ethanporcaro/eric-fulltext-meta huggingface dataset:
Developmental Reading and English Assessment in a Researcher-Practitioner Partnership. CCRC Working Paper No. 85
Author: Perin, Dolores
Date: 2015-12-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Educational Research,Partnerships in Education,College Readiness,Community Colleges,Remedial Reading,English Instruction,Remedial Instruction,Two Year College Students,Standardized Tests,Writing Tests,Self Concept Measures,Questionnaires,Reading Skills,Writing Skills,Self Efficacy,Correlation,Regression (Statistics),Teacher Attitudes,College Faculty,Mixed Methods Research,Interviews

This paper reports findings from a researcher-practitioner partnership that assessed the readiness for postsecondary reading and writing demands of 211 students in developmental reading and English courses in two community colleges. An assessment battery was designed for the study, comprising two standardized tests and five projectdeveloped tasks. The project-developed measures were two text-based writing tasks similar to those typically assigned in college classrooms (a summarization task and a persuasive essay), a self-efficacy scale, a teacher judgment questionnaire, and a qualitative student retrospective report. The text-based writing measures were keyed to high-enrollment, introductory-level general education courses that had significant literacy demands. The results pointed to areas where students needed improvement in order to be ready for literacy tasks at the introductory postsecondary level. There was a discrepancy between the relatively low reading and writing skills as assessed through performance tasks and relatively high student self-efficacy ratings and teacher judgments. This finding suggests the possibility of an unrealistic amount of confidence in students' ability to perform college-level reading and writing tasks. Correlations between assessment measures tended to be moderate, suggesting that the measures were tapping different skills. A series of hierarchical regressions modeling the text-based writing skills suggested that improvement in text-based summarization may require particular attention to reading comprehension skills, while improvement in text-based persuasive essay writing may depend more on developing general writing skills. Students' retrospective reports indicated that although participants had some difficulty stating the requirements of the summarization task, they described appropriate strategies to complete it. Overall, the study's findings point to the need to examine approaches to instruction, curriculum, course structure, and placement policy that may improve students' college readiness. The following are appended: (1) Examples of Student Writing; and (2) Student Self-Efficacy Ratings and Teacher Judgments.
The Impact of School Improvement Grants on Achievement: Plans for a National Evaluation Using a Regression Discontinuity Design
Author: Deke, John
Date: 2015-00-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Academic Achievement,Educational Improvement,Grants,Educational Finance,Federal Legislation,Federal Aid,Regression (Statistics),Monte Carlo Methods,Disadvantaged Schools

Does receipt of School Improvement Grants (SIG) funding to implement a school intervention model have an impact on outcomes for low-performing schools? This study answers this question using a regression discontinuity design (RDD) that exploits cutoff values on the continuous variables used to define SIG eligibility tiers, comparing outcomes in schools that just met the eligibility criteria to outcomes in schools that just missed the eligibility cutoff (while controlling for the variable used to determine tier assignment). The sample includes 1,100 low-performing schools in about 60 districts in 21 states and the District of Columbia (DC). Using student-level data, researchers assess whether SIG affected student mobility, and calculate &quot;mobility-robust&quot; impacts using students slated to attend study schools in the implementation year based on the school they attended the prior year. This approach yields impacts on student achievement that are not conflated with impacts on student mobility. For comparison, researchers also calculate &quot;place-based&quot; impacts using students who attended study schools in the implementation year. Education researchers can benefit from this large-scale RDD that tackles a host of methodological issues simultaneously (including multiple sites, multiple assignment variables, fuzziness, clustering of individuals within schools, and standard errors that take into account the bandwidth selection method). Findings and conclusions will be presented in a future Institute of Education Sciences (IES) report. Tables and exhibits are appended.
Fixing the Academic Performance Index. Policy Brief 13-1
Author: Polikoff, Morgan S.
Date: 2013-01-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Academic Achievement,Standardized Tests,Accountability,State Legislation,Educational Legislation,Educational Policy,State Policy,Progress Monitoring,Educational Quality,Federal Legislation,Scores,Value Added Models,Measurement Objectives,Bias,Testing Problems,Intervention,School Size,Alternative Assessment

