ethanporcaro/eric-fulltext-meta huggingface dataset:
Informing Writing: The Benefits of Formative Assessment. A Report from Carnegie Corporation of New York
Author: Graham, Steve
Date: 2011-00-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Writing Evaluation,Formative Evaluation,Writing Improvement,Writing Instruction,Instructional Effectiveness,Best Practices,Feedback (Response),Self Evaluation (Individuals),Peer Evaluation,Progress Monitoring,Handwriting,Word Processing,Evaluation Methods,Scoring,Reliability,Writing Research,Meta Analysis

During this decade there have been numerous efforts to identify instructional practices that improve students' writing. These include "Reading Next" (Biancarosa and Snow, 2004), which provided a set of instructional recommendations for improving writing, and "Writing Next" (Graham and Perin, 2007) and "Writing to Read" (Graham and Hebert, 2010), which were systematic reviews of high-quality research that identified effective writing practices for improving both writing and reading, respectively. Despite these efforts and efforts by others (e.g., Bangert-Drowns, Hurley, and Wilkinson, 2004; Rogers and Graham, 2008), educators and policymakers need additional evidence-based practices for improving the writing of students in American schools. One tool with potential for improving students' ability to effectively convey thoughts and ideas through text is classroom-based writing assessment. Such formative assessments allow teachers to gauge the effectiveness of their instructional practices, modify instruction as needed, and provide students with feedback on writing strengths and areas in need of further development. These assessments can be administered in a variety of ways in the classroom, including teachers assessing students' writing, students assessing their own writing, and peers assessing others' writing. This report provides evidence to answer the following two questions: (1) Does formative writing assessment enhance students' writing?; and (2) How can teachers improve formative writing assessment in the classroom? This is the first report to examine the effectiveness of formative writing assessment (question 1) using the powerful statistical method of meta-analysis. This technique allows researchers to determine the "consistency" and "strength" of the effects of an instructional practice, and to highlight practices holding the most promise. This report also identifies best practices in writing assessment that need to be implemented in order to maximize the accuracy and trustworthiness of formative writing assessment (question 2). Appended are: (1) Methodology; and (2) Studies and Data Examined in the Report. (Contains 15 tables.)
Landscape Gardener: Apprenticeship Course Outline. Apprenticeship and Industry Training. 4711.1
Author: Alberta Advanced Education and Technology
Date: 2011-00-00
Type: Guides - Classroom - Learner
Subjects: Foreign Countries,Industry,Course Descriptions,Botany,Plants (Botany),Maintenance,Apprenticeships,Horticulture,Gardening,Program Descriptions,Training,Safety,Certification,Educational Policy,State Policy,Public Agencies,Technical Education,Technical Institutes,College Instruction,Postsecondary Education,Curriculum Design

The graduate of the Landscape Gardener apprenticeship program is a certified journeyperson who will be able: (1) apply the principles and processes of landscape design and construction; (2) construct and install landscape structures and other accessories of various materials; (3) estimate and handle orders of plant and related materials; (4) plan and implement landscape installations; (5) operate and maintain the tools and machinery used in the Landscape Gardener Trade; (6) design, install and maintain irrigation systems; (7) operate a greenhouse, nursery, garden centre, sod farm or landscape business; (8) apply the principles of horticultural management and maintenance practices; (9) apply the principles of plant production; (10) manage growing media; (11) identify and apply knowledge of pests, weeds, disease and controls used by this industry; (12) apply specialized knowledge of plant botany and plant identification; (13) relate to other trades and professions working in the same environment, including underground services, heavy equipment operators, engineers, architects etc.; (14) employ environmental stewardship practices in landscape planning, installation and maintenance; (15) work effectively in key roles in public and private horticultural and landscaping business units; and (16) perform assigned tasks in accordance with quality and production standards required by industry. Requirements for certification--including the content and delivery of technical training--are developed and updated by the Alberta Apprenticeship and Industry Training Board on the recommendation of Landscape Gardener Provincial Apprenticeship Committee. This course outline contains the following sections: (1) First Period Technical Training; (2) Second Period Technical Training; (3) Third Period Technical Training; and (4) Fourth Period Technical Training.
Using Data for School Improvement. Research Brief
Author: Education Partnerships, Inc. (EPI)
Date: 2012-00-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Principals,Educational Change,Instructional Leadership,School Restructuring,Teachers,Academic Achievement,School Districts,Credibility,Educational Improvement,Relevance (Education)

