ethanporcaro/eric-fulltext-meta huggingface dataset:
[StraighterLine] Student Survey Results. Final
Author: Hezel Associates
Date: 2011-08-15
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Distance Education,Income,Educational Experience,Student Surveys,Online Surveys,Online Courses,Nontraditional Education,Paying for College,Student Costs,Introductory Courses,Satisfaction,Demography,College Credits,Transfer Policy,Difficulty Level,Academic Failure,Student Diversity,Measures (Individuals),Tables (Data)

The cost of college continues to outpace inflation, even as average household income has declined over the past decade. Since 2008, StraighterLine has offered a new way of reducing the cost of a college degree: self-paced, pay-as-you-go introductory level college courses. The underlying philosophy of the program is that students can get an equivalent, if not superior, educational experience in introductory college courses (e.g., calculus, accounting, English composition) through an individually paced, tutor-supported course than in the large lecture hall setting that is common at traditional colleges and universities. Furthermore, StraighterLine is able to offer these courses at much lower cost than colleges and universities. Depending on the registration option and time spent completing the course, StraighterLine students can potentially pay less than $30 per credit. Demand for the program has been substantial, with nearly 2000 registrants since the first courses were offered in 2008. To better understand its clientele, StraighterLine hired Hezel Associates to develop, execute, and analyze an online survey of its alumni. The main foci of the survey were to: determine why students decided to take StraighterLine courses, assess whether they were satisfied with their experience, and learn more about the demographics of the StraighterLine student population. Based on the analysis of the survey data collected in June 2011, the major findings are: (1) Students register for StraighterLine courses for three main reasons: convenience, cost, and fulfilling a pre-requisite; (2) Students expect StraighterLine courses to be rigorous and find that those expectations are met; (3) Overall, students are very satisfied with StraighterLine courses; (4) More than ninety percent of students who completed courses with StraighterLine were able to get the credit for the courses transferred to a degree-granting institution; (5) Students appear to fail to complete StraighterLine courses due to a combination of factors, rather than one or two predominant factors; (6) The StraighterLine student population is much more diverse than the traditional college student population; and (7) StraighterLine appears to be off to a very successful start in developing courses that meet students' needs. Appended are: (1) Instruments; and (2) Additional Tables. (Contains 10 figures, 6 tables and 2 footnotes.)
Common Core State Standards: Implementation Tools and Resources
Author: Council of Chief State School Officers
Date: 2013-05-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Disabilities,State Standards,Vocational Education,Instructional Materials,Second Language Learning,English Language Learners,State Departments of Education,Career Readiness,Academic Standards,College Readiness,Program Implementation,Language Arts,Mathematics Instruction,Teachers,School Districts,Educational Resources,Parents,Students,Academic Achievement,Surveys

The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO or the Council) developed this list of free tools and resources to support state education agencies, districts, and educators during the process of implementing the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). This document primarily lists resources developed by CCSSO and other leading organizations and is not intended to be a comprehensive list of all available resources. CCSSO does not endorse any for-profit products. This is the fourth edition of this document and was released on May 15, 2013. The resources are grouped into the following categories: (1) About the Standards; (2) Communicating the Common Core; (3) Reviewing Instructional Materials; (4) Instructional Supports; (5) Implementation Planning; (6) Mathematics Common Core Resources; (7) English Language Arts/Literacy (ELA) Common Core Resources; (8) Connecting Career and Technical Education to the Common Core; (9) Connecting English Language Learners to the Common Core; (10) Connecting Students with Disabilities to the Common Core; (11) Defining College and Career Readiness; and (12) Assessment Information.
School Choice in the States: A Policy Landscape
Author: Davis, Jennifer
Date: 2013-02-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: School Choice,Context Effect,Program Effectiveness,Educational Policy,Educational Trends,Enrollment Trends,Trend Analysis,Open Enrollment,Charter Schools,Home Schooling,Private Schools,Virtual Classrooms,Vocational Schools,Magnet Schools,Educational Vouchers

