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

Great new K-12 teaching resources!

A grant funded project led by UNLV Libraries has created a new digital collection focused on Nevada history. They also brought in a consultant to create standards-based teaching activities which use these resources. Here is their announcement:

The UNLV University Libraries are pleased to announce the launch of a new digital collection with features designed for K-12 educators:

Southern Nevada: The Boomtown Years, 1900-1925
http://digital.library.unlv.edu/boomtown/

Southern Nevada: the Boomtown Years 1900-1925 is an online collection of over 1,600 primary source documents and over 30 standards-based activities that can be used in K-12 classrooms. The collection brings together digitized materials from the UNLV Libraries Special Collections, the Nevada State Museum and Historical Society in Las Vegas, and the Clark County Museum to document the history and development of Southern Nevada from 1900 to 1925. Photographs, selected newspapers, maps, mining reports and surveys, stock certificates, correspondence, and more give a detailed account of life in the Boomtown years of Southern Nevada and provide a unique opportunity to show students what life was like through the eyes of those who lived it. Teaching activities are available for all grade levels and eleven subject areas and are meant to engage students in higher-level thinking while directly interacting with the primary sources housed in this collection.

The Libraries welcome your feedback on this collection! You are invited to view the collection and respond to a quick survey at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Y5rxIAt9_2fMhIGT_2fipw9GvQ_3d_3d. Comments, questions, and feedback are always welcome. Bookmarks, flyers, and in-class demonstrations are available by contacting the Libraries. Please forward to other interested parties.

Research compares 1st grade math curricula

The National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance within the Institute of Education Sciences today released a report on the effectiveness of four math curricula. The "Achievement Effects of Four Early Elementary School Math Curricula: Findings from First Graders in 39 Schools" reports on the relative impacts of four math curricula on first-grade mathematics achievement. The curricula were selected to represent diverse approaches to teaching elementary school math in the United States. The four curricula are Investigations in Number, Data, and Space; Math Expressions; Saxon Math; and Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley Mathematics. First-grade math achievement was significantly higher in schools randomly assigned to Math Expressions or Saxon Math than in those schools assigned to Investigations in Number, Data, and Space or to Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley Mathematics. This study is being conducted as part of the National Assessment of Title I.

To view, download and print the report as a PDF file, please visit:
http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20094052/index.asp

Effects of Preschool Curriculum Programs on School Readiness

The National Center for Education Research within the Institute of Education Sciences today released the report on the Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research (PCER) initiative, an efficacy evaluation of several preschool curricula. The report, Effects of Preschool Curriculum Programs on School Readiness, provides individual results for each curriculum evaluated. Under the PCER initiative, twelve research teams were funded to implement and conduct research on 14 preschool curricula in a variety of settings serving predominantly low-income children under an experimental design. Evaluation data were collected from all research sites in fall and spring of the preschool year and spring of the kindergarten year using a common set of measures. The goal of the PCER initiative was to identify the impact of each preschool curriculum on five student-level outcomes (reading, phonological awareness, language, mathematics, and behavior) and six classroom-level outcomes (classroom quality, teacher-child interaction, and four types of instruction). This final report presents findings for the impact of each curriculum on student-level and classroom-level outcomes.