Google Scholar provides citation metrics

Google announced today that they have made citation metrics available to scholars: http://googlescholar.blogspot.com/2011/11/google-scholar-citations-open-to-all.html
According to the announcement, this free service is “a simple way for authors to compute their citation metrics and track them over time...”
This will provide an additional path to track citation impact, and is similar to services provided by Scopus database and Web of Knowledge.

Open Acces mandate from IES, effective FY 2012

There is now a mandate for any IES funded research publications to be made publicly available in ERIC. This follows similar mandates from NHS.
"Beginning in FY 2012, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) requires its grantees to submit their peer-reviewed research publications to the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC). Investigators are to submit the electronic version of their final manuscripts upon acceptance for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The author's final manuscript is defined as the final version accepted for journal publication, and includes all modifications from the peer review process. Posting for public accessibility through ERIC is strongly encouraged as soon as possible but must be within 12 months of the publisher's official date of final publication."

Additional information is here: http://ies.ed.gov/funding/researchaccess.asp

Should we be teaching citation styles??

I thought a compelling argument to postpone the insistence on utilization of citation styles for writing projects was put forth in this article, "Citation Obsession? Get Over It," by Kurt Schick in today's (Nov. 2, 2011) Chronicle. I have excerpted some key ideas...

• "Citation style remains the most arbitrary, formulaic, and prescriptive element of academic writing taught in American high schools and colleges. Now a sacred academic shibboleth, citation persists despite the incredibly high cost-benefit ratio of trying to teach students something they (and we should also) recognize as relatively useless to them as developing writers.
•  ...the uneven quality of information available online makes it more important for writers to know how to evaluate the worth of their sources than how to parse pedantic rules and display their expertise in footnoting.
• What I advocate here is not to dispense with teaching students how to use sources but rather to abandon our fixation on the form rather than the function of source attribution.
•  The intricacies and formalities of citation become useful to scholars only when they publish their work. Until then, they need a bookkeeping system to keep track of where they found things (a system that others might later use to retrace their steps), and some means of attributing their sources and thus establishing the credibility of information for their audiences. More than anything, source attribution enables students—who, by virtue of being students, don't yet know much about a subject—to borrow knowledge and ethos from those who do. It's just about that simple.
•  Citation contents are virtually the same across styles and disciplines: author's name(s), title(s), publication information....Why, then, could we not simply ask students to include a list of references with the essential information? Why couldn't we wait to infect them with citation fever until they are ready to publish (and then hand them the appropriate style guide...
•  We could then reinvest time wasted on formatting to teach more-important skills like selecting credible sources, recognizing bias or faulty arguments, paraphrasing and summarizing effectively, and attributing sourced information persuasively and responsibly.
• If anything, we should abandon trivial roadblocks so that students can write more often in more classes. Recent research demonstrates how effectively and efficiently writing can improve comprehension of content in any discipline. Writing also enables students to practice analysis, synthesis, and other skills that constitute critical, creative, and even civic thinking. If writing provides one of our best means to enhance learning outcomes across the curriculum, then more writing equals more learning. Why would we design writing assignments with obstacles that discourage students from learning?"

A small bright spot for Nevada in newest NAEP

An article in today's (Nov. 1, 2011) Education Week notes that, "Nevada registered statistically significant gains in both 8th grade reading and math compared with 2009, in both cases climbing 4 points. The state also saw 2-point gains in 4th grade reading and math, but neither was deemed statistically significant.
Keith W. Rheault, Nevada’s superintendent of public instruction, who was invited to comment on this year’s results at a press conference scheduled for this morning, said in prepared remarks that he was pleased to see the gains in his state, especially amid challenging economic times."
Given that the educational news about Nevada is usually so grim, I thought it worth a mention. Recent NAEP data is here: http://www.nationsreportcard.gov/

NCSER releases training videos for NLTS2 users...

The National Center for Special Education Research has released video training modules for the National Longitudinal Transition Study-2 (NLTS2). The NLTS2 data training modules are intended to be a resource to researchers who would like to use the NLTS2 dataset to conduct research addressing students with disabilities.
Links to all videos are here: http://ies.ed.gov/ncser/projects/nlts2/training.asp

Blackboard is learning to share...

