ethanporcaro/eric-fulltext-meta huggingface dataset:
The Impact of Open Licensing on the Early Reader Ecosystem
Author: Butcher, Neil
Date: 2016-07-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Early Reading,Online Vendors,Electronic Learning,Electronic Publishing,Electronic Libraries,Open Source Technology,Information Networks,Emergent Literacy,Educational Innovation,Models,Barriers,Information Management,Textbook Content,Textbook Preparation,Textbook Publication,Textbook Standards,Reading Materials,Low Income Groups,Interviews,International Organizations,Educational Quality,Relevance (Education),Student Interests,Educational Resources,Foreign Countries

The Impact of Open Licensing on the Early Reader Ecosystem examines how to use open licensing to promote quality learning resources for young children that are relevant and interesting. Research in early reading tends to focus on traditional publishing value and supply chains, without taking much consideration of new approaches and solutions emerging from the digitization of content and the impact of open licences. Production innovations considered include content creation models, storybook management and storage, and printing and distribution. all of which are evolving rapidly as new technologies are developed and applied. This paper also describes and assesses how major players in the early reader ecosystem impact on the production and utilization of quality resources. These include publishers, NGOs, libraries and literacy organizations, and donors. In addition, because cost models for open licensing any resource are different from commercial publishing, this report examines how open licensing and cost recovery can be effectively addressed in order to promote the long-term sustainability of local content creation, production, and utilization. Finally, this paper offers a detailed set of implications for early literacy content creation and utilization in low-income countries, which should underpin the development of creative ways to deliver books to young children. The following are appended: (1) List of interviewees; (2) Key components of early literacy; (3) Unpacking the components of the early literacy reader value network; (4) Demand and supply of early reading material; (5) Changes in the publishing industry; and (6) Examples of early literacy distribution initiatives.
There's Education, and Then There's Education in Medicine
Author: Royal, Kenneth D.
Date: 2016-07-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Medical Education,Criticism,Educational Improvement,Educational Attitudes,Educational Research,Research Design,Educational Quality,Educational Researchers,Teacher Shortage,Educational Practices,Information Sources,Bibliographic Databases,Periodicals,Personnel Selection

Introduction: For some time now the field of medical education has been criticized by many of its stakeholders. Countless debates have been presented in the literature regarding the quality of medical education research, adequacy of methodological rigor, and other concerns. Methods: At present, the views expressed have largely come from physicians and individuals with less familiarity with education science. Results: As prolific educational researchers with Ph.Ds in Education and Psychology, we offer a critique of medical education's apparent identity crisis and address what we believe are some of the most significant problems continuing to impede the field of medical education from catching up with the broader field of education. We close with specific recommendations for improving the overall state of medical education. Conclusion: Finally, both editors and reviewers for medical education journals need to abandon the hegemonic views regarding research design. Thus, research designs that many in the clinical sciences often perceive as &quot;weak&quot; are entirely appropriate in education research fields.
Teacher Evaluation in Practice: Year 3 Teacher and Administrator Perceptions of REACH. Research Brief
Author: Sporte, Susan E.
Date: 2016-08-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Teacher Evaluation,Educational Practices,Administrator Attitudes,Teacher Attitudes,Instructional Improvement,Achievement Gains,Value Added Models,Interrater Reliability,Feedback (Response),Evaluation Methods,Observation

Three years after the launch of Chicago's redesigned teacher evaluation system, Recognizing Educators Advancing Chicago Students (REACH) Students, most teachers and administrators continue to report they believe REACH has the potential to improve instruction and student learning, and they remain negative about the use of student growth in evaluations. Using survey data from 2014-15, the report finds that 61 percent of teachers agreed or strongly agreed they were satisfied with the evaluation system. In addition, over 60 percent of teachers and over 80 percent of administrators agreed or strongly agreed REACH will lead to better instruction and improved student learning. A majority of teachers continue to favor observations over student growth as measures of performance. Seventy-six percent of teachers perceive classroom observations as a fair way to evaluate their performance. Meanwhile, 72 percent disagree or strongly disagree that value-added measures are a fair way to evaluate performance. Key findings from the report include: (1) Most teachers feel their evaluators are fair and able to accurately assess their practice; (2) Teachers and administrators feel the observation process encourages reflection and improvements in practice; and (3) Teachers and administrators continue to report the evaluation system increases stress. Two appendices are included: (1) 2014-15 REACH Scores and Ratings; and (2) Survey Data.
Measuring Principals' Effectiveness: Results from New Jersey's First Year of Statewide Principal Evaluation. REL 2016-156
Author: Herrmann, Mariesa
Date: 2016-08-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Principals,Administrator Effectiveness,Administrator Evaluation,State Programs,Measures (Individuals),Correlation,Student Characteristics,Academic Achievement,Achievement Gains,Economically Disadvantaged,School Size,Change