The question of whether and how to offer students the option of attending a school other than the one assigned by their residence is a hotly debated issue with substantial implications for policymaking. Whether pursued as an effort to increase the availability of high-quality options in communities without equal access; to drive improvement through marketplace competition; or to promote individual liberty, school choice options are undoubtedly increasing across America. Yet in the midst of expansion, the body of research literature suggests that the impact of school choice programs on outcomes--such as student success, school and community composition, and system improvement--is poorly understood and can vary greatly across programs. Some research shows positive effects, while other research shows negative effects or unintended consequences. Numerous studies show no generalizable effects, suggesting that outcomes heavily depend on context and policy design. Therefore, in order to support its member chief state school officers in making critical decisions about school choice policies, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) has undertaken an effort to encourage the discussion of school choice policies across its membership. As an initial follow-up to its recent policy statement on school choice (below), CCSSO has attempted to address the often-asked question &quot;What are other states doing?&quot; by creating an ideologically-agnostic landscape analysis of school choice policies across the states. By highlighting policy coverage and characteristics from best available data across the states and for the full spectrum of existing school choice options, the paper intends to help chiefs contextualize their policy sets within national trends. The paper does not attempt to comment on which policy sets are &quot;right,&quot; nor does it answer questions about outcomes or consequences. Nevertheless, the policy landscape provides a knowledge base upon which subsequent inquiry can occur. (Contains 8 tables, 13 figures and 5 footnotes.)
Factors Impacting Corporate E-Learners' Learning Flow, Satisfaction, and Learning Persistence
Author: Joo, Young Ju
Date: 2012-10-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Foreign Countries,Electronic Learning,Learner Engagement,Corporate Education,Online Courses,Educational Environment,Outcomes of Education,Teacher Student Relationship

This study aimed to investigate the structural relationships among teaching presence, cognitive presence, usage, learning flow, satisfaction, and learning persistence in corporate e-learners. The research participants were 462 e-learners registered for e-lectures through an electronics company in South Korea. First, the sense of teaching presence, sense of cognitive presence, and usage affect flow. Second, the sense of teaching presence, sense of cognitive presence, usage, and flow affect satisfaction. Third, the sense of teaching presence, sense of cognitive presence, usage, flow, and satisfaction affect learning persistence. Fourth, learning flow intermediates the sense of teaching presence, sense of cognitive presence, usage, and satisfaction. Fifth, satisfaction intermediates the sense of teaching presence, cognitive presence, usage, flow, and persistence. We confirmed that learning flow significantly intermediated among sense of teaching presence, sense of cognitive presence, and satisfaction but not between usage and satisfaction. In addition, satisfaction intermediated among sense of teaching presence, sense of cognitive presence, usage, flow, and learning persistence. These findings demonstrate the importance of sense of teaching presence, sense of cognitive presence, and usage for e-learners. We expect that the results will contribute to the formation and improvement of fundamental learning strategies for successful e-learning. (Contains 3 figures and 3 tables.) [For the complete proceedings, "Proceedings of the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS) International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in Digital Age (CELDA) (Madrid, Spain, Oct 19-21, 2012)," see ED542606.]
Teaching to the Core: Integrating Implementation of Common Core and Teacher Effectiveness Policies
Author: Wiener, Ross
Date: 2013-03-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Teacher Effectiveness,State Standards,Teaching Methods,Feedback (Response),Educational Change,School Districts,Integrity,Educational Objectives,State Departments of Education,Cooperation,Educational Assessment,Reliability,Comprehension,Academic Standards,Academic Achievement

The purpose of the Common Core State Standards is to prepare students to succeed in college and career pursuits. To that end, the Common Core calls on teachers to focus on deepening students' understanding of what they're learning, enhancing their problem-solving skills, and improving their ability to communicate ideas. At the same time, states are putting in place policies aimed at increasing teachers' effectiveness, the most prominent of which are rigorous evaluations. Together, teacher effectiveness policies and the Common Core have transformative potential to significantly improve outcomes "and" equity. But putting them into place quickly, simultaneously and with integrity is a hugely demanding and complex endeavor. Successfully integrating these work streams into a coherent, unified improvement agenda requires intensive collaboration across teams and offices, sophisticated change management, and continuous cycles of feedback and response. If states do not do this aggressively and swiftly this opportunity to change teaching and improve learning could well be squandered. But this is not what state departments of education were designed to do. They were designed to ensure that school districts spend state and federal money for the purposes intended and to enforce myriad state and federal regulations, dealing with everything from school buses to special education. To carry out this new mission, state education agencies (SEAs) must reinvent themselves: establish a new culture, develop a different set of competencies, and adopt new approaches to their work with school districts. SEA leaders must demonstrate by their actions and words that the initiatives are inextricably linked and also that they call for fundamental changes in curriculum, instruction, and assessment. The purpose of this policy brief and its 10 recommendations is to help state departments succeed in carrying out these responsibilities. The first six recommendations deal with organizational design a functions of state departments. The next four recommend changes in practice. Appended are: (1) Next Steps and Resources for Teaching Frameworks Incorporating Common Core Expectations; and (2) Developments in the Field and Alternative Approaches to Assessments that Measure Common Core Expectations. (Contains 3 footnotes.)
Toward a &quot;Common Definition of English Learner&quot;: A Brief Defining Policy and Technical Issues and Opportunities for State Assessment Consortia
Author: Linquanti, Robert
Date: 2013-02-01
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Student Evaluation,Second Language Learning,Language Proficiency,Politics of Education,English,Consortia,Scaling,State Policy,Academic Standards,State Standards,English Language Learners,English (Second Language)