Here's an excerpt from an article in today's (Oct. 19, 2011) Chronicle of Higher Ed...
"
Professors who use Blackboard’s software have long been forced to lock their course materials in an area effectively marked, “For Registered Students Only,” while using the system. Today the company announced plans to add a “Share” button that will let professors make those learning materials free and open online.
The move may be the biggest sign yet that the idea of “open educational materials” is going mainstream, nearly 10 years after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology first began giving away lecture notes online. Blackboard made the change after college officials complained that the company’s software, which more than half the colleges in the country use for their online-course materials, was holding them back from trying open-education projects."

New source of school district data

I will also add this to the Statistics tab of the Education research guide, although at this point, no Nevada data is included.
School Attendance Boundary Information System (SABINS)

Free aggregate census data and GIS-compatible boundary files for school attendance areas, or school catchment areas, for selected areas in the United States for the 2009-2010 school year. Includes:

• grade-specific school attendance areas for thousands of school districts
  in the United States
• 2010 Redistricting data for the school attendance areas
• crosswalks linking the school attendance areas to the National Center for Education Statistics' Common Core of Data

Developed by the Minnesota Population Center of the
University of Minnesota.

Updated longitudinal data on high school completion/dropouts (1972-2009)

"This report updates a series of NCES reports on high school dropout and completion rates that began in 1988. The report includes national and regional population estimates for the percentage of students who dropped out of high school between 2008 and 2009, the percentage of young people who were dropouts in 2009, and the percentage of young people who were not in high school and had some form of high school credential in 2009. Data are presented by a number of characteristics including race/ethnicity, sex, and age. Annual data for these population estimates are provided for the 1972-2009 period. Information about the high school class of 2009 is also presented in the form on on-time graduation rates from public high schools."
For the class of 2008-09, Nevada still leads the way with the lowest state averaged freshman graduation rates (AFGR) for public school students at 56.3% -- nearly 6% below the next worst performer, Mississippi.

Links to full report is here: http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2012006

Dropout prevention programs in public schools: 2010-11

A joint report from NCES and IES provides "national data about how public school districts identify students at risk of dropping out, programs used specifically to address the needs of students at risk of dropping out of school, the use of mentors for at-risk students, and efforts to encourage dropouts to return to school."
"The estimates presented in this report are based on a district survey about dropout prevention services and programs offered by the district or by any of the schools in the district during the 2010–11 school year."
The full report is linked here: http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2011037

America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2011

The new report fro ChildStats is available here: http://childstats.gov/
This data-rich interagency report (including contributions from NCES) provides information on areas including health, education, economics, demographics and families.

Minority gaps narrow for some grades in latest geography scores

The Nation's Report Card: Geography 2010 is now available and show somewhat smaller gaps between scores for Hispanics and whites (grade 4) and between Black and white students (grades 4 and 8). Overall, average scores were not significantly changed from 2001 (the last national assessment) for grades 8 and 12.
Links to the newest report are here: http://nationsreportcard.gov/

2010 IDEA National Assessment Implementation Study

"This congressionally mandated study provides a national picture of state agency implementation of early intervention programs for infants and toddlers (IDEA Part C) and both state and school district implementation of special education programs for preschool- and school-age children (IDEA Part B). "
Links to an executive summary and the final report are here: http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20114026/

Math & vocabulary performance of children receiving preschool Special Ed

A Longitudinal View of the Receptive Vocabulary and Math Achievement of Young Children with Disabilities, was released by the National Center for Special Education Research and is available for download at: http://ies.ed.gov/ncser/pubs/20113006/
The report "describe[s] how children who received preschool special education services perform over time on assessments of receptive vocabulary and math skills. It also describes how their receptive vocabulary and math performance vary over time by primary disability category."

2011 Condition of Education (NCES) now available as e-book

Download your own copy of this benchmark annual study which "presents 50 indicators on the status and condition of education... in five main areas: (1) participation in education; (2) learner outcomes; (3) student effort and educational progress; (4) the contexts of elementary and secondary education; and (5) the contexts of postsecondary education."
Free download available for all e-readers.  http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2011033

Princeton challenges publishers' stranglehold on copyrights

Princeton has now mandated open access  for all their faculty scholarship, by prohibiting faculty from signing away copyrights to journal publishers. There is a loophole of course--faculty can request a waiver--but the move is in the right direction to make scholarship more widely available. The story, with links to Princeton's open access policy (adopted Sept. 19, 2011) is here.

Shortage of PhD's in Special Education predicted...