The Academic Performance Index (API) is the centerpiece of California's state assessment and accountability system. With the recent passage of SB1458 and the pending reauthorization of both state and federal accountability legislation, there is now an unprecedented opportunity to improve the API for next generation accountability in California. In this policy brief Morgan S. Polikoff and Andrew McEachin draw on their own previous work and more than a decade's worth of research on effective accountability policy design to describe the lessons that have been learned and to propose policy changes that would improve the API. The research literature on accountability systems has produced a number of key findings with regard to API and API-like measures of school performance. For instance, the API is heavily influenced by student demographics, as are other status measures of achievement. Year-to-year changes in API, often heralded by schools and the media, are highly unstable and do not reflect sustained improvement. The API is biased against small schools and high schools and in favor of larger schools and elementary schools. Perhaps most importantly, the API is too narrowly focused on test-based measures of performance. Fortunately, many of these problems are relatively simple to fix, as the operation of current accountability systems in other states and some school districts has made clear. The authors conclude with a number of recommendations for improving the API, including a) tracking the achievement of individual students across years; b) using multiple years of school-level data to measure growth in achievement; c) incorporating both growth and levels of achievement in identifying schools for intervention/support; and d) exploring alternative measures of school performance. While these solutions will not solve all of California's educational problems, they will certainly help make our state's assessment and accountability systems more effective in determining where to target improvement efforts.
Validating Components of Teacher Effectiveness: A Random Assignment Study of Value-Added, Observation, and Survey Scores
Author: Bacher-Hicks, Andrew
Date: 2015-00-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Teacher Effectiveness,Value Added Models,Observation,Student Surveys,Validity,Randomized Controlled Trials,Elementary School Teachers,Grade 4,Grade 5

Policy changes from the past decade have resulted in a growing interest in identifying effective teachers and their characteristics. This study is the third study to use data from a randomized experiment to test the validity of measures of teacher effectiveness. The authors collected effectiveness measures across three school years from three broad areas: value-added, classroom observation, and student surveys. In the first two years, they collected non-experimental estimates of these measures and, in the third year, they designed a randomized experiment to test the validity of these estimates. Using these data, they answer two questions: (1) Does a combination of these three distinct non-experimental measures identify teachers who, on average, produce higher student achievement gains following random assignment?; and (2) Does the magnitude of the gains correspond with what we would have predicted based on their non-experimental estimates of effectiveness? The analysis sample consisted of 66 fourth- and fifth-grade teachers from four large East coast school districts in the 2010-2011 through 2012-2013 school years. To answer the research questions, the authors first constructed the best linear combination of non-experimental student test score, survey, and classroom observation data from the first two years of the study (2010-11 and 2011-12) to predict teachers' average contribution to student growth on state standardized math tests another year. They used these predicted outcomes as their non-experimental estimates of teachers' contributions to student test score growth in 2012-13. Then, they examined actual student growth in 2012-13 (the third year of the study in which re randomly assigned students to teachers) and compared their non-experimental prediction of growth to actual growth. Tables are appended.
The Impact of an Unconditional Cash Transfer on Early Child Development: The Zambia Child Grant Program
Author: Seidenfeld, David
Date: 2015-00-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Foreign Countries,Child Development,Grants,Young Children,Randomized Controlled Trials,Longitudinal Studies,Financial Support,Program Effectiveness,Surveys

Little research has been conducted on unconditional cash transfers (UCTs) despite their growing prevalence in Africa, including South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Malawi, Lesotho, and Uganda. In this study, researchers implemented a randomized control trial with over 2,500 households to investigate the impact of Africa's child grant program on a range of protective and productive outcomes. The participants include over 3,000 children aged 3-7, one of the largest longitudinal samples of young children in a cash transfer evaluation, which allows researchers to estimate effects of the program on early childhood development (ECD) outcomes. The study includes a number of ECD indicators such as availability of learning materials, adult support for learning and school readiness, non-adult care, and pre-school attendance, with this study being the first time these indicators are studied in an evaluation of a cash transfer program in Africa. Researchers selected ECD indicators from UNICEF's Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS). Program impacts on individuals and households are estimated using a differences-in-differences (DD) statistical model that compares change in outcomes between baseline and follow-up, and between treatment and control groups. Findings reveal that the program increases the number of households with three or more books by 1.5 percentage points, from 1.5 percent of households to three percent of households. This effect holds for all subgroups except for small households. Children who grow up in households where books are available are likely to receive, on average, three more years of schooling than children from homes with no books. This relationship holds regardless of a caregiver's level of education, occupation or class, and it applies to rich and poor countries alike. However, the program has no effect on those who do not own any books prior to receiving the grant. For the full sample, the CGP impacts the child's ability to follow directions by 10.5 percentage points, with 65 percent of children in beneficiary households following directions. This study suggests that there is reason to believe that UCTs can affect early child development, and that more research should pursue this line of inquiry.
Teaching to the Tails: Teacher Performance Pay and the Distribution of Student Achievement
Author: Loyalka, Prashant
Date: 2015-00-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Foreign Countries,Merit Pay,Teacher Salaries,Developing Nations,Academic Achievement,Correlation,Outcomes of Education,Grade 6,Elementary School Students,Elementary School Teachers,Mathematics Teachers,Control Groups,Experimental Groups,Comparative Analysis,Incentives,Administrators,Administrator Surveys,Student Surveys,Teacher Surveys,Statistical Significance,Teacher Behavior