The U.S. Department of Education (USED) requires states participating in either of the two Race to the Top assessment consortia (Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium and Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers [PARCC]), as well as those participating in either of the two Enhanced Assessment Grant (EAG) English language proficiency assessment consortia (WIDA's Assessment Services Supporting English Learners through Technology Systems [ASSETS] and CCSSO's English Language Proficiency Assessment for the 21st Century [ELPA21]), to establish a &quot;common definition of English Learner.&quot; Specifically, each consortium &quot;must define the term in a manner that is uniform across member states and consistent with section 9101 (25)1 of the ESEA&quot; (US Department Of Education, 2010, p. 20). Although the two consortia developing alternate assessments based on alternate achievement standards (AA-AAS) are &quot;not&quot; required to develop a common definition of English learner (EL), their member states largely overlap with these assessment consortia and they will include their English learners in these assessments. Having a common EL definition that agrees with the definition adopted by the other consortia is clearly desirable, if not essential. As discussed in this paper, this requirement presents substantial challenges that will call for a carefully coordinated, multiyear effort within and across consortia member states. The effort will need to proceed in stages and encompass several critical decisions. Since the federal definition of English learners posits that their level of English language proficiency (ELP) may deny them the ability to perform proficiently on academic content assessments, a relationship between students' ELP and content assessment results must be established. Recently developed empirical methods illustrate how this might be done. However, this requires operational data from all consortia assessments. Since assessment scaling and academic content performance standards across states and consortia are needed to conduct such empirical analyses, scaling and standard-setting for all assessments would first need to be completed. Very likely, changes to state policy and regulations will also be required, which implies potential legislative or state board of education action. Some key issues and opportunities are highlighted. (Contains 10 footnotes.)
Implementing the Common Core State Standards: State Spotlights
Author: Council of Chief State School Officers
Date: 2013-05-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: State Standards,Stakeholders,Educational Change,Academic Standards,Web Sites,Alignment (Education),Career Readiness,College Readiness,Student Evaluation,Interpersonal Communication,Accountability,Educational Resources,Academic Achievement

As of the 2012-2013 school year, over 20 states have formally moved to the Common Core State Standards being used as the learning expectations for all students across the state, and the remainder will be doing so in the 2014-2015 school year. This document highlights state initiatives that are supporting Common Core implementation in the following areas: (1) Communication and Engagement; (2) System alignment and systems change; and (3) Educator supports. The Common Core State Standards will impact student learning through improvements in instruction and clarity of purpose between educators, students, and parents. Once implemented, the standards will result in more students having the powerful, engaging, and challenging learning experiences that prepare them for success in college and career. The next year of Common Core implementation is critical not only because of the ongoing process of enactment but also because of the release of the next generation assessments. Additionally, critics of the Common Core State Standards are becoming more forceful requiring states to enhance their communication, stakeholder engagement, system alignment, and educator and student support systems. The following spotlights are offered to: (1) provide resources and examples of states enacting successful communication campaigns; and (2) provide all states with quick access to sample practices they can quickly and easily review. It is hoped that this document can serve as a resource and will facilitate ongoing networking between states, districts, educators, and parents. This is intended to be a quick reference document to support the sharing of innovative practices and lessons learned. Examples are fluid and were chosen based on quality and accessibility of information via the web.
High School Graduation: State Policies Driving Transparency and Success. Policy in Focus
Author: Council of Chief State School Officers
Date: 2013-03-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Disabilities,Graduation,Graduation Rate,State Policy,English Language Learners,Career Readiness,College Readiness,Accountability,Educational Indicators,Educational Legislation,Federal Legislation,Dropout Rate,Information Management,Data,Access to Information,Disclosure,Academic Achievement

