Education Commons^™

Testing The Knowledge Of Early Childhood Educators, Dianne S. Mccarthy

Journal of Inquiry and Action in Education

Teacher certification exams are supposed to assess if a student is likely to succeed in teaching. What if an exam seems to be inappropriate? This article is an inquiry of the New York State Content Specialty Test for Early Childhood Candidates, particularly the math section. It raises the issue of whether we are asking the right questions and ascertaining the right data to decide if someone has the appropriate math knowledge and is ready to teach math to young children.

Reinforcement Practicality For Middle School Students: A Meta-Analysis, Kelly C. Dreger Ed.D., Steve Downey Ph.D.

Journal of Inquiry and Action in Education

The need for evolving support interventions that can help students in a wide range of settings is an ongoing requirement for middle schools today. Token reinforcement, which is a form of extrinsic motivation and incentivization, is studied within this meta-analysis to determine if significant treatment effects exist overall and if there are studies that show more gains than others. Most studies report significant positive gains individually, but the statistical significance is lost when the studies are reviewed as a whole. Variables such as sample size requirements, treatment effect variation, and session time all influence treatment effect size. Reinforcement has been …

Learning While Building: Enhancing Opportunities For Teacher Candidate Development Within Professional Development Schools Through Programmatic Analysis, Valerie Widdall 7532451, Andrea Lachance, John M. Livermore

Journal of Inquiry and Action in Education

Abstract

This study investigated the impact of differing models of practicum placements on teacher candidates’ (TC’s) abilities to practice teaching skills and receive feedback on their teaching. Within the Professional Development School (PDS) model TCs were placed as cohorts in a single PDS site with at least one college faculty member assigned as a liaison, and within the Traditional model TCs were placed across a variety of schools without college faculty connected to the various school sites. Teacher candidates completed a survey with Likert scale and open-ended items to measure TCs’ perceptions of how much time they spent teaching lessons …

Data Diving Into “Noticing Poetry”: An Analysis Of Student Engagement With The “I Notice” Method, Scot Slaby, Jordan Benedict

Journal of Inquiry and Action in Education

This paper explores students’ engagement in reading poems, examining data on their self perceptions of their confidence and competence in reading poems before, during, and after using the “I Notice” methodology as adapted from The Academy of American Poets’ unit plan, “Noticing Poetry” (Slaby, 2017). The data was collected over the course of a month from January 9 through January 30, 2018 and involved five classes of one hundred general English tenth grade students across three teachers’ classrooms at Shanghai American School’s Puxi High School Campus. Data indicates that the “I Notice” method and the “Noticing Poetry” unit and its …

Conflicting Perspectives: A Comparison Of Edtpa Intended Outcomes To Actual Experiences Of Teacher Candidates And Educators In New York City Schools, Deborah Greenblatt

Journal of Inquiry and Action in Education

The edTPA is a performance-based assessment of teacher candidates created by the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning and Equity (SCALE) and nationally scored by Pearson Education. It is also promoted by American Association of Colleges of Teacher Educators (AACTE) as a “standards-based assessment.” As of the spring of 2018, the edTPA is used as a requirement for program accreditation or teacher candidate certification or program completion in 18 states.

This article analyzes the stated goals, objectives, and benefits made by SCALE and AACTE and compares them to data collected from interviews and open-ended questions with teacher candidates and teacher educators …

Value Added Models And The Implementation Of The National Standards Of K-12 Physical Education, Clancy M. Seymour, Mark J. Garrison

Journal of Inquiry and Action in Education

The implementation of value-added models of teacher evaluation continue to expand in public education, but the effects of using student test scores to evaluate K-12 physical educators necessitates further discussion. Using the five National Standards for K-12 Physical Education from the Society of Health and Physical Educators America (SHAPE), physical educators in New York State were polled about the most important goals of physical education and how value-added models may be affecting physical education practices. Participants were drawn using a proportionate stratified random sample (n=489). Standard 5 was selected as the most important by 36% of physical educators who responded, …

An Investigation Of The Development Of Pre-Service Teacher Assessment Literacy Through Individualized Tutoring And Peer Debriefing, Dennis Murphy Odo

Journal of Inquiry and Action in Education

Many pre-service teachers lack deep understanding of assessment concepts and have low self-efficacy for using assessments but pre-service on-campus programs have been shown to support their assessment literacy development. Likewise, individualized tutoring has helped pre-service candidates improve instructional practice and peer debriefing has been found to help push their thinking. However, questions remain regarding the usefulness of these techniques to develop candidates’ assessment literacy. The primary aim of this exploratory qualitative study was to describe pre-service teachers’ perceptions of assessment literacy and the process of their assessment literacy development during a literacy assessment class containing an individualized tutoring component. Five …

Critical Thinking Skills And Academic Maturity: Emerging Results From A Five-Year Quality Enhancement Plan (Qep) Study, Ian N. Toppin, Shadreck Chitsonga

Journal of Inquiry and Action in Education

The QEP that was implemented in this study focused on enhancing students’ critical thinking skills. A pretest/ posttest approach was used to assess students’ critical thinking progress in freshman level core English and Math courses. An intervention was performed involving intensive instruction and assignments relating to a set of reasoning strategies such as: analytical, analogical, inductive, deductive, and comparative reasoning, among others. When students performed well on assignments by applying the reasoning strategies, it was assumed that critical thinking occurred. However, pre/ posttest results in these classes were often disappointing, and seemed at times to suggest that freshmen are not …

Teachers’ Opinions On Teacher Preparation: A Gap Between College And Classroom, Jason Ashley

Journal of Inquiry and Action in Education

Teacher preparation evaluation has expanded rapidly since 1998, pushed by “failing” rhetoric adopted by many educational leaders, such as Michelle Rhee, founder of the Students First organization. Led by the ideas and arguments put forth by Diane Ravitch, others think that there is too much focus on red herrings and that there are, in fact, problems with the educational system, but not the ones with which decision and policy makers have become enamored. Despite this dichotomy, the former group is prevailing, giving the American education system a narrative of inadequacy and failure, and making the idea of data driven evaluation, …

Differentiating Writing Instruction: Meeting The Diverse Needs Of Authors In A Classroom, Mary Shea

Journal of Inquiry and Action in Education

Abstract

The proposed article, Differentiating writing instruction: Meeting the diverse needs of authors in a classroom, begins with an explanation of the concept of differentiated instruction as a basis and another term for responsive teaching. This involves writing instruction that is sensitive to the diversity of students’ individual strengths and needs and reacts to these factors in a timely manner with targeted instruction. The practice of responsive teaching — teaching differentially — is also the foundation of RTI (response to intervention) structures, currently developing in schools across the U.S. as a result of the national mandate. However, responsive teaching …

Right From The Start: A Kindergarten Program That Helps Prevent Reading Failure, Mary E. Shea D., Ardith D. Cole

Journal of Inquiry and Action in Education

This article describes a study conducted with kindergarten classrooms in a suburban elementary school with a relatively diverse population. The researchers were the building literacy specialist and a college instructor teaching a Foundations of Reading course for pre-service teachers on-site at the school. The traditional curriculum in these kindergarten classrooms was infused with developmentally appropriate reading and writing experiences that had a significant impact on children’s literacy achievement as well as teachers’ beliefs on what constitutes appropriate kindergarten literacy activities, instruction, and classroom resources.