How can principals and teachers use available data to plan school improvements? How can principals and teachers gather and analyze data that are useful for school reform? Karen Levesque and her colleagues sum up the problem of data use in schools this way. Most school districts and schools in this country are routinely involved in data collection. However, they do not typically use the data they collect in a systematic fashion to identify strengths and weaknesses at their sites and to develop improvement strategies. More recently, data utilization has been the centerpiece of school reform efforts, focusing principals' and teachers' attention on student performance as the most important driving force for school improvement. However, as Ron Williamson, professor of educational leadership at Eastern Michigan University says, "data by themselves are not very useful to principals and teachers for school improvement purposes. It's only when data have been turned into information, and that information is used to stimulate conversations about the future directions of the school, that data utilization is meaningful and important in school reform." In order for data to be useful to principals and teachers, there is agreement among most scholars that certain conditions must be met: (1) The data must be clearly relevant to the people using them; (2) Data must be reduced or transformed to become clear "information"; and (3 Data must be trustworthy. It's a short list, but a very tall order. Fortunately, numerous resources have been created by various players in the school reform movement to help principals gather, transform, and use data for school improvement efforts with their faculty and community. The resources provided in this brief represent some of the best and most useful. (Contains 12 online resources.)
Learning Clicks: Year End Report 2008/2009
Author: Alberta Advanced Education and Technology
Date: 2009-00-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Foreign Countries,Teacher Surveys,Student Surveys,Postsecondary Education,Web Sites,Parent Attitudes,Student Attitudes,Teacher Attitudes,Parent Surveys,Secondary School Students,Access to Information,Satisfaction,Questionnaires

Learning Clicks was developed in 2003 as an interactive, fun way for Alberta students to learn about these opportunities. Learning Clicks is a program designed to support Strategy 2.4 in Alberta Advanced Education and Technology's 2007-10 Business Plan. The 2008/2009 season was the 5th year of the Learning Clicks program. This paper offers a report of the activities and developments of the Learning Clicks program for school year 2008-2009. Appended are: (1) Student Survey; (2) Teacher Survey; and (3) Parent Survey. [For the 2007/2008 report, see ED510661.]
Broadband for Rural America: Economic Impacts and Economic Opportunities. Economic Policy/Briefing Paper
Author: Kuttner, Hanns
Date: 2012-10-15
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Rural Areas,Internet,Economic Impact,Economic Opportunities,Rural Urban Differences,Telecommunications,Disadvantaged,Costs,Education,Health Services,Teleworking,Services,Business,Agriculture,Manufacturing,Retailing,Small Businesses

Historically, waves of new technologies have brought Americans higher standards of living. Electrical service and hot and cold running water, for example, were once luxuries; now their absence makes a home substandard. Today, technologies for accessing the Internet are diffusing at an even faster rate than those earlier innovations once did, bringing with them commensurate transformations of Americans' way of life. Technologies that increase the speed at which data can be transmitted have had powerful effects. Most importantly, they have transformed the Internet from a tool used by a narrow group of academics and technicians into a means of interaction used by a large majority of Americans. However, Americans have not universally benefitted from better Internet access. Geography, especially the divide between rural and urban America, determines how much some Americans can benefit from the Internet. Networks have not been as extensively developed in rural areas as in urban areas. Some people in rural America still have dial-up as their best available, affordable technology, a technology that offers five percent of the capacity for what the FCC has said is the broadband threshold. Others have service that reaches the broadband level, but still does not offer the "lightning-fast" speeds advertised by Internet service providers in urban areas. Accordingly, the nation faces a "broadband gap," not only with regard to the lack of access in rural areas to service that meets the broadband threshold, but also with regard to the lack of availability of faster service between urban and rural America. This report identifies opportunity costs that arise from this gap. These costs exist today, but the pace at which data transmission capability is growing means that the inequality between the technology being newly deployed and the technology that was deployed a decade or more ago is increasing. Networks that connect research institutions in the United States can move 100,000 times more data per unit of time than the dial-up connections that some Americans still must use. The technology gap is not a fixed deficit that once filled, stays filled. The technology gap will be larger--much larger--in the future, along with the information and technology gap, unless significant action is taken to overcome it. (Contains 2 figures, 1 table, and 19 footnotes.)
RTT-D Guidance: Implementing Performance Metrics for Continuous Improvement That Support the Foundational Conditions for Personalized Learning
Author: Johnson, Jessica
Date: 2012-09-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Academic Achievement,Competition,School Districts,Total Quality Management,Educational Improvement,Teacher Student Relationship,Individualized Instruction,Student Evaluation,Achievement Gap,Educational Environment,Academic Support Services,Efficiency,Organizational Effectiveness,Teacher Evaluation,Teacher Effectiveness,Program Implementation