A note in the Chronicle (Sept. 14, 2011) summarizes this report from the Special Education Faculty Needs Assessment project at Claremont Graduate University, "Assessing Trends in Leadership: Special Education’s Capacity to Produce a Highly Qualified Workforce." They suggest that, "Not enough people are getting Ph.D.’s in special education, which could result in a shortage of qualified special-education faculty members...one-half to two-thirds of special-education faculty will retire within the next five years, which could leave 300 students with disabilities underserved for each missing faculty member."

Learning Styles: A Common Misconception?

This video by neuroscientist/cognitive psychologist Daniel T. Willingham (U. of Virginia) suggests teachers do NOT need to change what they do to accommodate different learning styles...

Then there was this article from the Dec. 15, 2009 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, "Matching Teaching Style to Learning Style May Not Help Students." Quoting Pashler and colleagues, "We were startled to find that there is so much research published on learning styles, but that so little of the research used experimental designs that had the potential to provide decisive evidence." They are not asserting that people don't have preferences, but that those preferences are not the primary driver of how well students learn. In fact, different types of material are more effectively taught in different ways, and the important teaching strategy is to determine that--i.e., "matching style with content"--rather than  accommodating multiple student learning styles. Learning styles advocate and researcher Robert Sternberg disagrees with their conclusions, but David Kolb, one of the earliest proponents of learning styles, "says that the paper's bottom line is probably correct: There is no strong evidence that teachers should tailor their instruction to their students' particular learning styles."

All this consideration was prompted by a recent (Aug. 29, 2011) piece on NPR's "Morning Edition." "Think You'e an Auditory or Visual Learner? Scientists Say It's Unlikely" revisits both the Pasher, et al. literature review and the work by Willingham to conclude that the evidence just isn't there.
What do you think and teach about using learning styles in the classroom?

Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3), 105-119.

APA clarifies its position on providing data to "discovery" tools

According to Linde Beebe, Senior Director of PsycInfo, in the latest issue of PsycInfo News (Aug. 2011):
"To clarify what appears to be confusing and even misleading information in the marketplace, we wish to make it absolutely clear what APA content is available through discovery services.
APA has not provided any metadata from PsycINFO^® to any service, nor does the organization have any plans to do so at this time. With more than 3.1 million records from as early as 1597, PsycINFO is the only source for literature that covers the breadth and depth of psychology and related disciplines...

Comparing search results for common psychological constructs in PsycINFO with those in discovery services very quickly demonstrates the dramatic difference in what the searches yield. Any claims to the contrary in discovery service sales and marketing communications should be viewed with skepticism.
Researchers and students with no access to PsycINFO will miss a very large percentage of content in almost any area. And they will not have the advantages of the precision PsycINFO offers them in refining their search. The only way to get the content in PsycINFO is through a site license or purchase of a daily pass.
Metadata only for APA's full-text databases PsycARTICLES^®... currently are included in the indexes of four major discovery services:

• EBSCO Discovery Service from EBSCO
• Primo from Ex Libris
• Summon from Serials Solutions [the one being used at UNLV Libraries]
• WorldCat Local from OCLC

APA has collaborated with these services to enable our customers to find full text more easily. Our agreements with the services stipulate that users will link from the services to our full text only if they are authorized users of an institution that has a current APA site license agreement...
We have collaborated with discovery services to provide an additional service to our customers for full text. In no way, however, should our collaboration be viewed as a potential replacement for the APA databases themselves."

So, just a reminder that, although Summon will find lots of material, it doesn't search everything!

Digital Etiquette policies in the classroom

You've all run into problems I'm guessing with students inappropriately using technology in the classroom so I thought you might be interested in this short discussion and sample policy in today's "Chronicle."  I especially liked this suggestion from the "Comments" that followed the article,

"After hearing a few students walking across campus engaged in a bitter analysis of a professor who banned laptops, I now ask my students, each semester, to devise their own policy on classroom etiquette (including: cell phones, laptops, eating, talking while others are talking, responding to those with whom they disagree, lateness--mine or theirs). This works much better than imposing rules, for students discover that other students are in the majority very disapproving of classroom incivilities. For example, students dislike the smell and crackling of food, the spilling of drinks, the distractions of laptop screens tuned to non-class materials, and the rude, distracting behavior of students and teachers who arrive late for class. Peer consensus is always far more powerful and persuasive than a teacher's impositions and, to my surprise, students are always more conservative than I would be."

