ethanporcaro/eric-fulltext-meta huggingface dataset:
Teacher Hiring: The Disconnect between Research Based Best Practice and Processes Used by School Principals
Author: Kimbrel, Laurie
Date: 2019-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Teacher Selection,Best Practices,Evidence Based Practice,Principals,Teacher Effectiveness,Employment Interviews,Selection Criteria,Screening Tests,Decision Making,Training,Teacher Qualifications

Student success is dependent on teacher quality; therefore, it is imperative that principals hire the teachers most likely to experience success as measured by the impact on student outcomes. This study investigated teacher hiring processes to determine the extent to which practices that are supported by selection science and teacher quality research are utilized by school principals. Data were gathered using a survey e-mailed to principals in ten states in the southern and western regions of the United States. Analysis indicated that principals do not use consistent processes and vary the hiring approach based on their opinion of conditions. Principals favor traditional interviews as the primary teacher selection instrument and are unlikely to utilize predictive screening tools or research-based structured interviews. In most cases, principals do not make final hiring decisions based on measurable data or research-based qualities known to be predictive of high teacher performance. Most principals reported extremely limited teacher selection training through one-time workshops and graduate courses. This research is limited by the participation of principals in only ten states but implies that there is a disconnect between research-based best practices for teacher hiring and the actual processes used by principals.
Tenure Clock Policy Transparency for Biological Clock (Family Friendly) Events
Author: McEacharn, Michelle
Date: 2019-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Tenure,College Faculty,Family Work Relationship,Web Sites,Leaves of Absence,Personnel Policy,Birth,Adoption,Foster Care,Children,Institutional Characteristics,Information Dissemination,Productivity,Women Faculty

The intention of this study is to investigate the transparency of information on university websites regarding the policies in place related to leave and/or tenure clock extensions for child-related events such as childbirth, adoption, or placement of a foster child. The main purpose is to improve awareness about the policies existing in academia related to these events. The secondary purpose is to determine whether major institutional characteristics affect the family-friendly policies of these institutions. Nearly 80% of the institutions studied communicated some type of information on their website related to tenure clock extension policies. An analysis of the data from these colleges/universities is provided so that other institutions who are developing or reviewing their own policies are aware of the typical policies provided by other institutions. The study found significant differences in policy availability and attributes based on major institutional characteristics.
Are Achievement Gaps Related to Discipline Gaps? Evidence from National Data
Author: Pearman, Francis A.
Date: 2019-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Achievement Gap,Discipline,Racial Differences,Racial Bias,Elementary School Students,Middle School Students,Hispanic American Students,African American Students,White Students,Equal Education

There is growing interest in the relation between the racial achievement gap and the racial discipline gap. However, few studies have examined this relation at the national level. This study combines data from the Stanford Education Data Archive and the Civil Rights Data Collection and employs a district fixed effects analysis to examine whether and the extent to which racial discipline gaps are related to racial achievement gaps in Grades 3 through 8 in districts across the United States. In bivariate models, we find evidence that districts with larger racial discipline gaps have larger racial achievement gaps (and vice versa). Though other district-level differences account for the positive association between the Hispanic-White discipline gap and the Hispanic-White achievement gap, we find robust evidence that the positive association between the Black-White discipline gap and the Black-White achievement gap persists after controlling for a multitude of confounding factors. We also find evidence that the mechanisms connecting achievement to disciplinary outcomes are more salient for Black than White students.
Stress in Boom Times: Understanding Teachers&apos; Economic Anxiety in a High-Cost Urban District
Author: Dizon-Ross, Elise
Date: 2019-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Stress Variables,Teacher Attitudes,Anxiety,Urban Schools,Labor Market,Economic Climate,Well Being,School Districts,Predictor Variables,Faculty Mobility,Age Differences,Job Performance,Teacher Effectiveness,Teacher Persistence,Negative Attitudes,Teacher Attendance,Urban Education

Despite growing concern over teachers' ability to live comfortably where they work, we know little about the systematic relationship between affordability and teachers' well-being, particularly in high-cost urban areas. We use novel survey data from San Francisco Unified School District to identify the patterns and prevalence of economic anxiety among teachers and assess how this anxiety predicts teachers' attitudes, behaviors, and turnover. We find that San Francisco teachers have far higher levels of economic anxiety on average than a national sample of employed adults, and that younger teachers are particularly financially anxious. Furthermore, such anxiety predicts measures of job performance and teacher retention--economically anxious teachers tend to have more negative attitudes about their jobs, have worse attendance, and are 50% more likely to depart the district within 2 years after the survey.
Preschool Mathematics Intervention Can Significantly Improve Student Learning Trajectories through Elementary School
Author: Dumas, Denis
Date: 2019-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Mathematics Education,Preschool Education,Outcomes of Education,Student Improvement,Mathematics Achievement,Elementary Education,Mathematics Skills,Elementary School Students,Minority Group Students,Evidence Based Practice,Mathematics Curriculum,Preschool Curriculum,Alternative Assessment,Early Intervention