The Race to the Top-District (RTT-D) competition asks districts to personalize education for all students in their schools, focusing on classrooms and the relationship between educators and students. To reach this bold goal, the competition calls for providing teachers with &quot;the information, tools, and supports that enable them to meet the needs of each student and substantially accelerate and deepen each student's learning.&quot; Local education agencies must &quot;have the policies, systems, infrastructure, capacity, and culture to enable teachers, teacher teams, and school leaders to continuously focus on improving individual student achievement and closing achievement gaps.&quot; In addition, the RTT-D competition requires that applicants identify 12 to 14 &quot;ambitious yet achievable&quot; performance measures, as well as a process for how the measures will provide rigorous, timely, and formative information and how the applicant will review and improve the measures over time if they are insufficient to support and gauge implementation progress. The anchoring system for this work is a continuous improvement process and a set of performance measures that drills down to the learner and classroom, focuses on the relationship between educators and students, and helps teachers, teacher teams, and school leaders to continuously focus on improving individual student achievement and closing achievement gaps. Section E of the RTT-D Notice Inviting Applications (NIA) requires that districts have a continuous improvement process that includes ongoing communication and engagement and a set of performance measures. The proposed continuous improvement process and measures support three conditions necessary for successful implementation of personalized learning: (1) effective learning environments, (2) effective student support, and (3) organizational efficacy. In this report, the authors describe a continuous improvement strategy and a rigorous application of performance measures at the district, school, classroom, and student levels. AIR's College Eligibility Index: A Sample On-Track Measure is appended. (Contains 3 footnotes.) [This paper is a companion piece to the &quot;Race to the Top-District Action Brief: Establishing a Foundational Conditions for Personalized Learning&quot; by Turnaround for Children.]
Powerline Technician: Apprenticeship Course Outline. Apprenticeship and Industry Training. 2104.4
Author: Alberta Advanced Education and Technology
Date: 2004-00-00
Type: Guides - Classroom - Learner
Subjects: Foreign Countries,Power Technology,Utilities,Energy,Industry,Course Descriptions,Paraprofessional Personnel,Apprenticeships,Program Descriptions,Training,Safety,Certification,Educational Policy,State Policy,Public Agencies,Technical Education,Technical Institutes,College Instruction,Postsecondary Education,Curriculum Design

The graduate of the Powerline Technician apprenticeship program is a certified journeyperson who will be able to: (1) responsibly do all work tasks expected of a journeyperson; (2) supervise, train and coach apprentices; (3) use and maintain hand and power tools to the standards of competency and safety required in the trade; (4) construct, maintain, operate or repair electrical distribution systems and their equipment; (5) practice the safe work practices required by the trade; (6) perform with dexterity the hand skills required to carry out the required mechanical work; and (7) perform assigned tasks in accordance with quality and production standards required by industry. Requirements for certification--including the content and delivery of technical training--are developed and updated by the Alberta Apprenticeship and Industry Training Board on the recommendation of Powerline Technician Provincial Apprenticeship Committee. This course outline contains the following sections: (1) First Period Technical Training; (2) Second Period Technical Training; and (3) Third Period Technical Training.
Fitness and Physical Activity. Research Brief
Author: Walker, Karen
Date: 2005-10-17
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Physical Education,Physical Activities,Physical Fitness,Health Promotion,Health Behavior,Wellness,Academic Achievement

What can be done to support fitness and physical activity? Schools can guide students in developing life-long habits of participating in physical activities. According to the National Association for Sports and Physical Education, the concepts of physical fitness activities and physical education are used synonymously, however, they are not the same. A physical education program is a scheduled and highly structured program where skills of teamwork, cooperation, leadership, and specific physical skills are taught by well-trained physical education teachers. Fitness activities involve any type of body movement. In addition to students participating in a physical education program, fitness activities should be done by adolescents at least 60 minutes a day at least five times a week. Some studies indicate that if physical activities are done in short 10-15 minute time frames throughout the day, the benefits are the same as if they had been done in a full workout at one time. Fitness activities can include: walking, biking, hiking, dancing, mowing the lawn, snow blowing the yard, gardening, bowling, washing the family car, babysitting for a toddler, walking a dog, flying a kite, and participating in intramural sports or extracurricular activities. This brief enumerates the benefits of being physically active, as well as offers recommendations to support fitness and physical activity. (Contains 25 online resources.)
eTexts: The Wave of the Future?
Author: Walker, Karen
Date: 2010-05-02
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Educational Technology,Teaching Methods,Textbooks,Electronic Publishing,Age Groups,Influence of Technology,Generational Differences,Textbook Selection