Information Literacy Standards for Teacher Education published

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) published Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education in 2000, which were subsequently incorporated into many accrediting bodies' benchmarks. Since that time, work has been underway to develop discipline specific standards, and those for teacher education have just been published. "The Information Literacy Standards for Teacher Education provides a bridge between the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education (2000) and the application of the information literacy standards in teacher education contexts" (Cook & Cooper, 2006).
According to the committee that drafted and revised the standards,
"The main purposes of the Information Literacy Standards for Teacher Education are to:

• Guide teacher education faculty and instruction librarians in developing information literacy instruction for teacher education students.
• Enable the evaluation and assessment of such instruction and curricula through benchmarking outcomes.

Secondarily, the Standards aim to communicate to teacher education students expectations for information literacy knowledge and skills they need to develop and apply in their academic work and pre-service teaching. The Standards also aim to lead teacher education students to consider how they might integrate information literacy into their future curriculum, instruction, and assessment activities once a member of the teaching profession." (http://crln.acrl.org/content/72/7/420.full)

Cook, D. & Cooper, N. (Eds.) (2006). Teaching information literacy to social sciences students and practitioners: A casebook of applications. Chicago: ACRL.

 

What students don't know...

You may already have seen this article in today's Inside Higher Ed, which reminds me of several things:

• We (faculty & librarians) assume our students know more about researching than they actually do.
• Most students have no idea what librarians do or how they can help with research based projects.
• Faculty teaching classes are the key to bridging the gap in terms of helping students find their way to librarians and library resources.

ERIAL (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries) is a multi-institution, ethnographic study of student research behavior, conducted in collaboration with anthropology faculty. Researchers "were surprised by the extent to which students appeared to lack even some of the most basic information literacy skills that we assumed they would have mastered in high school.”
Hopefully, as the new term starts, we can work together to help your students become better critical consumers and users of information.

ERIC database updates

While at the national library conference this summer, I attended a session on the ERIC database and thought I would share some bits of interesting data:

• There are over  1.4 million records including 892 thousand journal records, of which 336 thousand are full-text.
• They index 1063 journals comprehensively (i.e., cover to cover) and an additional 100+ titles are indexed selctively
• They are collaborating with ProQuest (vendor) to provide links to the full text of dissertations and they are adding ERIC indexing terms to the records. This is huge as dissertation indexing (and hence searching) has been very primitive in the past.
• They add 4 thousand new records to the database every month. 
• The updates appear daily in the government's web site (eric.ed.gov) and monthly in the other vendors' versions (e.g., Ebsco)

New primary source collection for U.S. History

photo © 2008 Marion Doss | more info (via: Wylio)
A designated endowment has allowed the UNLV Libraries to purchase a new collection of primary sources on the American West which social studies/ history teachers may enjoy using. Here is a brief description of the contents:
"Primary sources, mainly from 1830-1939, digitized from the Everett D. Graff Collection of Western Americana at the Newberry Library, Chicago. Includes over 300 manuscripts, ranging from the original manuscript journal and papers of James Audubon and a twelve page letter of General Custer to the logbook of a cattle trail driver and the Hinman papers describing the overland trail to California and the Gold Rush; rare or unique ephemeral material including advertisements, claim certificates, cheques, photos, wanted notices and news-sheets; 120 zoomable maps and rare printed works like city directories, pamphlets and leaflets."

Available to UNLV students, faculty and staff only from the "A - Z database list" under "American West"
http://www.library.unlv.edu/search/databases/index.html

The new version of RefWorks is here

Still optional to use either the new or old interface, but it will be mandatory come July to switch over, so start your transition early. Same functionality of the old version, but some improved navigation is provided through layout and enhanced use of icons. As usual, I recommend going through the tutorials to familiarize yourself with the basic functions:
http://www.refworks-cos.com/refworks/tutorials/basic.html
There is also an overview of the new layout available here:
http://www.refworks-cos.com/refworks/rwpreview/RefWorks_New_UI_demo.htm

Once you've gone through these, I guarantee you'll be up and running!