Growing evidence suggests that teachers in developing countries often have weak or misaligned incentives for improving student outcomes. In response, policymakers and researchers have proposed performance pay as a way to improve student outcomes by tying concrete measures like achievement scores to teacher pay. While evidence from randomized experiments generally indicates that performance pay programs are effective at improving student achievement in developing countries, there has been considerable variation in how much these programs affect student achievement. The goals of this study are to: (1) examine the impacts of different teacher performance pay designs on student achievement, both for the average student and for students across the baseline achievement distribution; and (2) examine the mechanisms through which different teacher performance pay designs affect student achievement (for the average student and for students across the baseline achievement distribution). The sample includes a total of 8,892 students and their grade 6 mathematics teachers from 216 schools from 16 nationally-designated &quot;poverty&quot; counties in Yulin Prefecture (Shaanxi Province) and Tianshi Prefecture (Gansu Province) in rural, northwest China. To test the impacts of the different teacher performance pay designs, researchers designed a cluster-randomized controlled trial. In this trial, schools were randomly allocated to 4 different treatment arms: (1) control--no teacher incentive pay; (2) levels incentive--performance pay contract stipulating rewards based on student achievement levels on endline tests; (3) gains incentive--performance pay contract based on student achievement gains from baseline and endline tests; and (4) pay-for-percentile incentive--performance pay contract stipulating rewards based on student growth percentiles. Surveys were used to collect information from the students, teachers, and school administrators. Findings reveal that: (1) Only &quot;pay-for-percentile&quot; incentives had a positive, statistically significant impact on average student achievement; (2) Teacher incentives based on &quot;levels&quot; or &quot;gains&quot; were ineffective; (3) &quot;Gains&quot; incentives led teachers to only focus on certain types of students, which led to negligible learning (on average) across all students; and (4) Pay-for-percentile incentives led to score gains across all students (on average). The results of this study may have important implications for how Teacher Performance Pay Policy can be implemented in China and in other developing countries.
State Legislative Developments on Campus Sexual Violence: Issues in the Context of Safety
Author: Morse, Andrew
Date: 2015-12-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Student Personnel Services,Higher Education,School Safety,Violence,Sexual Abuse,Sexual Harassment,Weapons,State Legislation,Law Enforcement,Lawyers,State Policy

NASPA--Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education and Education Commission of the States (ECS) have partnered to address legislative developments and offer considerations for leaders in higher education and policy on two top-level safety issues facing the higher education community: campus sexual violence and guns on campus. The first in a series jointly released by NASPA and ECS, this publication looks at recent state legislation on campus sexual violence. By offering in-depth analyses of state legislation and framing key issues and considerations for leaders in higher education and policy across the states, NASPA and ECS look to support constructive dialogue toward effective action on campus safety. The following are appended: (1) State Legislation in the Four Primary Policy Areas: Enacted, 2013-2015; and (2) Four Primary Policy Areas by State: Legislation that Died or Was Vetoed, 2013-2015. A list of NASPA resources on campus sexual violence law and policy is included.
2020 Vision: Rethinking Budget Priorities under the LCFF
Author: Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE)
Date: 2014-04-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Educational Finance,Budgets,Funding Formulas,School Districts,Long Range Planning,Educational Improvement,Common Core State Standards,Expenditures,Time,Community Involvement,Information Systems,Technology Uses in Education,Professional Development,Teacher Recruitment,Elementary Secondary Education

