Education Commons^™

Paths To Quality: A Child Care Quality Rating System For Indiana. What Is It's Scientific Basis?, James Elicker

Center for Families Publications

Paths to QUALITY is Indiana’s new statewide child care quality rating system (QRS), first implemented in 2008. The main components of most state QRS programs are: 1) a set of quality standards that apply to home-based and center-based child care; 2) a process for objectively assessing child care quality and maintaining accountability; 3) a system of training and technical assistance to help child care providers improve quality; 4) incentives to encourage providers to reach higher levels of quality; and 5) public information to inform parents about what the QRS is and how to use it when they make child care …

Celebrating Teachers’ Voices, Ayesha Bashiruddin

Book Chapters / Conference Papers

No abstract provided.

Reducing The Effects Of Bullying Among Aboriginal Children Living In Rural Western Australia: Annual Report, Child Health Promotion Research Unit, Edith Cowan University

Research outputs pre 2011

It is unknown how Aboriginal children and adults conceptualize childhood bullying and what school/community intervention programs are appropriate. The Solid Kids, Solid Schools project will use a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods to develop culturally informed and determined understandings of bullying among Aboriginal children. These understandings can then be used to formatively develop a sustainable school and community-based bullying prevention and reduction program with strategies identified by Aboriginal people for use in schools in the Yamaji region or Midwest, Murchison Education District of Western Australia.

According to the funding proposal a Steering Committee was established to provide project …

Acer 2006-2007 Annual Report, Australian Council For Educational Research (Acer)

ACER Annual Reports

No abstract provided.

Social Constructivist E-Learning: A Case Study, Michael K. Barbour, Peter Rich

Education Faculty Publications

This paper considers the use of Knowledge Forum to complete a curriculum-based project with students enrolled in asynchronous, web-based Advanced Placement courses in Canada and the United States. Knowledge Forum is an online database that promotes written interaction in a social constructivist environment. The paper looks at how students utilized the system to enhance learning, more so than traditional environments, at both lower-order and higher-order levels.

Critical Thinking And Evidence-Based Practice In Problem-Based Learning Tutorial Groups: A Critical Case Study, Joanne M. Bortone

Occupational Therapy Faculty Publications

Little research has investigated how problembased learning (PBL) instruction influences students' critical thinking and evidence-based practice. This research sought to ascertain if PBL instructional practices facilitated critical thinking and EBP; identify those practices; and, identify changes students made in tutorials.

A qualitative, twocase, critical case study design used pretest and posttests of the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (CCTST) (Facione, 1990) and Self-Evaluation of EBP adapted from Straus et al. (2005) to select the critical case sample. Students who made the greatest gains from pre to posttest scores met selection criteria for the critical case sample and were invited to …

Practicing Civility In The Legal Writing Course: Helping Law Students Learn Professionalism, Sophie M. Sparrow

Law Faculty Scholarship

This Article suggests some concrete ways to teach civility— one component of professionalism—to law students. Professionalism certainly includes much more than civility, incorporating the concepts of ethics, morals, public service, life-long learning, personal integrity, professional identity, and a commitment to selfdevelopment. This Article begins with a brief overview of civility in Part I. Part II provides a few of the many arguments for why we should teach law students to be civil. Part III explores some concrete ways in which we can teach civility within individual classes, using the dynamics of student engagement in the classroom as an opportunity to …

Student Use Of, And Engagement With, Information Technology, John Ainley, Laura Engers

Digital learning research

The emergence of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has changed the nature of the learning environments experienced by school students. ... The connection between the learner and the learning environment is central to understanding how virtual learning environments motivate or engage students... The research literature on engagement in general has distinguished between three forms of engagement; behavioural, emotional and cognitive. These distinctions provide a means by which students? engagement with information technology can be described. Behavioural engagement refers to participation (both how much and in what forms) in technology-related activities. In this context behavioural engagement pre-supposes opportunities to engage with …

National Assessment Program : Ict Literacy Years 6 & 10 Report 2005, John Ainley, Julian Fraillon, Chris Freeman, Ministerial Council On Education, Employment, Training And Youth Affairs (Mceetya)