Nation's Report Card: Civics 2010

"This report presents results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 2010 civics assessment. National results for representative samples of students at grades 4, 8, and 12 are reported as average scale scores and as a percentage of students performing at or above three achievement levels: Basic, Proficient, and Advanced. Scores are also reported at selected percentiles, showing changes in the performance of lower-, middle-, and higher-performing students. Results for student demographic groups defined by various background characteristics (e.g., race/ethnicity, gender, and students’ eligibility for free or reduced-price school lunch) are included, as well as sample assessment questions with examples of student responses. Results from the 2010 assessment are compared to those from two previous assessments in 1998 and 2006."
Full report is linked here: http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2011466

On remediation and writing in higher ed

This thoughtful piece by Mike Rose (UCLA) discusses why it is so important to continue providing access to education for all and suggests we need to break out of disciplinary and methodological silos to do it effectively. As you may or may not have noticed, I frequently include posts about reading and writing in this ostensibly education oriented blog, precisely because I see being able to read and write as so essential to success in higher (or K-12 or continuing) education. My friend and writing instructor extraordinaire, Sara Jameson, wrote her thesis on Mike Rose so I always pay particular attention to what he has to say. Here are a couple of excerpts from this piece:
"...some of the problems with college remediation as it is typically executed. It is built on a set of assumptions about language and cognition that have long ago been proven inadequate, like the belief that focusing on isolated grammar exercises will help students write better prose. The work students are doing isn’t connected to the writing they are required to do in their other courses, academic or vocational.... Most of us are trained and live our professional lives in disciplinary silos. Let me give you one example of how mind-boggling, and I think harmful, this intellectual isolation can become. In all the articles I’ve read on remediation in higher education journals, not one cites the 40 years’ worth of work on basic writing produced by teachers and researchers of writing. There is even a Journal of Basic Writing that emerged out of the experiments with open admission at CUNY in the 1970s. Not a mention of any of it. Zip."

To be or not to be? Librarians as faculty?

Here at UNLV, Librarians are indeed tenure-track, with similar [albeit discipline-specific] expectations for performance and evaluation in job, service, and scholarship. This isn't true everywhere and this article, "Faculty No Longer," from today's (4/21/11) edition of Inside Higher Ed describes the recent decision by a community college system to change the status of librarians to professional staff in order to save money. This is followed by discussion about why academic librarians are generally considered to be faculty.

Tips for improving student presentations

ProfHacker offers a simple set of guidelines in today's (4/20/11) post for avoiding DBP (death by powerpoint):
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/challenging-the-presentation-paradigm-with-the-115-rule/32691?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Start with the Pecha Kucha formula: maximum 20 slides at 20 seconds per slide
Spur creativity and mastery of the material by superimposing the 1:1:5 rule...

"In addition to the time constraint of the Pecha Kucha, your presentation must also follow the 1/1/5 rule. That is, you must have at least one image per slide, you can use each exact image only once, and you should add no more than five words per slide. "

Professor Sample says these guidelines have improved student presentations overall, although nothing is foolproof :-).

New enrollment figures for elementary/secondary schools

Some highlights from the new NCES report on the  2009-2010 year.


• About 49 million students attended 98,817 operating public elementary/secondary schools in the 2009–10 school year.

• Almost 1.6 million students were enrolled in 4,952 charter schools in 2009-10.

• Across all active regular public schools with students, the pupil/teacher ratio in 2009-10 was 16.1. Pupil/teacher ratio ranged from 10.9 in Vermont to 23.4 in Utah. [ Nevada's overall ratio was 19.4]

Full report is available here: http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2011345

WWC comparison of elementary math programs

photo © 2011 Caroline (via: Wylio)
"The study examined the relative effectiveness of four early elementary school math curricula: Investigations in Number, Data, and Space; Math Expressions; Saxon Math; and Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley Mathematics.
The study analyzed data on more than 8,000 first- and second-grade students in 110 schools in 12 districts in 10 states....

more info
For first graders, the authors found no statistically significant differences in student math achievement among the curricula after adjusting results for multiple curricula comparisons within the same analysis.

For second graders, one difference was statistically significant after taking multiple curricula comparisons into account. Second-grade students attending Saxon Math schools scored 0.17 standard deviations higher than students attending Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley Mathematics schools, roughly equivalent to moving a student from the 50th to the 57th percentile in math achievement."
Additional information about the programs studied is here:
http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/publications/quickreviews/QRReport.aspx?QRId=170

Helping students learn to read journal articles

This article from Inside Higher Ed offers some excellent guidance is offered for how we can help students learn to read good sources...
http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/instant_mentor/essay_on_teaching_students_to_read_journal_articles

Students are writing but don't have anything to say...?

