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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration

Selected Works

2009

Learning

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Teaching Students And Teaching Each Other: The Importance Of Peer Learning For Teachers, Clement (Kirabo) Jackson, Elias Bruegmann Sep 2009

Teaching Students And Teaching Each Other: The Importance Of Peer Learning For Teachers, Clement (Kirabo) Jackson, Elias Bruegmann

C. Kirabo Jackson

Using student examination data linked to longitudinal teacher personnel data, we document that a teacher’s students have larger test score gains when she experiences an improvement in the observable characteristics of her colleagues. Using within-school and within-teacher variation, we further show that a teacher’s students have larger test score gains when she has more effective colleagues (based on their own students’ achievement gains from an out-of-sample pre-period). A one standard deviation increase in average teacher peer quality is associated with an increase of 0.02 and 0.04 standard deviations in student test score growth in reading and math respectively (about one …


Book Review 19 The Third Chapter By Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, William C. Mcpeck Feb 2009

Book Review 19 The Third Chapter By Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, William C. Mcpeck

William C. McPeck

This is my personal review of the book The Third Chapter by Sara Lawrence Lighfoot which was published in 2009 by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.


Disasters, Lessons Learned, And Fantasy Documents, Thomas Birkland Dec 2008

Disasters, Lessons Learned, And Fantasy Documents, Thomas Birkland

Thomas A Birkland

This article develops a general theory of why post-disaster ‘lessons learned’ documents are often ‘fantasy documents’. The article describes the political and organizational barriers to effective learning from disasters, and builds on general theory building on learning from extreme events to explain this phenomenon. Fantasy documents are not generally about the ‘real’ causes and solutions to disasters; rather, they are generated to prove that some authoritative actor has ‘done something’ about a disaster. Because it is difficult to test whether learning happened after an extreme event, these post-disaster documents are generally ignored after they are published.