ethanporcaro/eric-fulltext-meta huggingface dataset:
Building District Capacity for System-Wide Instructional Improvement in Cincinnati Public Schools. Working Paper. GE Foundation &quot;Developing Futures&quot;™ in Education Evaluation Series
Author: Sam, Cecile
Date: 2013-12-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: School Districts,Public Schools,Instructional Improvement,Capacity Building,Program Evaluation,Program Effectiveness,Stakeholders,Partnerships in Education,Educational Change,Professional Development,Educational Indicators,Leadership,Interviews,Surveys,Qualitative Research

This report summarizes findings from one component of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education's (CPRE) evaluation of the General Electric Foundation's (GEF) &quot;Developing Futures&quot;™ in Education program in Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS). The purpose was to closely analyze district capacity to support system-wide instructional improvement. Specifically, this phase focused on a single, overarching question: to what extent has the district central office adopted and institutionalized the core principles of &quot;Developing Futures&quot;™? To answer this question, this evaluation assesses the Cincinnati Public School District's progress in scaling up and institutionalizing seven core elements of &quot;Developing Futures&quot;™: (1) Internal constituency engagement; (2) External constituency engagement; (3) Curriculum and instruction; (4) Professional development for instruction; (5) Professional development for leadership; (6) Management capacity; and (7) Evaluation. These seven reform elements were identified through a review of GEF program materials and documentation, and through a close analyses of each districts' reform trajectory over the life of the grant. Based on a thorough review of the research and evaluation literature, a set of indicators was constructed to allow the research team to determine the extent to which there was evidence of effective practice in each of these seven areas. Each area was decomposed into a set of more specific, observable characteristics. Research instruments were designed to elicit evidence of these characteristics in descriptions of central office processes, functions, or overall capacity. Ratings were then assigned to each characteristic based on the prevalence of available evidence using a three-point scale: (1) Strong implementation; (2) Moderate implementation; and (3) Weak implementation. This report provides ratings for CPS for each indicator and its component characteristics, along with qualitative and survey evidence illustrating and supporting the ratings. Overall, CPS has made significant progress in building system-­wide capacity for instructional improvement by facilitating collaboration, involving all stakeholders in planning and decision-­making, clarifying instructional expectations, and building a robust professional development system. The evidence suggests that instructional practice remains inconsistent in some cases, and that shifting standards and summative assessments pose a challenge for alignment and coherence.
Learning from NCLB: School Responses to Accountability Pressure and Student Subgroup Performance. Policy Brief. RB-54
Author: Weinbaum, Elliot H.
Date: 2012-09-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Educational Legislation,Federal Legislation,Administrator Attitudes,Teacher Attitudes,State Standards,Standardized Tests,Accountability,Academic Achievement,Interviews,Principals,Administrator Role,Surveys,Elementary Schools,Secondary Schools,Educational Practices,Observation,Educational Improvement,Change Strategies,Data Analysis,Correlation,Academic Failure,Comparative Analysis,Evaluation Methods,Educational Policy

Prior to the mandatory testing and reporting required by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), school improvement efforts were shown to lack coherence (Newman, Smith, Allensworth, &amp; Bryk, 2001) and often included conflicting programs (Hatch, 2002). Part of the theory of performance-based accountability in general, and NCLB in particular, was based on the belief that regular and comprehensive evidence would help to focus these efforts. Research seems to indicate, however, that individuals vary widely in their assumptions about the value and purpose of evidence (Coburn &amp; Talbert, 2006), that it is often difficult to identify students' challenges based on the resulting annual data (Black &amp; Wiliam, 1998), and that searches for meaningful remedies to real or imagined problems are often extremely limited, somewhat chaotic, and frequently lead back to familiar practices as opposed to real change or innovation (Gross, Kirst, Holland, &amp; Luschei, 2005). In this CPRE Policy Brief, the authors examine the extent to which the assumptions in the law manifest themselves in the actions that school leaders take. This brief asks and answers the question: How do school leaders--administrators and teachers--respond to the results of state assessment systems and the pressure of performance-based accountability? And do those responses seem to matter to achievement outcomes? Data Collection Information is appended.
Building a Foundation for School Leadership: An Evaluation of the Annenberg Distributed Leadership Project, 2006-2010. Research Report # RR-73
Author: Supovitz, Jonathan
Date: 2012-08-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Educational Change,Program Evaluation,Instructional Leadership,Transformational Leadership,Mixed Methods Research,Urban Schools,Leadership Effectiveness,Leadership Role,Principals,Capacity Building,Teacher Empowerment,Teacher Leadership,Educational Planning

