts to improve the internal consistency of the scale, especially for science interactions, will also be made. They hope to undertake this work as part of a dedicated, full-scale study of the PRISM that allows for continued development, field testing, more extensive psychometric explorations, and final validation of the instrument. (Contains 4 tables.)
The Impact of Indiana's System of Diagnostic Assessments on Mathematics Achievement
Author: Konstantopoulos, Spyros
Date: 2011-00-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Intervention,Mathematics Achievement,Academic Achievement,Program Effectiveness,Inferences,Program Evaluation,Diagnostic Tests,Educational Diagnosis,State Standards,Achievement Gains,Outcomes of Treatment,Outcome Measures,Educational Indicators,Educational Assessment

The purpose of the study was to design a rigorous experimental study and collect high quality data to determine the effectiveness of the intervention on student achievement. In particular, the authors examined whether diagnostic assessments implemented by schools in Indiana produced rigorous estimates of their effects on student performance on the state's annual Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress-Plus (ISTEP+) measures. Because the data were produced from a well designed randomized experiment they have high internal validity and justify causal inferences about the intervention effects (Shadish, Cook, &amp; Campbell, 2002). In addition, because their sample included numerous schools (58 schools) from different school districts in Indiana their results should have higher external validity than those from convenient and localized samples. To account for the nesting of students within schools the authors employed two-level models to examine the effectiveness of the intervention. The experiment took place in Indiana in 2009-2010 and included K-8 schools that had volunteered to be part of the intervention the Spring of 2009. The authors used data from the first year of the experiment for grades K through 8. They conducted analysis on the initial number of schools that were randomly assigned to conditions (Intention to Treat or ITT) and on the participating or TOT (Treatment on Treated) schools. The outcome was mathematics scores of ISTEP+. The findings overall suggested that across all grades (K to 8) the treatment effect was positive, but it was not as large and not significantly different from zero. As a result, it seems that the type of diagnostic assessment that Indiana implemented in the sample of schools they evaluated did not improve mathematics achievement that much. The same conclusion holds for the results using grades K to 2 and 3 to 8. However, the within grade analysis revealed that in fifth grade mathematics the treatment effect was significant and not trivial. The treatment effect was consistently as large as one-fifth of a standard deviation and indicated an important annual gain in mathematics achievement. All other estimates were not consistently significant and depended on the specification. Hence, it is unclear that the intervention had any systematic effects on student achievement except for fifth grade mathematics. The estimates produced from the TOT analysis indicated significant treatment effects. However, it is likely that the TOT estimates are biased due to selection and therefore they are not as internally valid as those produced by the ITT analysis.
Improving Foundational Number Representations through Simple Arithmetical Training
Author: Kallai, Arava Y.
Date: 2011-00-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Experimental Groups,Control Groups,Numbers,Achievement Gains,Number Concepts,Number Systems,Arithmetic,Behavioral Objectives,Improvement Programs,Student Improvement,Training Methods,Mental Computation,Logical Thinking,Problem Sets,Problem Solving,Pretests Posttests,Mathematics Achievement,Science Course Improvement Projects

The aim of this study was to test a training program intended to fine-tune the mental representations of double-digit numbers, thus increasing the discriminability of such numbers. The authors' assumption was that increased fluency in math could be achieved by improving the analogic representations of numbers. The study was completed in the University of Pittsburgh and was a behavioral as well as imaging lab study. Only the behavioral part is reported here. Forty participants (20 male) completed the experiment in return for $230 base pay plus performance bonuses for a mean total pay of $317. All participants were college students or recent graduates, 18 to 25-years-of-age with English as their first language. Participants were screened to be non-experts in math (math SAT between 600 and 700), and to not have a math-connected discipline as their major. Twenty participants (10 male) were assigned to the experimental group. The remaining participants, each matched in gender and math SAT score to an experimental participant, were assigned to the control group. The results show an advantage of the training program over control training. The selective advantages of the Arithmetic training were widespread and included gains on SAT-like complex math questions, automatic addition, math facts retrieval, and representational change of numbers. This pattern of results suggested that when engaged in a training program that emphasizes fast processing of double-digit numbers, participants enhanced a variety of skills and representations that together comprise the basis for skilled numerical processing. Rather than merely increasing the ability to retrieve math facts from memory, the training program also increased automatic arithmetical proficiency and the precision of representations of double-digit numbers. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)
Investigating the Effectiveness of SW-PBIS on School's Accountability at Both Elementary and Middle Schools
Author: Ryoo, Ji Hoon
Date: 2011-00-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Middle Schools,Elementary Schools,Academic Failure,Standardized Tests,At Risk Students,Program Effectiveness,Educational Change,Data Analysis,Accountability,Matched Groups,Public Schools,Intervention,Longitudinal Studies,Grade 3,Grade 5,Grade 6,Grade 8