What do principals need to know about the use of electronic textbooks? Students, referred to as the Millennials or the Net Generation, born between 1980 and the present, have very different learning styles than those of previous generations. They were born into a world of everyday applications of technology and have utilized it from a very young age. In order to stay current and successfully prepare students for the world beyond high school, educators must meaningfully integrate and employ technology in the instructional program. The latest technological tool is the electronic reader (eReader) that uses digital texts (eTexts). The use of eReaders and eTexts is an emerging technology with little clear research about its use or impact on student learning. They are an attractive option because students are comfortable with the use of technology, and they open reduce expenditures and allow for more frequent updating of texts. However, their use also has significant instructional implications for teachers and students. (Contains 26 online resources.)
English Language Learners' Programs. Research Brief
Author: Walker, Karen
Date: 2007-05-07
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Immigrants,Bilingual Education,English (Second Language),Second Language Learning,Language Acquisition,Program Implementation,Bilingualism,Models,Educational Change,English Language Learners,Literacy

What are programs for ELL? The United States is made up of immigrants and each group has had to face the challenges of learning the culture and/or the English language. There has been a huge backlash in this country against bilingual education. A common sentiment about it has been that if a person lives in America they should speak English and bilingual education does not teach them to do that. According to a vast amount of research in this area, education in the primary language helps secondary language development because it provides students knowledge in the various content areas and helps them develop literacy in the primary language, which is a short cut to literacy in the secondary language. It takes about two years for a student to be able to speak English but four to five years to have the language for academic literacy. The primary goal of bilingual education has been and continues to be to provide the skills for students to become proficient in English and have the appropriate grade/content skills and literacy. There is no one program that will meet the needs of all of the ELL's. When a program is decided upon and implemented, it should be able to meet the needs of the given student population. Prior to program implementation, the following should be examined and explored: (1) What are the school's goals?; (2) What are the school's language acquisition goals?; (3) How do the current programs meet the school's goals?; (4) What are available resources?; (5) What are the needs and special characteristics of the school's ELL population?; and (6) What are some program models and how will they help meet the students' needs? (Contains 17 online resources.)
Experiential Education. Research Brief
Author: Muir, Mike
Date: 2003-12-08
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: At Risk Students,Experiential Learning,Organizational Development,Cooperative Education,Outdoor Education,Educational Philosophy,Service Learning

Experiential education is essentially an educational philosophy first developed in the late 19th century and has since been articulated in a variety of fields including cooperative education, internships, outdoor education, organizational development and training, and service-learning. The essence of Experiential Education was captured by the philosopher John Dewey, who argued that "Events are present and operative anyway; what concerns us is their meaning." The problem for teachers and students is how to make meaning out of the experience. In its purest forms, Experiential Education is inductive, beginning with "raw" experience that is processed through an intentional learning format and transformed into working, useable knowledge. Experiential Education has been shown to positively impact at-risk students, put learning into context, and make learning more meaningful for students. (Contains 10 online resources.)
Empowerment Schools. Research Brief
Author: Walker, Karen
Date: 2007-11-05
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Empowerment,Power Structure,School Administration,Principals,Program Effectiveness

In education, the pendulum continues to swing from one side to the other, all in an effort to find the &quot;right&quot; way to educate all of its students. The concept of empowerment, what it means and who should be empowered to provide the &quot;best&quot; way to instruct students, has been one that has been explored from many different perspectives from students, to parents, to community, to business, to teachers, to districts, to states, and to the federal government. In the most recent wave of how to best meet the needs of students, New York City, New York and Clark County, Nevada have been leading the field in instituting &quot;Empowerment Schools.&quot; According to New York City's reference guide, &quot;Empowerment schools are premised on the fundamental belief that schools will only succeed at the highest levels if school leaders are given greater authority to design their own paths to success.&quot; As of this writing, there is little research about the effectiveness of this model. Although this structure is relatively new, it is another step towards the recognition that the &quot;one size fits all model&quot; is not working and that each school is the best judge about how to most effectively meet the needs of its students. (Contains 17 online resources.)