Leading school change is a challenging endeavor. Successful leadership requires strategic and sustained effort, particularly in the shifting and uncertain environment of urban public schools. The concept of distributed leadership--in which multiple actors tackle the challenges of school leadership in concert--is a promising way to strengthen professional practice and thereby improve the educational experiences of all students. The Annenberg Distributed Leadership (DL) project was one of the first efforts in the nation to deliberately take on the challenge of designing and implementing a concerted effort to build distributed leadership capacity in a diverse set of urban schools to improve the quality of teaching and learning. The DL project featured the careful selection of leadership team members to identify and lead instructional improvement efforts; ample professional development to build cohesive teams and help members understand the motivational, psychological, and pedagogical aspects of advocating instructional change; resources to apply to the task; and ongoing school-based coaching to guide leadership team efforts. This report describes the Consortium for Policy Research in Education&apos;s mixed-method evaluation of the DL project. The evaluation featured a cluster randomized control trial, where schools first agreed to participate in the study, and then were chosen by lottery to participate in the DL project or serve in the comparison group. Overall there were 16 DL schools and 21 comparison sites in the evaluation. Central evaluation findings included: (1) The DL project successfully identified and developed leadership teams that were significantly higher functioning than were leadership teams in the comparison schools; (2) Principals and team members forged new working relationships that productively expanded the leadership capacity in the participating schools; (3) Teachers developed leadership capacity and took on leadership roles on their teams and with their colleagues; and (4) Team members worked strategically to change instruction through a variety of approaches and targeted a variety of areas that they determined to be their school&apos;s greatest needs. The report concludes the DL project demonstrates that an intensive effort to influence and expand the leadership capacity of schools can have a positive impact on leadership practice, leadership team functioning, and support for instructional improvement. It further suggests that distributed leadership might be best thought of not as a reform in itself, but rather as a means of implementing reform. &quot;Demographics of Distributed Leadership Schools&quot; are appended.
The Linking Study: An Experiment to Strengthen Teachers' Engagement with Data on Teaching and Learning
Author: Supovitz, Jonathan
Date: 2013-04-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Data,Decision Making,Instructional Effectiveness,Intervention,Teaching Methods,Educational Change,Outcomes of Education,Formative Evaluation,Teacher Attitudes,Mathematics Instruction,Communities of Practice,Feedback (Response),Control Groups,Experimental Groups,Elementary School Teachers,Elementary School Students,Measures (Individuals),Online Surveys,Teacher Surveys,Teacher Characteristics,Academic Achievement

The allure of using data to improve performance is a source of tremendous activity in the education field today. &quot;Data use&quot; has spurred a wide variety of reforms at all different levels of the education system, ranging from infrastructure augmentation to state databases, to district dashboard systems that collect and display an array of indicators, to the formation of school data teams that conduct data-informed inquiries into subgroups of students, to specific formative assessment classroom techniques. From this cornucopia it is increasingly apparent that data use means different things to decision-makers at different levels of the education system, and that the type of data, frequency of the data, mode of inquiry, and decision-making processes look quite different from one another according to role, situation, and purpose (Supovitz &amp; Klein, 2003; others). Thus, when we talk about the term &quot;data use,&quot; we must hone in on &quot;for whom?&quot; and &quot;for what purpose?&quot; In this paper, the author is interested in what it means for teachers to fruitfully use data to enhance the teaching and learning process. Informed by research on the challenges teachers face to use data meaningfully, and clues from the rich literature on formative assessment, this paper reports on the design and effects of an intervention designed to help teachers connect data on their teaching with data on the learning of their students for the purpose of informing subsequent instruction which leads to better student outcomes. The hypothesis of this study, therefore, is that while examining data may be useful, the real value of data use is to examine the connection between data points--in this case the instructional choices that teachers make and the learning outcomes of students. Thus, &quot;data use&quot; in this study means encouraging and facilitating teachers' analytical experiences of linking data on teaching to data on the learning of their students. Using a randomized control trial, the Linking Study tests the impacts of the intervention on teachers' perceptions of their fluency with data and their self-reported learning about their instructional practices and their students' thinking. Moreover, the study estimates effects on instruction caused by the intervention, based upon external trained raters' judgments of the quality of instructional practice. Finally, this research examines impacts of the intervention on student outcomes. Appended is: Survey Items and Scale Reliabilities.
Building District Capacity for System-Wide Instructional Improvement in Erie Public Schools. Working Paper. GE Foundation &quot;Developing Futures&quot;™ in Education Evaluation Series
Author: Riggan, Matt
Date: 2013-12-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: School Districts,Public Schools,Capacity Building,Instructional Improvement,Program Evaluation,Educational Change,Stakeholders,Partnerships in Education,Improvement Programs,Professional Development,Program Effectiveness,Educational Indicators,Leadership,Interviews,Surveys,Qualitative Research