Due to the lack of effectiveness of the punitive school approach toward challenging behaviors (Luiselli, Putnam, Handler, & Feinberg, 2005; Reynolds, Skiba, Graham, Sheras, Conoley, & Garcia-Vazquez, 2006), public schools have searched for an innovative approach to better serve students who are at risk for academic failure and dropout/expulsion. A growing number of schools have considered School-Wide Positive Behavior Intervention Support (SW-PBIS) as an innovative approach that sheds light on prevention rather than on disciplinary enforcement. Although there are some studies investigating the effectiveness of SW-PBIS on students' or schools' accountability, no studies investigate the effect of SW-PBIS over different grade levels with statewide standardized tests. The authors' study purports to investigate the effect at both elementary and middle schools with 3-year longitudinal statewide test data. In line with the purpose, three research questions guided this research: (1) Is SW-PBIS effective on schools' accountability as represented by statewide standardized tests; (2) What is the pattern of the effect on schools' accountability over time?; and (3) Which school characteristics or factors boost the effect on school's accountability? Participating schools consist of two groups: one includes elementary schools having 3rd to 5th grades and the other includes middle schools having 6th to 8th grades between the years 2008 and 2010. Preliminary data analysis based on elementary schools indicates no statistically significant relationship between SW-PBIS program and schools' accountability. Interestingly, the matched sample still indicates a fairly large gap on schools' accountability between cohort groups and matched groups (Figures 4 to 9). Although the authors' preliminary data analysis based on separate linear mixed models indicates no significant effect of SW-PBIS, further analyses are planned in order to investigate this issue more fully. (Contains 4 tables and 9 figures.)
The Student Success Act: Reforming Federal Accountability Requirements under No Child Left Behind. WebMemo. No. 3461
Author: Burke, Lindsey M.
Date: 2012-01-17
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Federal Legislation,Accountability,School Policy,Success,Federal Regulation,Change Strategies,Educational Change,Educational Policy,Politics of Education,Academic Achievement

On its 10-year anniversary, there is consensus that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is broken. The debate over how to reform NCLB has generated a number of proposals from both houses of Congress and the Obama Administration, but ideas about how to rewrite the law differ greatly. In early 2012, the House Education and the Workforce Committee introduced a draft of the Student Success Act as part of a piecemeal strategy to rewrite No Child Left Behind. As the decade-old law's harshest sanctions quickly approach and discontent with lackluster student achievement mounts, the Student Success Act aims to reform the much-derided accountability provisions of NCLB, provide funding flexibility to states and local school districts, and limit federal intervention into local school policy. (Contains 9 footnotes.)
Astronomy Degree Recipients: Initial Employment. Data from the Degree Recipient Follow-Up Survey for the Classes of 2007, 2008 and 2009. Focus On
Author: Mulvey, Patrick
Date: 2011-12-00
Type: Numerical/Quantitative Data
Subjects: Astronomy,College Graduates,Employment,Salaries,Private Sector,Colleges,Government Employees,Bachelors Degrees,Masters Degrees,Doctoral Degrees,Job Satisfaction,Scientific Personnel

Each fall the Statistical Research Center conducts its Survey of Enrollments and Degrees, which asks all degree-granting physics and astronomy departments in the US to provide information concerning the numbers of students they have enrolled and counts of recent degree recipients. In connection with this survey, the authors ask for the names and contact information for their recent degree recipients. This degree recipient information is used to conduct their Follow-up Survey in the winter following the academic year in which they received their degrees. The post-degree outcome data in this "focus on" come from that survey. Within the private sector, astronomy bachelor's degree recipients employed in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) had a median starting salary that was nearly $25K higher than those employed in non-STEM positions. Virtually all astronomy bachelor's recipients employed in colleges and universities worked in STEM jobs and they too had higher starting salaries than their colleagues in the private sector working in non-STEM fields. Forty-one percent of astronomy bachelor's recipients graduated with a double major. About half of new astronomy bachelor's recipients enter the workforce after earning their degrees. Half of all new astronomy bachelor's recipients employed in the private sector are working in a STEM field. Almost half of exiting astronomy master's degrees were earned by women. Seventy percent of new astronomy master's recipients immediately entered the workforce. U.S. citizens made up 71% of new astronomy PhD recipients. Over three-quarters of new astronomy PhD recipients accepted postdoc positions. The median starting salary for astronomy PhDs in academia and government were $50,000 & $55,300 respectively. (Contains 3 tables and 6 figures.)