States and districts across the country are implementing new principal evaluation systems that include measures of the quality of principals' school leadership practices and measures of student achievement growth. Because these evaluation systems will be used for high-stakes decisions, it is important that the component measures of the evaluation systems fairly and accurately differentiate between effective and ineffective principals. This requires the measures to be reliable (consistent across raters and observations) and valid (accurately measuring true principal performance). This study examined data from 2013/14, the first year of statewide implementation. It examined four statistical properties of the system's component measures: the variation in overall and component measure ratings across principals, the year-to-year stability of overall and component measure ratings, the correlations between component measure ratings and characteristics of students in the schools, and the correlations among component measure ratings. Information about these properties of the measures can inform efforts to improve the principal evaluation system and revise the guidance districts receive. Key findings include: (1) Nearly all principals received effective or highly effective overall ratings; (2) The percentage of principals who received highly effective overall ratings was lower for principals who were evaluated on school median student growth percentiles than for principals who were not evaluated on this measure; (3) Principal practice instrument ratings and school median student growth percentiles had moderate to high year-to-year stability; (4) Several component measure ratings--school median student growth percentile ratings, teachers' student growth objective ratings, and principal practice instrument ratings--as well as the overall rating, had low, negative correlations with student socioeconomic disadvantage; and (5) Principals' ratings on component measures had low to moderate positive correlations with each other. The following are appended: (1) Description of districts participating in the 2012/13 pilot; (2) Design of principal evaluation system; (3) Data used in the study; (4) Variation in ratings on the component measures; (5) Changes in the principal practice instrument and school median student growth percentiles and their associated ratings across years; (6) Correlations of component measure ratings with student background. characteristics for assistant principals; and (7) Correlations among component measure ratings for assistant principals.
Essential Organizational Supports for Early Education: The Development of a New Survey Tool to Measure Organizational Conditions. Survey Development Brief
Author: Ehrlich, Stacy B.
Date: 2016-07-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Early Childhood Education,Early Experience,Disadvantaged,Teacher Surveys,Parent Surveys,Educational Quality,Achievement Gap,Outcome Measures,Organizational Theories,Test Reliability,Test Validity,Pilot Projects,Program Validation,Definitions,Program Development,Program Implementation,Pretesting,School Support,Fundamental Concepts

Decades of research evidence indicate that high-quality early education can positively affect the learning trajectories of disadvantaged young children. However, despite significant investments to improve what happens in the classroom, publicly funded pre-kindergarten programs continue to display instructional quality that is too weak to prepare children for kindergarten (Burchinal et al., 2010; Office of Head Start, Administration for Children &amp; Families, U.S. Department of Health &amp; Human Services, 2013, 2014, 2015a). In 2014, UChicago Consortium launched a partnership with The Ounce of Prevention Fund (Ounce) to explore how the measurement of the five essentials could be adapted and applied to early childhood settings in an effort to help the early childhood field measure organizational conditions and consider how these conditions influence classroom practices. This survey development brief documents the adaptation and refinement of the UChicago Consortium's K-12 Five Essentials survey for use in publicly-funded early education programs, including federally-funded Head Start, state-, and locally-funded programs that provide center-based services (not home-based services) to three- and four-year-old children. The resulting Five Essentials-Early Education consists of two surveys--one for early educators and one for parents--designed to capture indicators of processes occurring at the school or center level that, in prior research, have been linked to improvements in student learning. This brief encompasses the first two years of survey development. A validation study is currently underway, and researchers are investigating both the teacher and parent surveys to understand whether responses to these surveys are related to classroom and child outcomes across different settings and with different populations.
Case Study I: The John W. Gardner Center and Redwood City 2020
Author: Coburn, Cynthia E.
Date: 2015-10-08
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Case Studies,Partnerships in Education,Educational History,Organizational Climate,Organizational Culture,Group Dynamics,Educational Improvement,School Districts,Theory Practice Relationship,Change Strategies

