Education Commons^™

Team Learning: A Pilot Study, Brooke A. Whitworth, Robert Evans, Terry Howerton

Publications

Teachers must put effort, creativity, and ingenuity into the science classroom and curriculum in order to ensure the material will remain fresh and interesting for the students and for themselves. In one case an organic chemistry teacher used a “Team Learning” method in order to keep the material stimulating for his students and to overcome some of the difficulties teachers face (Dinan & Frydrychowski, 1995). This experiment in new curriculum involved using teams over the course of a semester to teach the required material.

Dinan and Frydrychowski (1995) found that this method seemed to increase the effectiveness of learning and …

Multimedia And Engaged Reading In A Digital World, David Reinking

Publications

Anyone who has spent more than a few minutes “surfing the ‘net” has an intuitive awareness of how different it feels to encounter textual information in a digital as opposed to a typographic environment. The inert features of the printed page that make reading essentially a solitary psycholinguistic process and only incidentally a visual one, as Goodman argued many years ago, are transformed on the computer screen to make reading more dynamic, more interactive, more essentially visual, and even auditory. In comparison, the experience of reading printed materials, especially books, as Richard Lanham (1993) has argued, is static, silent, introspective, …

Schools On Probation In The States Of Maryland And Kentucky. Technical Report. Volumes I-Iv, Heinrich Mintrop, James Cibulka, Jane Clark Lindle

Publications

This study on accountability designs for underperforming schools focuses on probation as a tool for policy. Findings are based on the analysis of state performance data, the reading of approximately 100 school improvement plans, and the study of 11 focal schools in Maryland and Kentucky. Test-score data from Maryland show that probation is associated with an initial reversal of decline in the worst performing schools that fades out in subsequent years. Teachers in the 11 schools fundamentally do not buy into the accountability system. Low job commitment diminishes the threat of low-performance penalties. Many teachers were skeptical about the goals, …

Teaching And Learning Reform: Curriculum, The Kentucky Department Of Education, & The Educational Professional Standards Board, Jane Clark Lindle

Publications

For explanatory purposes, the 1990 Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) is generally divided into three major clusters of initiatives: finance, curriculum, and governance. As explained elsewhere in this volume, the systemic complexity of KERA makes any divisions of its initiatives, artificial, and ultimately, insufficient, in describing the decade-old scope of Kentucky’s radical education reforms (Rinehart & Lindle, 1997; Steffy, 1993). For the purposes of this retrospective review of research, this chapter was designed to focus on the very heart of KERA’s purpose, the improvement of teaching and learning. For that reason, this chapter addresses a teaching-learning-oriented KERA initiative, curriculum, and …

School Based Decision Making, Jane Clark Lindle

Publications

The 1989 Task Force on Education Reform adopted 12 systemic principles used in drafting the 1990 Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA). One of the principles formed the basis for School Based Decision Making (SBDM). It stated: "School accountability and school-based authority are two intertwined parts of the same proposition" (Foster, 1999; Task Force on Education Reform, 1989, p. 2). In other words, once the Task Force selected schools as the unit for the commonwealth's new accountability and assessment system, the General Assembly agreed that schools should have statutory authority to plan and make policy addressing achievement of accountability goals. The …