Perhaps more than at any other time in history, the development of mathematical skill is critical for the long-term success of students. Unfortunately, on average, U.S. students lag behind their peers in other developed countries on mathematics outcomes, and within the United States, an entrenched mathematics achievement gap exists between students from more highly resourced and socially dominant groups, and minority students. To begin to remedy this situation, educational researchers have created instructional interventions designed to support the mathematical learning of young students, some of which have demonstrated efficacy at improving student mathematical skills in preschool, as compared with a business-as-usual control group. However, the degree to which these effects last or fade out in elementary school has been the subject of substantial research and debate, and differences in scholarly viewpoints have prevented researchers from making clear and consistent policy recommendations to educational decision makers and stakeholders. In this article, we use a relatively novel statistical framework, Dynamic Measurement Modeling, that takes both intra- and interindividual student differences across time into account, to demonstrate that while students who receive a short-term intervention in preschool may not differ from a control group in terms of their long-term mathematics outcomes at the end of elementary school, they do exhibit significantly steeper growth curves as they approach their eventual skill level. In addition, this significant improvement of learning rate in elementary school benefited minority (i.e., Black or Latinx) students most, highlighting the critical societal need for research-based mathematics curricula in preschool.
Development of a Rubric for Identifying and Characterizing Work-Integrated Learning Activities in Science Undergraduate Course
Author: Jones, Christopher E.
Date: 2019-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Experiential Learning,Job Skills,Undergraduate Students,Employment Qualifications,Foreign Countries,Science Education,Scoring Rubrics,STEM Education,Skill Development,Industry,Career Development

There is a societal expectation that undergraduate degrees will contain activities that focus on making graduates workplace ready. Although it is likely that many of these activities occur in science degrees, there is a lack of formal and tested methodologies and frameworks for identifying them. One existing framework (Edwards, Perkins, Pearce, &amp; Hong, 2015) was used to analyze [work-integrated learning] WIL activities identified in course (unit, n=81) documentation and interviews with unit coordinators (n=71) at one Australian University. This revealed many (hidden) WIL activities that had not been previously articulated to either students or curriculum designers. The authors refined the existing framework to develop a rubric that allows the depth and breadth of WIL activities to be captured in a standard manner and WIL activities in a degree to be readily mapped.
Analysis of Sport Motivation Factors amongst Eastern European Higher Education Students
Author: Fenyves, Veronika
Date: 2019-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: College Students,Athletics,Leisure Time,Recreational Activities,Student Motivation,Health Related Fitness,Physical Characteristics,Young Adults,Foreign Countries,Gender Differences,Social Influences,Physical Activity Level

The annually organized Campus Festival in Debrecen is one of the musical summer festivals in Hungary, which attract masses of people and consider higher education students as their primary target community. Besides musical events, organizers of the Campus Festival put a special emphasis on the promotion of the sports life of the visiting audience. The Campus Sports Festival is organized every year; it aims to popularize sports and sporting activities and to create a social event where students, fans and athletes of Hungarian and foreign (Romanian, Slovakian and Ukrainian) higher education institutions are able to establish relationships with each other. The aim of a questionnaire survey prepared in 2017 was to carry out an assessment of needs, in the scope of which the opinion and demand of higher education students related to sports festivals and leisure sports is surveyed. Present study introduces the sporting habits of higher education students and their motivations related to sports and the sports festival. The analysis was carried out by means of the SPSS software package, while the differences among the countries were studied using Pearson's Chi-square test and the Mann-Whitney test and Categorical Principal Component Analysis. It was established that higher education students belonging to the sample prefer active entertainment and one of their favourite leisure activities is doing sports and that the scale of values of the surveyed higher education students is mostly influenced by fellow students and friends. It was also found that for higher education students, health is a more important motivational factor -- in relation with sports -- than physical appearance.
An Approximation of University Students&apos; Learning Ability in the Area of Probability
Author: Sandoval-Bravo, Salvador
Date: 2019-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Probability,Undergraduate Students,Economics Education,Problem Solving,Statistics,Gender Differences,Foreign Countries,Knowledge Level,Difficulty Level,Test Items,Intellectual Disciplines,Scores