Two researchers reporting at the annual meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication said that students “...are not selecting authoritative, meaningful sources and not reading them carefully. They are not, in a word, engaging.” 164 student research papers (with 1,832 research citations) produced in first-year composition classes were analyzed. Institutions in 12 states from diverse regions of the country, including community colleges and four-year public universities, private colleges and universities, and religiously affiliated and Ivy league institutions were represented.
"Only 9 percent of the citations were categorized as summary [ as opposed to quotes, paraphrasing or patchwriting]. 'That's the stunning part, I think: 91 percent are citations to material that isn't composing,' said Jamieson. 'They don't digest the ideas in the material cited and put it in their own words.' "
Read a fuller report of their findings in today's (April 11) Inside Higher Ed.

REL Study Examines Student Bullying and Victimization in Grades 3–8

photo © 2008 Eddie~S | more info (via: Wylio)
The study examined aggression, victimization, and approval of aggression among elementary and middle grades students in two Oregon counties. Data for the study were collected in 2005 through surveys; participation was voluntary. Students reported on beliefs about aggression, how frequently they were the victims or the perpetrators of either overt aggression (verbal and physically aggressive behavior intended to threaten or physically harm another student) or relational aggression (behaviors intended to harm another student’s relationships with others). Iincludes detailed summaries of students’ responses to specific questions about victimization and bullying.

Click here http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/projects/project.asp?projectID=248 to view this new release by the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance.

Schott Foundation's 2009 report on Opportunity to Learn

The most recent report from the Schott Foundation, Lost Opportunity: A 50 State Report on the Opportunity to Learn in America , "employs a state-by-state comparison of academic proficiency as illustrated by the percentage of students scoring at or above proficiency on the eighth-grade National Assessment of Educational Progress reading exam and access to high-performing schools as measured by the Opportunity to Learn Index (OTLI)." Unfortunately, Nevada falls into the lowest category (with 8 other states and the District of Columbia) that " provide neither a moderately proficient school system nor equitable access to the systems' best schools or resources." (from the web site: http://www.otlstatereport.org/national/summary/intro#staterankings)

Collaborative editing

Some of you may already use Google Docs to collaborate on creating and editing presentations, documents, spreadsheets, etc. Now you can do that without ever leaving your MS Office application. Google Cloud Connect lets you work in MS Office software and then share your edits to Google Docs. See this article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. Or view the application site directly at: http://tools.google.com/dlpage/cloudconnect

New issue of IES newsletter available

IES activities are reported through their newsletter. Several of these may be of interest...

The news includes articles about:

• A cooperative agreement with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching that involves the use of 90-day research cycles

• A 3-D project designed to enhance the social competencies of youth with Autism Spectrum Disorders

• Research findings from the National Center for Research on School Choice

• A new website application for accessing public and private school data

• Upcoming training opportunities

Click here to read the newsletter, http://ies.ed.gov/whatsnew/newsletters/

Projections of Education Statistics to 2019

New report out from NCES that covers "statistics on enrollment, graduates, teachers, and expenditures in elementary and secondary schools, and enrollment and earned degrees conferred expenditures of degree-granting institutions. For the Nation, the tables, figures, and text contain data on enrollment, teachers, graduates, and expenditures for the past 14 years and projections to the year 2019. For the 50 States and the District of Columbia, the tables, figures, and text contain data on projections of public elementary and secondary enrollment and public high school graduates to the year 2019."
I will also put a link to this source in the Education subject guide on the "Statistics and Demographics" page. http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2011017

New reporting for teacher prep programs proposed for 2012

Here is an historical summary of legislative reporting requirements (federal) as provided in Education Week (March 8, 2011).

Federal Requirements

1998 Amendments to the Higher Education Act of 1965
• Traditional teacher-preparation programs create report cards on enrollments in traditional teacher education programs and the passing rate of candidates on teacher-certification or -licensing tests.
• States create report cards ranking teacher-preparation programs based on the passing rates on those assessments, as well as those in state-approved alternative-certification programs. They also identify low-performing and “at risk” programs.
Higher Education Opportunity and Access Act of 2008
In addition to previous requirements, the law requires:
• Reporting on alternative-certification programs both inside and outside higher education programs.
• Preparation programs to report on the average scaled scores, as well as passing rates, on all licensing tests, broken out by the stage at which candidates take the tests.
• Preparation programs to report on admissions, the number of candidates by field, demographics of program participants, the number of faculty supervising clinical experiences, and programming on technology instruction and working with special populations.
• Preparation programs to set and report on goals for increasing the number of teachers prepared in shortage fields.