ICT - Digital Literacy

Australia's national goals for schooling assert that when students leave school they should be: confident, creative and productive users of new technologies, particularly information and communication technologies, and understand the impact of those technologies on society. The Australian National Assessment Program includes the systematic assessment of the extent to which this goal is being achieved through triennial sample surveys of students in Years 6 and 10. This report is based on the assessment of ICT literacy conducted in October 2005. It describes the development of a computer-based tool for assessing ICT literacy among school students and the application of that …

Best Practices In Writing Assessment, Robert C. Calfee, Roxanne Greitz Miller

Education Faculty Books and Book Chapters

Our assignment in this chapter is to discuss best practices in writing assessment, a task that poses a twofold challenge for teachers-first, the task of providing authentic opportunities for students to acquire skill in writing while covering an ever-increasing array of other curriculum demands; second, the overriding pressures to ensure that students perform well on the standardized tests that have become the primary accountability index. As we complete this chapter, few state testing systems rely to any significant degree on performance tests for measuring student achievement. Multiple-choice tests dominate, and on-demand writing tests (including the SAT) generally contravene the counsel …

Research On The Progressive Achievement Tests And Academic Achievement In Schools, Gerard Fogarty

Assessment and Reporting

This report presents three studies examining research conducted in Queensland on Progressive Achievement Tests (PAT) published by Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER). In study 1 ‘Predictive Validity of the Progressive Achievement Tests for Boys’, a battery of tests was used to assess vocabulary, comprehension, and numeracy skill levels of students commencing study at a regional high school. The tests were used as a screening tool to identify students who might benefit from additional instruction and also to select high achieving students for participation in extension work, maths competitions, and the like. Test results were later correlated with performance in …

Teacher Assessment As Policy Instrument: Contradictions And Capacities, Constant Leung, Pauline Rea-Dickins

Institute for Educational Development, East Africa

Assessment has been at center stage of educational reform in England and Wales in the past 15 years. This article argues that official educational assessment policy is essentially indifferent to the technical, pedagogic, and epistemological issues related to different forms of assessment. Policymakers are primarily concerned with “delivering” educational success in terms of reportable rising levels of attainment. The first part of this article provides a contextualized account of the use of assessment as an educational policy instrument and some of the consequences for pedagogy and curriculum provision. Our focal point here is on the assessment of English within the …

Impact Of Extra-Curricular Activities On Adolescents' Connectedness And Cigarette Smoking: Final Report, Margaret Hall, Greg Hamilton, Therese Shaw, Donna Cross, Tommy Cordin, Leanne Lester, Stacey Waters

Research outputs pre 2011

In Australia, cigarette smoking is still the leading cause of preventable death and yet in the past 10 years, despite efforts that have been made in the classroom and through the media, there have been limited reductions in adolescent smoking. The Extra-curricular Project builds on the work of two other projects conducted by researchers from the Child Health Promotion Research Centre (CHPRC). The Smoking Cessation for Youth Project (SCYP), conducted by the Western Australian Centre for Health Promotion Research, led to the identification of connectedness as a key mediator of cigarette smoking. The role of extra-curricular activities in mediating school …

Investigating Student Understanding Of Sound As A Longitudinal Wave, Earl C. Coombs

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The field of physics education research (PER) has highlighted the discrepancy between what is taught during traditional instruction in physics, and what students understand afterward. PER has also provided alternatives to traditional instruction that are research-based and have been shown to be more effective in bringing students’ level of understanding of physics more in line with that of the scientific community. One topic that has received attention is the propagation of sound. We confirmed that students in the introductory algebra-based and calculus-based physics courses at the University of Maine have difficulties with sound propagation similar to those documented by others. …

Pedagogical Agents As Social Models To Influence Learner Attitudes, Yanghee Kim, A. Baylor

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications

Based on social-cognitive theory, we describe the role of pedagogical agents as “social models.” In several experimental studies we have found that pedagogical agents as social models can effectively persuade and motivate learners. We briefly describe two on-going projects where agents as social models are employed to enhance young women’s motivation and attitudes toward math and engineering.