The objective of this study is to analyze the ability of students of the University Center for the Economic Administrative Sciences which forms part of the University of Guadalajara from different economic-administrative undergraduate programs, to solve distinct problems in the area of probability, applying a multiple-choice instrument aligned to the learning objectives via a qualitative-descriptive methodology. The study comprised a sample of 251 students from 14 different undergraduate degree programs who were enrolled in the same statistics course. Multivariate tests were conducted in order to identify any differences in performance related to undergraduate degree program and sex, while a RASCH model was applied to provide validity evidence for the assessment. The results show that the students do not have a good level of ability for solving conditional probability problems, which they confused with the formulation of independent event problems although they did show a satisfactory level of ability for solving other types of problems.
Automated Essay Scoring at Scale: A Case Study in Switzerland and Germany. TOEFL® Research Report. RR-86. ETS RR-19-12
Author: Rupp, André A.
Date: 2019-12-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Automation,Foreign Countries,English (Second Language),Language Tests,Second Language Learning,High School Students,Cues,Interrater Reliability,Adolescents,Measurement Techniques,Writing Evaluation,Essays,Scoring,Computer Assisted Testing,Evaluators,Models

In this research report, we describe the design and empirical findings for a large-scale study of essay writing ability with approximately 2,500 high school students in Germany and Switzerland on the basis of 2 tasks with 2 associated prompts, each from a standardized writing assessment whose scoring involved both human and automated components. For the human scoring aspect, we describe the methodology for training and monitoring human raters as well as for collecting their ratings within a customized platform. For the automated scoring aspect, we describe the methodology for training, evaluating, and selecting appropriate automated scoring models as well as correlational patterns of resulting task scores with scores from secondary measures. Analyses show that the human ratings were highly reliable and that effective prompt-specific automated scoring models could be built with state-of-the-art features and machine learning methods, which resulted in correlational patterns with secondary measures that were in line with general expectations. In closing, we discuss the methodological implications for conducting this kind of work at scale in the future.
Relationships among Noncognitive Factors and Academic Performance: Testing the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research Model
Author: Wanzer, Dana
Date: 2019-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Academic Achievement,Interpersonal Competence,Academic Persistence,Learning Strategies,Hispanic American Students,Low Income Students,Adolescents,Self Efficacy,Predictor Variables,English Language Learners,Parent Background,Educational Attainment,High School Freshmen,High School Seniors,Grade Point Average

In response to interest in the role of noncognitive factors in academic performance, several theoretical models have been developed; however, there have been few empirical attempts to validate those models, particularly with minority populations. This study used measures of academic mindsets, social skills, academic perseverance, learning strategies, and academic performance to test the structural pathways of a well-known hypothesized model of noncognitive factors and academic performance proposed by researchers at the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research. The population of study consisted of high school students from a mainly Hispanic, low-income school district. Results support the hypothesized model; however, academic perseverance was not significantly related to academic performance in the context of other noncognitive factors. Additionally, findings differed across groups, including age (e.g., freshman vs. senior), socioeconomic status (e.g., parent education, free/reduced priced lunch), and race/ethnicity.
Observational Research in Work-Integrated Learning
Author: Dean, Bonnie Amelia
Date: 2019-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Experiential Learning,Job Skills,Observation,Research Methodology,Educational Research,Ethnography,Participant Observation,Reflection,Documentation,Photography,Higher Education

Observational research has a long history in many disciplines, such as education and organizational studies, yet has had slow uptake in the scholarship of work-integrated learning (WIL). Observational research enables the researcher to journey inside workplace or community sites where actions and conversations unfold, to unpack the complexities of work, learning and practice. This paper looks at observational methodologies and their use in WIL research, highlighting practical methods for accessing and generating data, and discussing criteria for judging the quality of observational research. It introduces WIL researchers to alternative methods to elicit data, to consider making their bodies, thoughts and reflections part of the research itself.
Developing an Alternate English Language Proficiency Assessment System: A Theory of Action. Research Report. ETS RR-19-25
Author: Gholson, Melissa L.
Date: 2019-12-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: English (Second Language),Second Language Learning,Language Tests,Language Proficiency,Intellectual Disability,Elementary Secondary Education,Educational Legislation,Federal Legislation,Public Agencies,Test Construction,Teaching Methods,Barriers,Test Validity,Alternative Assessment,Educational Theories,Summative Evaluation,Eligibility