After years of painful budget cuts, new revenues will begin to flow to California school districts in 2014. Thanks to the voters' approval of Proposition 30 and the adoption of the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), nearly all districts can expect budget increases over the next several years. In this report PACE offers guidance on research-based strategies for LCFF implementation. They begin with three key principles that must guide any long-term strategy for improvement in California's education system. PACE then identifies four key areas for the investment of new resources where research suggests that additional spending can produce real gains in the performance of schools and students.
School Finance Reform: Can It Support California's College- and Career-Ready Goal? Report 2
Author: Perry, Mary
Date: 2013-02-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Finance Reform,Educational Finance,Educational Objectives,Career Readiness,College Readiness,Policy Analysis,Educational Policy,State Policy,Funding Formulas,School District Autonomy,Student Needs,Accountability,Academic Persistence,Incentives,Resource Allocation,Government Role,State Government

For decades, when California's state leaders have wanted to see local school districts respond to shifts in policy and expectations they relied on the state-controlled school finance system to leverage local change. Through the use of categorical programs and earmarked funding, they created incentives for districts that complied and penalties for those that did not. The result: a school finance system that has been roundly criticized as irrational, inequitable, excessively complicated, overly centralized, and inefficient at allocating resources. In 2012, Governor Jerry Brown proposed to transform California's school finance policies by introducing a new funding formula that would give local districts more control over their funding and provide additional funds to school districts based on student need. Despite broad consensus that school finance reform is needed the Legislature declined to act on the Governor's proposal. As the 2013 legislative session begins, the governor is once again proposing K-12 finance reform. In broad strokes, his proposed Local Control Funding Formula would provide a uniform base amount for each student a school district serves, adjusted by grade span, and with extra funding based on student needs. (See box below.) Intended both to simplify the state's approach to school district funding and to give more control and flexibility to local education leaders, the proposal raises a number of challenging questions that are examined in this report: (1) How can the state balance its need to create a school finance system that is more rational and transparent with its interest in better results for all students?; (2) Is it possible to provide funding with few or no strings attached and still have meaningful incentives and accountability systems that result in improved local educational practices and student outcomes?; and (3) What changes in how state policymakers allocate funds to local education agencies would most effectively further their aspirational goals for schools?
Improving the Opportunities and Outcomes of California's Students Learning English: Findings from School District-University Collaborative Partnerships. Policy Brief 15-1
Author: Umansky, Ilana M.
Date: 2015-10-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: English Language Learners,Educational Opportunities,Outcomes of Education,Educational Policy,Educational Practices,College School Cooperation,Partnerships in Education,Classification,Data Collection,Information Utilization,Access to Education,Core Curriculum,Bilingual Education,Teacher Education,Elementary Secondary Education

Recent policy changes in California's education system have opened up a unique opportunity to improve educational opportunities for the state's 1.4 million English learner students (ELs). The implementation of new state standards including new English Language Development standards will require major changes in teaching and learning for all students including ELs, while the Local Control Funding Formula gives districts that educate large numbers of ELs additional resources to improve the services that they provide. To take full advantage of these opportunities policymakers and educators should rely on the best available evidence to shape state and district policies and to inform classroom instructional practice for EL students. In this policy brief, Ilana Umansky and her co-authors review research findings from three university-school district research partnerships and present recommendations for changes in policy and practice to expand opportunities for EL students. They draw three main conclusions. First, California must improve the ways in which students who need language supports are classified and reclassified, in order to improve alignment across districts in the state, and alignment between classification and services. Second, state and local officials must become more systematic in how data on ELs are collected and used, by tracking students' progress over longer time periods and by including all students who were ever ELs in accountability metrics. Finally, and most importantly, the state must improve ELs' educational opportunities in school by expanding access to core content, bilingual instruction, and well-prepared teachers. Changes along these lines would not necessarily require large new investments, but they could yield substantial benefits for large numbers of California students.
Effect of Items Direction (Positive or Negative) on the Reliability in Likert Scale. Paper-11
Author: Gul, Showkeen Bilal Ahmad
Date: 2015-11-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Likert Scales,Test Reliability,Test Items,Undergraduate Students,Student Attitudes,Foreign Countries

In this paper an attempt was made to analyze the effect of items direction (positive or negative) on the Alpha Cronbach reliability coefficient and the Split Half reliability coefficient in Likert scale. The descriptive survey research method was used for the study and sample of 510 undergraduate students were selected by used random sampling technique. A scale developed by Sobhei Hamdan &amp; Mohammed Jehad (2007) was used by the investigator to access attitude of students towards undergraduate study. The findings of the study revealed that: (1) there is no effect of items direction (positive, negative, half positive and half negative and randomly) on the Alpha Cronbach reliability coefficients in Likert scale, and (2) the results also indicated that there is no effect of items direction (positive, negative, half positive and half negative and randomly) on the Spilt Half reliability coefficients in Likert scale.