The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) has released a new publication titled &quot;High School Graduation: State Policies Driving Transparency and Success.&quot; The report describes recent state actions aimed at ensuring all students graduate from high school college-and career-ready, and policy issues such as graduation rate calculations, accountability, and state data systems. It also presents specific examples of state leadership in using new research and data systems to improve graduation rates in the states. The publication is designed to update practitioners and the general public on recent state-led successes in improving graduation rates. It contains numerous examples and interviews with chief state school officers and senior SEA staff. (Contains 2 footnotes and 12 resources.)
Knowledge, Skills, and Dispositions: The Innovation Lab Network State Framework for College, Career, and Citizenship Readiness, and Implications for State Policy
Author: Council of Chief State School Officers
Date: 2013-02-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: State Policy,Educational Policy,College Readiness,Career Readiness,Citizenship,Educational Change,Knowledge Level,Skills,Personality Traits,Outcomes of Education,Definitions,Models

In 2011, member states of the Innovation Lab Network (ILN or Network), facilitated by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), agreed to work together under the shared belief that their states face a great opportunity to transform their education systems to new designs that prepare all students for postsecondary learning, work, and citizenship. Gathering as a Network, these states aimed to define the challenge, establish shared objectives, and support one another in identifying, testing, and sharing replicable, cost effective models that will compel system-wide changes in lab states, in other states, and in federal policy. First among their objectives was to create a shared framework for understanding the definitional elements of "college, career, and citizenship readiness" (CCCR) that will serve as a compass for state-to-local actions. Stemming from the collective work of ILN states, this white paper communicates the shared framework and definitional elements of CCCR accepted by ILN chief state school officers in June 2012. Going forward, each ILN state has committed to adopting a definition of college and career readiness that is consistent with these elements, although precise language may be adapted; and to reorient its education system in pursuit of this goal. Appendix includes: "Underlying Assumptions."
Investigating the Effect of Users' Tagging Motivation on the Digital Educational Resources Metadata Descriptions
Author: Zervas, Panagiotis
Date: 2012-10-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Foreign Countries,Open Source Technology,Indexing,Motivation,Metadata,Communities of Practice,Electronic Publishing,Educational Resources,Information Retrieval,Comparative Analysis,Classification,Expertise,Novices

Over the past years, several Open Educational Resources (OERs) initiatives have been emerged worldwide aiming to create, share and reuse digital educational resources among educational communities. As a result, organizing, offering and accessing these resources over the web have been key issues for both the research and the educational community. Traditionally, a popular way for characterizing digital educational resources is by using a formal and centrally agreed classification system, such as the IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM). On the other hand, with the emerging Web 2.0 applications, the issue of characterizing digital educational resources tends to move from the expert-based description based on formal classification systems to a less formal user-based tagging referred to as social tagging. As a result, a number of studies have been reported in the field of Technology-enhanced Learning (TeL) aiming to evaluate whether social tagging can improve the discovery of new digital educational resources and the retrieval of known ones stored in web-based repositories. Additionally, recent studies in the field of social tagging systems has provided initial evidence that users' tagging motivation has a direct influence on the properties of the resulted tags and folksonomies. Thus, in this paper we aim to propose a methodology for investigating this issue and examine whether different end-users' tagging motivations (that is teachers) could enlarge the metadata descriptions of digital educational resources. The results of our study provided us evidence that there is a direct influence of users' tagging motivation on the enlargement of metadata descriptions of digital educational resources, as well as to the resulted folksonomy when it is compared with formal structured vocabularies used by metadata experts or content providers for characterizing digital educational resources. (Contains 6 tables.) [For the complete proceedings, "Proceedings of the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS) International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in Digital Age (CELDA) (Madrid, Spain, Oct 19-21, 2012)," see ED542606.]
Using Wikis to Foster Collaborative Writing: Exploring Influencing Factors to Successful Implementation
Author: Hadjerrouit, Said
Date: 2012-10-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Foreign Countries,Collaborative Writing,Electronic Publishing,Cooperative Learning,Web 2.0 Technologies

Wiki technology provides new opportunities to foster collaborative learning in various educational settings. To empirically examine the impact of wikis on learning, this article explores students' collaborative writing activities performed on MediaWiki. The activities were analyzed using a taxonomy with ten categories (clarify content, add content, delete content, add link, delete link, fix link, grammar, spelling, style/typography, and formatting). The work also analyses students' comments posted on the discussion page of the wiki. The results show important differences in the types of contributions across the categories investigated. The results also reveal that the level of collaboration and discussion was relatively low compared with other activities performed on the wiki. Finally, the article suggests a number of factors influencing wiki-based collaborative writing in teacher education. (Contains 3 tables.) [For the complete proceedings, "Proceedings of the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS) International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in Digital Age (CELDA) (Madrid, Spain, Oct 19-21, 2012)," see ED542606.]