In the current education landscape, pressures are ever increasing on educational policy and practice to use research to guide improvement. In recent years, federal programs, such as No Child Left Behind, Reading First, and Race to the Top, have all provided strong incentives for the use of research in decision-making. Research-practice partnerships are a promising strategy for improving schools and districts. It often difficult, however, for researchers and district administrators involved in partnerships to learn from one another. It can also be challenging for those interested in developing new partnerships to learn about different ways they might organize their work or anticipate and address the issues they may face. What is needed is a more robust dialogue in which district leaders, researchers, policymakers, and funders speak candidly about the strategic trade-offs partnerships face and the resources that are required for success. The white paper &quot;Research-Practice Partnerships: A Strategy for Leveraging Research for Educational Improvement in School Districts&quot; (Coburn, C. E., Penuel, W. R., &amp; Geil, K. E. January 2013) is an important part of moving that conversation forward by: (1) Defining research-practice partnerships; (2) Identifying the major types of partnerships that operate at the district level; and (3) Describing challenges partnerships face, and strategies for addressing these challenges. To do so, the authors draw on a review of existing research, and illustrate the work of research-practice partnerships in action. The monograph provided here, &quot;Case Study I: The John W. Gardner Center and Redwood City 2020&quot; is a supplement to the white paper, and provides a detailed description of the partnership between the John W. Gardner Center and Redwood City 2020. It includes the history, nature of the partnership, the challenges the partnership has encountered, and the benefits of the partnership. The hope is that the white paper and the supplements can guide those seeking to develop or maintain research-practice partnerships as well as funders of such partnerships. [This case study is a supplement to &quot;Research-Practice Partnerships: A Strategy for Leveraging Research for Educational Improvement in School Districts,&quot; ED568396.]
Teacher Evaluation in Chicago: Key Findings from Consortium Research. Research Retrospective
Author: University of Chicago Consortium on School Research
Date: 2016-01-00
Type: Reports - Research-practitioner Partnerships
Subjects: Teacher Evaluation,Educational Change,Evaluation Methods,Scoring Rubrics,Program Implementation,Systems Analysis

Teacher evaluation systems have been a pillar of recent efforts to improve instruction and ensure that all students have access to effective educators. Chicago Public Schools (CPS) began revising its approach to teacher evaluation in 2006. An initial pilot, the Excellence in Teaching Project (EITP), launched in 2008. The current system, called REACH Students (Recognizing Educators Advancing Chicago's Students), represents a dramatic departure from the checklist system used prior to 2008. In the 2014-2015 school year, for the first time under the new system, almost all CPS teachers received an evaluation score. In Chicago and nationwide, these implementation efforts have prompted ongoing conversations about the implications of the new system for teachers, administrators, and students. The UChicago Consortium on School Research has been studying teacher evaluation in CPS from the initial EITP pilot to district-wide implementation of REACH. Studies have included annual surveys of teachers and principals, quantitative analysis of all available ratings, and qualitative interviews with educators and administrators. This retrospective highlights key findings and lessons learned in Chicago from 2008 to 2014.
The Educational Attainment of Chicago Public Schools Students. 2015: A Focus on Four-Year College Degrees. Research Brief
Author: Nagaoka, Jenny
Date: 2016-06-00
Type: Reports - Research-practitioner Partnerships
Subjects: Educational Attainment,Public Schools,Urban Schools,College Readiness,Career Readiness,Progress Monitoring,Bachelors Degrees,Graduation,High School Graduates,College Attendance,Postsecondary Education,College Preparation,Grade Point Average,Enrollment Trends,Academic Achievement,Measures (Individuals),Enrollment Rate,College Entrance Examinations,Graduation Rate,Charter Schools,Grade 9

The Chicago Public Schools' (CPS) vision is that every student graduates from high school prepared for success in college, career, and life. To help the city reach that goal, the To&amp;Through Project is providing data that track the progress of students in Chicago and identify where students are falling off the path to college degree attainment. This report provides a summary of the current state of the educational attainment of CPS students, updating the numbers released in the 2014 brief, &quot;The Educational Attainment of Chicago Public School Students.&quot; It provides the big picture of what is happening in the district as context for a series of reports that provide information on individual high schools. The school-level reports--one summarizing attainment rates and preparation levels and the other on college enrollment--will be released later in 2016. [For the 2014 Research Brief, see ED553165.]
Case Study II: Research Alliance for New York City Schools
Author: Coburn, Cynthia E.
Date: 2015-10-08
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Case Studies,Educational Policy,Educational Practices,Educational Improvement,Partnerships in Education,Research Utilization,School Districts,Theory Practice Relationship,Change Strategies,Barriers,Educational History,Group Dynamics,Organizational Culture,Organizational Climate