The purpose of this report is to propose a theory of action for the development of an alternate English language proficiency assessment (AELPA) system to support the integrated instruction and assessment for English learners with significant cognitive disabilities (ELSCDs). This theory of action examines the purposes of an ELP assessment system based on the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) regulations requiring the assessment of all ELSCDs. This report seeks to inform assessment considerations for the development of an AELPA system for state education agencies (SEAs) and test developers. This theory of action identifies assumptions, purposes, and goals for assessment development and includes a logic model to represent system claims. The report ends with a discussion of unintended consequences and ways to mitigate them, as well as future research recommendations.
The Impact of Performance Goals on Cheating Depends on How Performance Is Evaluated
Author: Daumiller, Martin
Date: 2019-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Cheating,Ethics,Evaluation Methods,Goal Orientation,College Students,Student Behavior,Performance,Student Evaluation,Foreign Countries,Beliefs

We investigated how evaluation standards employed in performance tests affect the impact of performance goals (here focused on appearance) on academic cheating. Thereby, we assumed that appearance goals would lead to increased cheating only if students' performance was presumably evaluated based on results rather than on the strategies they applied to solve questions. A total of 169 university students (68.6% female) participated in an experimental design with 2 (induced appearance goals vs. no goal induction) × 2 (process-based vs. result-based evaluation standards) between-subject conditions. We assessed cheating using a confederate student observing the participants' behaviors and by measuring whether participants reported that they solved unsolvable questions. Confirming our hypotheses, we found that students were more likely to cheat only when appearance goals were induced and the evaluation standard focused on the results. This new knowledge helps explain the mixed findings regarding how performance goals affect cheating and provides opportunities to reduce cheating in high-stakes testing situations.
Different Methods of Adjusting for Form Difficulty under the Rasch Model: Impact on Consistency of Assessment Results. Research Report. ETS RR-19-08
Author: Manna, Venessa F.
Date: 2019-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Item Response Theory,Test Items,Test Construction,Sample Size,Test Length,Equated Scores,Evaluation Criteria,Statistical Bias,Error of Measurement

When using the Rasch model, equating with a nonequivalent groups anchor test design is commonly achieved by adjustment of new form item difficulty using an additive equating constant. Using simulated 5-year data, this report compares 4 approaches to calculating the equating constants and the subsequent impact on equating results. The 4 approaches are mean difference, mean difference with outlier removal using the 0.3 logit rule, mean difference with robust z statistic, and the information-weighted mean difference. Factors studied included sample size, anchor test length, percentage of anchor items displaying outlier behavior, and the distribution of test item difficulty relative to examine ability. The results indicated that the mean difference and information-weighted mean difference methods performed similarly across all conditions. In addition, with larger sample sizes, the mean difference with 0.3 logit method performed similarly to these 2 methods. The mean difference with robust z method performed most differently from the other three methods of calculating the equating constant. This method removed a large percentage of the anchor items compared to the mean difference with 0.3 logit method but seemed to produce the most stable trend in performance classification across the 5 years, particularly when sample sizes were large.
New Contexts for Professional Learning: Analyzing High School Science Teachers&apos; Engagement on Twitter
Author: Fischer, Christian
Date: 2019-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Science Teachers,Social Networks,Computer Mediated Communication,Advanced Placement,Biology,Electronic Publishing,Faculty Development,Teacher Attitudes,High School Teachers,Data Analysis,Content Analysis,Learning Experience,Communities of Practice

This mixed-methods observational study analyzes Advanced Placement (AP) Biology teachers' engagement in microblogging for professional learning. Data from three hashtag-based Twitter communities--#apbiochat, #apbioleaderacad, and #apbioleaderacademy (121 users; 2,253 tweets)--are analyzed using educational data mining, qualitative two-cycle content analysis, social network analysis, linear and logistic regression analyses, and hierarchical linear modeling. Results indicate that teachers' use of Twitter reflects aspects of high-quality professional development. Notably, Twitter's nonhierarchical organization affords shared content creation and distribution. Additionally, Twitter allows for different temporal participation patterns and supports the personalization of learning experiences aligned to teachers' needs and preferences. Furthermore, teachers frame their interactions on Twitter positively--thus, creating a supportive environment for professional learning that might reduce perceived professional isolation. Based on this analysis, policymakers and school leaders should feel comfortable encouraging teachers to use microblogging as part of their professional learning activities.