This report summarizes findings from one component of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education's (CPRE) evaluation of the General Electric Foundation's (GEF) &quot;Developing Futures&quot; ™ in Education program in Erie Public Schools (EPS). As described in the CPRE proposal and research design, the purpose was to closely analyze district capacity to support system-wide instructional improvement. Specifically, this phase focused on a single, overarching question: to what extent has the district central office adopted and institutionalized the core principles of &quot;Developing Futures&quot;™? To answer this question, this evaluation assesses the Erie Public School District's progress in scaling up and institutionalizing seven core elements of &quot;Developing Futures&quot; ™. They include: (1) Internal constituency engagement. The district engages stakeholders at all levels of the system, and establishes common vision and buy-­in for improvement efforts. (2) External constituency engagement. The district engages partner organizations and institutions, parents and the community; and effectively communicates about reform efforts. (3) Curriculum and instruction. The district communicates and supports a system-­wide vision for instructional improvement. (4) Professional development for instruction. The district delivers high-quality professional development on curriculum, instruction, standards or assessment. (5) Professional development for leadership. The district delivers high-­quality professional development on leadership or management. (6) Management capacity. The district collects and uses data, attracts and develops talent, and evaluates staff performance. (7) Evaluation. The district monitors and evaluates reform efforts. These seven reform elements were identified through a review of GEF program materials and documentation, and through a close analyses of each districts' reform trajectory over the life of the grant. Based on a thorough review of the research and evaluation literature, a set of indicators was constructed to allow the research team to determine the extent to which there was evidence of effective practice in each of these seven areas.
Evaluation of the i3 Scale-up of Reading Recovery: Year One Report, 2011-12. RR-76
Author: May, Henry
Date: 2013-08-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Reading Programs,Early Intervention,Reading Achievement,Reading Difficulties,Reading Instruction,Reading Skills,Educational Research,Program Effectiveness,Reading Failure,Beginning Reading,Elementary School Students,Reading Teachers,Literacy,Grants,Quasiexperimental Design,Evidence,Fidelity,Program Implementation,Surveys,Measures (Individuals),Program Evaluation

Reading Recovery (RR) is a short-term early intervention designed to help the lowest-achieving readers in first grade reach average levels of classroom performance in literacy. Students identified to receive Reading Recovery meet individually with a specially trained Reading Recovery (RR) teacher every school day for 30-minute lessons over a period of 12 to 20 weeks. The purpose of these lessons is to support rapid acceleration of each child's literacy learning. In 2010, The Ohio State University received a Scaling Up What Works grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Investing in Innovation (i3) Fund to expand the use of Reading Recovery across the country. The award was intended to fund the scale-up of Reading Recovery by training 3,675 new RR Teachers in U.S. schools, thereby expanding capacity to allow service to an additional 88,200 students. The Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) was contracted to conduct an independent evaluation of the i3 scale up of Reading Recovery over the course of five years. The evaluation includes parallel rigorous experimental and quasi-experimental designs for estimating program impacts, coupled with a large-scale mixed-methods study of program implementation under the i3 scale-up. This report presents findings through the second year of the evaluation. The primary goals of this evaluation were: (1) to assess the success of the scale-up in meeting the i3 grant's expansion goals; (2) to document the implementation of scale-up and fidelity to program standards; and (3) to provide experimental evidence of the impacts of Reading Recovery on student learning under this scale-up effort. This document is the first in a series of three annual reports produced based on our external evaluation of the Reading Recovery i3 Scale-Up. This report presents early results from the experimental impact and implementation studies conducted over the 2010-11 and 2011-12 school years. An appendix includes: Statistical Model for Impacts of Reading Scores. [For &quot;WWC Review of the Report 'Evaluation of the i3 Scale-up of Reading Recovery Year One Report, 2011-12.' What Works Clearinghouse Single Study Review,&quot; see ED547670.]
WWC Review of the Report &quot;Evaluation of the i3 Scale-up of Reading Recovery Year One Report, 2011-12.&quot; What Works Clearinghouse Single Study Review
Author: What Works Clearinghouse (ED)
Date: 2014-10-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Reading Difficulties,Early Intervention,Reading Achievement,Elementary School Students,Grade 1,Program Evaluation,Reading Comprehension,Achievement Tests,Research Methodology,Statistical Significance,Outcomes of Education