Fiscal 2012 Proposals
• Would eliminate some reporting requirements.
• Preparation programs would be expected to report on three outcome measures:

• Achievement growth of students taught by program graduates;
• Graduate job-placement and retention rates; and
• Graduate and employer satisfaction

• Would end the TEACH grant program and replace it with the Presidential Teaching Fellows program.

SOURCE: Education Week

Shared curricula recommended to address new Common Core Standards

A diverse group of signatories representing all levels of education, both sides of the political spectrum and business are promoting the developing of "lean" curriculum guidelines to help link the new common core standards to teaching. “To be clear, by ‘curriculum,’ we mean a coherent, sequential set of guidelines in the core academic disciplines, specifying the content knowledge and skills that all students are expected to learn, over time, in a thoughtful progression across the grades,” the document says. “We do not mean performance standards, textbook offerings, daily lesson plans, or rigid pedagogical prescriptions.” The full text of the statement along with the names/affiliations of the signatories are available here:
http://www.ashankerinst.org/curriculum.html

Exciting news from TED

Those of you who are fans of the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talks will be pleased to hear they are focusing on education, according to this news item in the Chronicle (Mar. 2, 2011)

"Long Beach, Calif.—The leaders of the annual TED conference, known for featuring short, carefully prepared talks on big ideas about technology and society, hope to apply their approach to education.
This week they announced TED-Ed, which will provide a hand-picked set of free online educational talks (expected to be even shorter than the conference talks), many submitted by educators themselves but enhanced by TED officials. An online forum, the Ted-Ed Brain Trust, will encourage discussion of how to reform teaching using the videos and other technology.
The system is not up yet, but the online forum is scheduled to open as early as next week, says Logan Smalley, whose title is TED-Ed catalyst. The videos will be added in the coming months, he says.
The project will also create an updated listing of the more than 900 existing TED talks, arranging them by categories that align more neatly to academic disciplines."

Elementary-Secondary Information System (ELSi) from NCES

"ELSi is comprised of three separate tools, which allow users to quickly view public and private school data, view commonly requested tables and create custom tables and charts using data from the Common Core of Data (CCD) and Private School Survey (PSS). ELSi utilizes frequently requested variables and tables—it’s a fast, easy way to obtain basic statistical data on U.S. schools. ELSi gives the user the ability to create customized tables by choosing row variables, column variables and filters to refine the data."

To view this new tool, visit: http://nces.ed.gov/ccd/elsi/

HS academic performance of student with hearing impairments

photo © 2010 woodley wonderworks | more info (via: Wylio)
"A gap exists between the academic achievement of youth with hearing impairments and their peers in the general population in reading, mathematics, science, and social studies, according to a new release by The National Center for Special Education Research. Facts from NLTS2: The Secondary School Experiences and Academic Performance of Students With Hearing Impairments uses data from the National Longitudinal Transition Study 2 dataset to provide a national picture of the secondary school experiences and academic achievement of students with hearing impairments who received special education services.

The outcomes cover several key areas, including students’ experiences in general education academic courses and non-vocational special education courses, accommodations, supports, services provided to students, and academic achievement. In addition to the findings for the overall group, this fact sheet provides findings by parent-reported levels of hearing impairments. "

The report is available here: http://ies.ed.gov/ncser/pubs/20113003/

Visualizing Data with Gapminder

This remarkable website, Gapminder, developed in Sweden allows you to visualize data "some 500 indicators (relating to health, income, education, energy, the environment, technology, and more.)" from such standard sources as the United Nations, World Bank, and OECD. Watch this 4 minute video to get a sense of what it can do. http://www.gapminder.org/videos/200-years-that-changed-the-world-bbc/
There is definitely a learning curve (here is a page with a 2.5 minute tutorial to get started) but it's a rich resource for teaching and presenting the possibilities of data. 

Does accountability reduce quality in scholarship?