In the current educational landscape, pressures are ever increasing on educational policy and practice to use research to guide improvement. In recent years, federal programs such as No Child Left Behind, Reading First, and Race to the Top have all provided strong incentives for the use of research in decision-making. Research-practice partnerships are a promising strategy for improving schools and districts. It is often difficult however for researchers and district administrators involved in partnerships to learn from one another. It can also be challenging for those interested in developing new partnerships to learn about different ways they might organize their work or anticipate and address the issues they may face. What is needed is a more robust dialogue in which district leaders, researchers, policymakers, and funders speak candidly about the strategic trade-offs partnerships face and the resources that are required for success. The white paper &quot;Research-Practice Partnerships: A Strategy for Leveraging Research for Educational Improvement in School Districts&quot; (Coburn, C. E., Penuel, W. R., &amp; Geil, K. E. (January 2013) is an important part of moving that conversation forward by: (1) Defining research-practice partnerships; (2) Identifying the major types of partnerships that operate at the district level; and (3) Describing challenges partnerships face, and strategies for addressing these challenges. To do so the authors draw on a review of existing research, and illustrate the work of research-practice partnerships in action. &quot;Case Study II Research Alliance for New York City Schools&quot; is a supplement to the white paper, and details the history, mission, nature of the partnership, challenges encountered in developing strong partnerships, and the benefits realized from the alliance between the Research Alliance for New York City Schools, and the New York City Department of Education. [This case study is a supplement to &quot;Research-Practice Partnerships: A Strategy for Leveraging Research for Educational Improvement in School Districts,&quot; ED568396.]
Measurement Instruments for Assessing the Performance of Professional Learning Communities. REL 2016-144
Author: Blitz, Cynthia L.
Date: 2016-09-00
Type: Guides - Non-Classroom
Subjects: Measures (Individuals),Communities of Practice,Teacher Collaboration,Faculty Development,Program Evaluation

For more than a decade education practitioners have promoted the professional learning community (PLC) as an effective way to provide professional development to teachers. As more PLCs are established in schools and districts nationwide, education stakeholders--researchers, practitioners, administrators, and policymakers--are interested in evaluating the performance of PLCs. Stakeholders want to know more about PLCs' contributions to a range of outcomes, including teacher and administrator professional development, instructional practices, school culture, and, ultimately, student learning and achievement. This tool compiles 49 instruments for measuring key performance indicators of professional learning communities for teachers. It is intended as a resource for researchers, practitioners, and education professionals who seek solid evidence as the basis for planning, implementing, and evaluating teacher professional learning communities. The following are appended: (1) Literature search methodology and analysis; (2) Logic model for professional learning communities; (3) Deciding which instruments to use; and (4) Professional learning community measurement instruments. A list of references for professional learning community profiles is included.
Early Childhood Educators&apos; Knowledge, Beliefs, Education, Experiences and Children&apos;s Language- and Literacy-Learning Opportunities: What Is the Connection?
Author: Schachter, Rachel E.
Date: 2016-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Early Childhood Education,Preschool Teachers,Teacher Attitudes,Beliefs,Knowledge Level,Educational Background,Child Language,Emergent Literacy,Academic Degrees,Teaching Experience,Regression (Statistics),Pedagogical Content Knowledge,Native Language Instruction,Language Attitudes,Measures (Individuals),Predictor Variables,Correlation,Teacher Characteristics,Observation,Surveys

In this study, we investigated how multiple types of knowledge and beliefs, along with holding an early childhood-related degree and teaching experience were linked to amounts of early childhood educators' language and literacy instruction. Quantile regression was used to estimate associations between these variables along a continuum of language and literacy instruction for 222 early childhood educators. In general, low levels of language- and literacy-related instruction were observed; however, the use of quantile regression afforded unique insight into the associations of knowledge, beliefs, education, and teacher experience with instruction when levels of instruction were sufficient. These findings would not have been visible with traditional, linear regression models. Specifically, two types of knowledge were examined: disciplinary-related content knowledge about the structure of language and knowledge for use in teaching language and literacy to young children. Only educators' disciplinary content knowledge was associated with amount of instruction. Associations between beliefs about language and literacy instruction and amount of instruction were less consistent. Generally, holding an early childhood related degree was positively associated with language and literacy instruction whereas teaching experience was negatively associated with the amount of instruction. Implications for studying educators and understanding the associations among educator characteristics and instruction are discussed.