Desirable Characteristics Of Learning Companions, Yanghee Kim

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications

This study investigated the desirable characteristics of anthropomorphized learning-companion agents for college students. First, interviews with six undergraduates explored their concepts of desirable learning companions. The interviews yielded agent competency, agent personality, and interaction control. Next, a controlled experiment examined whether learner competency (strong vs. weak) would relate directly to agent competency (high vs. low) and to interaction control (agent-control vs. learner-control). The dependent measures included learners' perceptions of agent functionality, their self-efficacy beliefs in the task, and their learning. The results indicated that academically strong students perceived the high-competent agent higher than the lowcompetent agent and showed higher self-efficacy …

The Development And Validation Of The Elementary School Ethical Climate Index, Kay Anne Keiser, Laura E. Schulte

Educational Leadership Faculty Publications

The purposes of this study were to develop and validate an instrument that measures the ethical climate of elementary schools. To create the Elementary School Ethical Climate Index (ESECI), we adapted the ethical climate index for middle and high schools. The ESECI assesses student and teacher interactions and relationships through the application of five ethical principles: respect for autonomy, nonmaleficence, beneficence, justice, and fidelity (Kitchener, 1984, 1985). To provide evidence of the ESECI’s reliability and validity we distributed the ESECI to the students and teachers/staff at one urban elementary school in a Midwestern city. There was a significant difference in …

You Don’T Always Get What You Want: Lessons To Be Learned From The Demise Of Maine’S Local Assessment System, Rebecca H. Berger

Maine Policy Review

The recent repeal of Maine’s local education assessment requirement was met with mixed reactions ranging from relief to outrage. That there were such differing responses points to the fact that “assessment” in education is understood in diverse and sometimes contradictory ways. In this article, Rebecca Berger looks retrospectively at how the problems associated with implementing Maine’s local assessment system (LAS) were caused by a lack of understanding of important aspects of assessment as it relates to standards-based reform in education. Using examples from her case study of one Maine school district, Berger notes three areas of ongoing concern: lack of …

Is School Wide Adoption Of Ict Change For The Better?, Katherine Dix

Shannon Research Press

The use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in schools is now an intrinsic part of students’ learning, both inside and outside the classroom. The adoption and impact of ICT on teaching practice and learning outcomes has been a source of keen interest among government policy makers, school leaders, teachers and researchers worldwide. Few empirical studies have been conducted in Australia, or worldwide, that focus on student attitudinal outcomes framed within a design-based paradigm that spans several years. The overarching purpose of this study is to investigate longitudinal change in school climate through its influence on students and teachers, during …

Text Categorization For Aligning Educational Standards, O. Yilmazel, N. Balasubramanian, S. C. Harwell, J. Bailey, Anne R. Diekama, E. D. Liddy

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications

Standard alignment (where standards describing similar concepts are correlated) is a necessary task in providing full access to educational resources. Manual alignment is time consuming and expensive. We propose an automatic alignment system, using machine learning techniques utilizing natural language processing. In this paper we discuss our experiments on text categorization for automatic alignment. We explore the role of relevant vocabulary sets in automatic alignment.

Designing Educational Games For Activity-Goal Alignment, Brett E. Shelton

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications

What indeed, can we expect from our newest trend in education, implementing moving pictures and conversations with instruction through simulation games? Lewis Carroll's familiar narratives Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass provide helpful imagery for many of the queries, explorations and assumptions we currently make about this latest Wonderland of academia. So what are the goals for the designers and researchers of educational games, or perhaps more importantly, what should be the goals?

Demystifying Survey Research: Practical Suggestions For Effective Question Design, Deborah H. Charbonneau

Library Scholarly Publications

Objective ‐Recent research has yielded several studies helpful for understanding the use of the survey technique in various library environments. Despite this, there has been limited discussion to guide library practitioners preparing survey questions. The aim of this article is to provide practical suggestions for effective questions when designing written surveys.

Methods ‐Advice and important considerations to help guide the process of developing survey questions are drawn from a review of the literature and personal experience.

