Education Commons^™

Addressing The Needs Of All Learners: The Art Of Accommodation, Angelica Lynn Garnett

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Schools in Kentucky identify gifted students at a young age. Those students are labeled and should be provided with services based on their gifts throughout their educational career. It is the teacher’s duty to provide these services in their individual classrooms. This becomes progressively difficult as the student increases in grade level. Supporting teachers in their ability to recognize and manage the different levels in their classrooms does not always happen. The research question of this study focuses on how teachers meet the academic needs of gifted students in their classrooms in middle and secondary schools.

Participants included forty-four teachers …

Deep Impact: How A Job-Embedded Formative Assessment Professional Development Model Affected Teacher Practice, Thomas A. Stewart, Gary Houchens

Educational Administration, Leadership, and Research Faculty Publications

This study supports the work of Black and Wiliam (1998), who demonstrated that when teachers effectively utilize formative assessment strategies, student learning increases significantly. However, the researchers also found a “poverty of practice” among teachers, in that few fully understood how to implement classroom formative assessment. This qualitative case study examined a series of voluntary workshops offered at one middle school designed to address this poverty of practice. Data were gathered via semi-structured interviews. These research questions framed the study: (1) What role did a professional learning community structure play in shaping workshop participants’ perceived effectiveness of a voluntary formative …

Meeting The Needs Of Gifted Students By Providing Year-Long Professional Development On Differentiated Instruction, Barbara M. Rollins

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This study focused on how teachers' planning and teaching methods changed after they acquired more confidence in applying differentiated strategies in their instructional units. Teachers were given a questionnaire about their skills, qualifications and teaching beliefs comparing teaching general education students and gifted education students within the typical classroom setting. Then teachers received several professional development opportunities within the school year exposing them to different forms of differentiation. Time was given between trainings so that teachers would have ample time to integrate what they learned into their planning and instructional design. At the end of the study, teachers were given …