For the 2013 study, &quot;Evaluation of the i3 Scale-up of Reading Recovery Year One Report, 2011-12,&quot; researchers examined the Year 1 impacts of the Investing in Innovation (i3) scale-up of &quot;Reading Recovery&quot;®, a short-term intervention for struggling readers, on the reading achievement of first-grade students. The analytic sample included 866 students from 147 schools. Researchers measured general reading achievement using the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) Total Reading Score. They also examined two subtests, ITBS Reading Words and ITBS Reading Comprehension. This study is a well-executed randomized controlled trial with low levels of sample attrition and meets the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) group design standards without reservations. The study authors found, and the WWC confirmed, that &quot;Reading Recovery&quot;® had a significant positive impact on the general reading achievement of struggling readers in the first grade. Researchers also reported statistically significant positive impacts of &quot;Reading Recovery&quot;® in the general reading achievement and reading comprehension domains. Four appendices present: (1) Study details; (2) Outcome measures for each domain; (3) Study findings for the general reading achievement domain; and (4) Supplemental study findings by domain. A glossary of terms is included. [The following study is the focus of this review: May, H., Gray, A., Gillespie, J. N., Sirinides, P., Sam, C., Goldsworthy, H., Armijo, M., &amp; Tognatta, N. (2013). &quot;Evaluation of the i3 scale-up of Reading Recovery year one report, 2011-12.&quot; Philadelphia, PA: Consortium for Policy Research in Education (ED547669).]
Building District Capacity for System-Wide Instructional Improvement in Jefferson County Public Schools. Working Paper. GE Foundation &quot;Developing Futures&quot;™ in Education Evaluation Series
Author: Darfler, Anne
Date: 2013-12-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Capacity Building,School Districts,Faculty Development,Futures (of Society),Educational Policy,Educational Practices,Educational Improvement,Program Descriptions,Interviews,Surveys,Qualitative Research,Leadership Training,Educational Change,Program Evaluation,Cooperation,Principals,Stakeholders,Science Curriculum,Mathematics Curriculum,State Standards,Administrator Attitudes,Central Office Administrators,Information Technology,Resource Allocation,Teacher Recruitment,Teacher Persistence,Information Systems,Leadership Role

This report summarizes findings from one component of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education's (CPRE) evaluation of the General Electric Foundation's (GEF) &quot;Developing Futures&quot;™ in Education program in Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS). As described in the CPRE proposal and research design, the purpose was to closely analyze district capacity to support system-­wide instructional improvement. Specifically, this phase focused on a single, overarching question: to what extent has the district central office adopted and institutionalized the core principles of &quot;Developing Futures&quot;™? To answer this question, this evaluation assesses the Jefferson County Public School District's progress in scaling up and institutionalizing seven core elements of &quot;Developing Futures&quot;™. They are: (1) Internal constituency engagement; (2) External constituency engagement; (3) Curriculum and instruction; (4) Professional development for instruction; (5) Professional development for leadership; (6) Management capacity; (7) Evaluation. Based on a thorough review of the research and evaluation literature, a set of indicators was constructed to allow the research team to determine the extent to which there was evidence of effective practice in each of these seven areas. Results indicate that JCPS has made significant progress in curriculum standardization instructional vision setting and formative assessment.
Administrators and Learning: An Experience in Self-Direction
Author: Watkins, J. Foster
Date: 1977-00-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Instructional Leadership,Graduate Students,Student Evaluation,Technology Uses in Education,Questioning Techniques,Discussion (Teaching Technique),Video Technology,Feedback (Response),Teaching Methods

A move away from the text book-based, class-room delivered, time-specific meetings, etc. was utilized in a graduate class in educational leadership. The more flexible approach utilized some of the emerging technologies with students responsible for selecting among multiple options. A group processing approach with self and peer evaluation and feedback was included. The preliminary results of assessment steps from the students and the professor are shared.
The Effects of Teachers' Educational Technology Skills on Their Classroom Management Skills
Author: Varank, Ilhan
Date: 2013-12-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Foreign Countries,Educational Technology,Technology Integration,Classroom Techniques,Elementary School Teachers,Technological Literacy,Teacher Attitudes,Self Concept,Teaching Experience,Predictor Variables,Faculty Development,Questionnaires,Surveys

Because technology integrations require changes in instructional processes it may require different approaches for classroom management. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether teachers' educational technology skills, besides their gender and years of experiences, significantly explain their classroom management skills. The data was gathered from 300 elementary school teachers in a mid-western city of Turkey. It was found that teachers' educational technology skills and their years of experiences were significantly associated with their course management skills, behavior arrangement skills and activity management skills. The finding of non-significant effects of teachers' gender on their subordinate classroom management skills are supported by previous research. The finding that experience may be expected to be an important predicting factor for occupational proficiency may be explained by the opportunities teachers may have to develop themselves in occupational skills during their career. Teachers with high perceptions of educational technology self-skills have high perceptions of classroom management skills. This result may be attributed to the experience in the use of educational technology.