Results ‐Basic techniques can be incorporated to improve survey questions, such as choosing appropriate question forms and incorporating the use of scales. Attention should …

Nclb Data-Driven Reform Movement: Contextualizing Data, Ramin Farahmandpur

Educational Leadership and Policy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Commentary on the article of Rosita L. Rivera Rodriguez, Leaving most Latino children behind: No Child Left Behind legislation, testing, and the misuse of data under George Bush administration, DataCrítica: International Journal of Critical Statistics, Vol 1, No 1 (2007). Rivera‐Rodriguez raises a series of important concerns for educators as it applies to the deleterious effects of educational policy in marginalized communities, such as the Latino population. To better understand the arguments the author places the No Child Left Behind Legislation (NCLB) within its broader context.

Evaluating Factors Contributing To Engineering Technology Students' Introductory Physics Experience, Daniel A. Reed

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The UMaine’s introductory algebra-based physics course PHY 107 is dedicated to students from the School of Engineering Technology (SET). These SET students come from a wide range of backgrounds and are studying a hybrid of curricula for an engineer and a technician with a leaning toward engineering. In order to appropriately serve this population we must attempt to understand who these students are. One of the legends surrounding this group is that their struggles with physics stem from having a lower level of mathematics ability than the typical introductory physics student. Through the use of a math diagnostic, the Force …

Learning For All: Alternative Models & Policy Options, Ash Hartwell

Center for International Education Faculty Publications

The greatest barrier to achieving the Millennium Development and Education for All goal of universal, quality primary education by 2015 is the inability of public education systems in the poorest countries to adequately reach and educate large segments of their populations .Not only are significant numbers of children underserved in terms of access to education, the public schooling that is provided fails to provide most who do attend with basic literacy and life skills. This failure has enormous consequences for national education systems, for countries’ human resources and economic development. However, complementary models for providing primary schooling, typically provided through …

Practice What You Preach : A Look At Retention Research And Classroom Practice, Angela R. Carpenter

Graduate Research Papers

This literature review examines the subject of grade level retention. A comprehensive overview of the history, trends, and current practices involving retention will provide the background to the research base. Looking at the common reasons students are retained and the short and long-term effects of retention decisions will help answer the question of whether retention research guides school practice. Alternative solutions that can be implemented in lieu of grade level retention or social promotion practices will also be addressed. The majority of grade level retention and social promotion researchers found the practices of retention and social promotion to be unfavorable. …

Quiet, Do Not Disturb: Prying Open The Door To Examine Our Worlds Of Testing And Assessment, Amma Akrofi, Carole Janisch, Mellinee Lesley, Robin Griffith, Xiaoming Liu

Essays in Education

Teacher educators recount their personal experiences related to testing and assessment. Through the examination of these experiences stemming from collegial conversations, the individuals have come to better understand the issues and challenges their university students, preservice and inservice teachers, will face in their classroom settings. Along with theory and research, the realities encountered by these individuals become “course capital.” The content of their current and future university literacy courses and assessment courses reflects their renewed emphasis on responsive and child-centered instruction as opposed to the untoward focus on testing.

What Now?: Evaluating Elearning Cpd Practice In Irish Third-Level Education, Roisin Donnelly, K. C. O'Rourke

Articles

The internet has made it impossible for higher education institutions to ignore technology in fulfilling their strategic mission and respond to the expectations of a diverse student body. In the Republic of Ireland, as elsewhere, the use of online technologies has become an increasingly important challenge in academic staff development, and on the surface, eLearning has been moderately successful in the teaching and learning environment. However, given the rapid rate of change in both technology and the increasing diversity in academic staff and students, to describe accurately the nature of eLearning for academic staff development is near impossible. There has …

From Pen To Paper : A Study Of The Dissertation As A Tool For Communicating Students' Understanding And Creative Abilities In The Maritime Social Science Context, Nang Arm Seng

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.

An Investigation Of The Impact Of The Success For All Whole-School Reform Model On The Elementary School Proficiency Assessment And The New Jersey Assessment Of Skills And Knowledge In An Urban District, Winston D. Jackson

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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