This provocative article by Simon Head in the New York Review of Books (Jan. 13, 2011) suggests at least some of the consequences when numbers of publications are linked to state (in this case Britain) financial support for university research...
"Some of the most telling testimony on the damage to British scholarship inflicted by the HEFCE/RAE regime has come not from an academic but from Richard Baggaley, the European publishing director of Princeton University Press...Writing in the Times Higher Education Supplement in May 2007, Baggaley deplored what he saw as “a trend towards short-termism and narrowness of focus in British academe.”¹² In the natural and social sciences this took the form of “intense individual and team pressure to publish journal articles,” with the writing of books strongly discouraged, and especially the writing of what he calls “big idea books” that may define their disciplines. Baggaley attributes this bias against books directly to the distorting effects of the RAE. Journal articles are congenial to the RAE because they can be safely completed and peer-reviewed in good time for the RAE deadline. If they are in a prestigious journal, that is the kind of peer approval that will impress the RAE panelists.
The pressure to be published in the top journals, Baggaley wrote, also "increases a tendency to play to what the journal likes, to not threaten the status quo in the discipline, to be risk-averse and less innovative, to concentrate on small incremental steps and to avoid big-picture interdisciplinary work."
In the humanities the RAE bias also works in favor of the 180–200-page monograph, hyperspecialized, cautious and incremental in its findings, with few prospects for sale as a bound book but again with a good chance of being completed and peer-reviewed in time for the RAE deadline."

Gloomy results persist in science performance

An article in today's edition of EdWeek reports on the continuing dismal performance of K-12 students in science, this time according to the NAEP results. Only 20 percent of 12th graders scored as "proficient" in science, lower than the proficient percentages for 8th graders ( 30% ) or 4th graders ( 34% ). These results confirm the mediocre science and math performance documented by the PISA results at the end of last year. Even more disturbing are the huge discrepancies in performance based on race/ethnicity and SES. Per the article in EdWeek, "At the 4th grade, for example, 47 percent of white students scored proficient or above, compared with 11 percent of African-American and 14 percent of Hispanic students. Meanwhile, only 15 percent of 4th graders eligible for a free lunch and 25 percent for a reduced-price lunch scored proficient or higher on the exam, compared with 48 percent of 8th graders ineligible for either."
Large percentages of students at all levels don't even reach basic levels in science, "The figure was highest at the 12th grade, where 40 percent were below basic, compared with 37 percent of 8th graders and 28 percent of 4th graders." And very few perform at high levels on the NAEP, "Only 1 percent of 4th and 12th graders earned an advanced score, and 2 percent at the 8th grade." Links to the 2009 report are here: http://nationsreportcard.gov/science_2009/

US News will start ranking teacher prep programs

Couple of articles describing U.S. News & World Report's intentions to start a survey of 1,000 teacher prep programs, utilizing the National Council on Teacher Quality methodology.

From PR Newswire:
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-news--world-report-and-national-council-on-teacher-quality-launch-comprehensive-review-of-nations-teacher-preparation-programs-114163659.html

From Inside Higher Ed:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/19/qt#248429

Measuring student engagement: K-12

A new report from REL Southeast:  "Measuring Student Engagement in Upper Elementary through High School: A Description of 21 Instruments, presents the results of a literature review of available instruments for measuring student engagement (behavioral, emotional and cognitive) in upper elementary through high school. The study describes 21 instruments that include student self-reports, teacher reports, and observation measures.
The report summarizes what is measured, instrument purposes and uses, and available technical information. In addition, instrument abstracts describe the main features of each instrument, including the developer, population, method, background, administration, constructs measured, scoring and reporting, reliability and validity, and use. References are listed for each instrument. The report is descriptive and is not intended to assess the quality of each instrument or identify strengths or weaknesses."


To view this report, see http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/projects/project.asp?projectID=268

Summer Research Training: Single-Case Design

This announcement from IES~

The National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER) at the Institute of Education Sciences announces its 2011 Summer Research Training Institute on Single-Case Intervention Research Design and Analysis. The Training Institute is intended to increase the national capacity of education researchers to conduct single-case intervention studies that have scientifically credible methodology and analyses.

When:
June 27th to July 1st, 2011
Where:
University of Wisconsin-Madison; Madison, WI
All applications must be received no later than Friday, March 11, 2011 at 8:00 p.m. EST. For more information about the Training Institute, including the application procedures, please visit: http://ies.ed.gov/whatsnew/conferences/?id=772