Keeping the Focus on the Child: Supporting and Reporting on Teaching and Learning With a Classroom-Based Performance Assessment System

Abstract

This article describes the findings of studies conducted on a large-scale, classroom-based performance assessment of literacy for the early grades designed to provide information that is useful for reporting, as well as teaching. Technical studies found the assessment to be a promising instrument that is reliable and valid. Follow-up studies of the assessment's use point to its positive impact on teachers' practice and on school and district policies. The studies' findings suggest that classroom-based performance assessment can be a viable accountability, as well as instructional, tool, capturing a range of students' abilities in a range of formats, and that use of such an assessment has the potential to enhance teachers' knowledge about literacy and their abilities to effectively support students' learning.     

COMPARISON OF THE BECK DEPRESSION INVENTORY-II AND THE INVENTORY TO DIAGNOSE DEPRESSION: IMPLICATIONS FOR COMMUNITY COLLEGE COUNSELORS

Community college counselors need to assess depressive symptoms in students and to differentiate depressive symptoms from anxiety symptoms to help them implement crisis intervention strategies. Two instruments available to the community college counselor are the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II) and the Inventory to Diagnose Depression (IDD). This article, which is based on the published literature, reports on and discusses the construct and discriminant validities of the BDI-II and IDD so that community college counselors may use them with knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of each instrument. Although results should be interpreted with caution, both instruments are useful in measuring the presence or absence of depressive symptoms.     

First order or higher order general factor?

The Schmid‐Leiman decomposition of a hierarchical factor model converts the model to a constrained case of a bifactor model with orthogonal common factors that is equivalent to the hierarchical model. This article discusses the equivalence and near‐equivalence of the hierarchical and bifactor models and the implications of the difficulty of distinguishing between these models because of low power in samples commonly found in academic research.     

Creating a Schoolwide Vocabulary Initiative in an Urban High School

In an effort to improve student achievement at an urban high school, teachers and administrators developed a 5-part, schoolwide vocabulary plan. Over 4 years, teachers provided students with increased opportunities to read, read to their students, developed content-specific vocabulary instruction, taught students academic words, and focused on 5 words each week with a common prefix, suffix, or root. Over the 4 years, student achievement in vocabulary and reading comprehension improved in significant ways, both on reading assessments and state achievement tests.     

Sociodemographic Inequality in Early Literacy Development: The Role of Teacher Perceptual Accuracy

Previous research has established that student learning is influenced by how accurately teachers perceive student academic ability. But studies rarely investigate the degree to which inaccuracies in teacher perceptions exacerbate demographic inequality in academic ability. Using a sample of almost 14,000 children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort, we found that children whose literacy skills are overestimated by their teachers typically gain more literacy skills during kindergarten. Conversely, children whose skills are underestimated learn less. It is important to note that the skills of socioeconomically disadvantaged children are on average underestimated. As a result, inequalities in kindergarten literacy development stem in part from the links between teacher misperceptions and student background. We also explored the extent to which these relationships operate through practices associated with ability grouping. We found instructional grouping to be a weak facilitator of the link between teacher perceptions and student learning, suggesting the need for further research that identifies the social and structural classroom characteristics that link teacher perceptual accuracy to student learning.     

High-Quality Preschool: The Socioeconomic Composition of Preschool Classrooms and Children's Learning

Research Findings: As policymakers expand access to preschool, the sociodemographic composition of preschool classrooms will become increasingly important. These efforts may create programs that increase the concentration of children from low-income families or, alternatively, foster the creation of socioeconomically diverse preschool classrooms. What effect the creation of such contexts would have on very young children remains unclear. Using multilevel methods and data on 2,966 children in 704 prekindergarten classrooms, this study explores the relationship between socioeconomic classroom composition and children's social and cognitive development. The results indicate positive associations between the mean socioeconomic status (SES) of the class and children's receptive language, expressive language, and mathematics learning, regardless of children's own sociodemographic backgrounds and the characteristics of their classrooms. However, the analyses indicate no association between the development of social competence and class mean SES. Practice or Policy: The links between classroom SES and language and mathematics development were comparable in size to those associated with instructional quality and even children's own SES. Neither structural nor instructional characteristics of prekindergarten classrooms explained these relationships, suggesting the possibility of direct peer effects. The findings indicate that the composition of children's classrooms should be considered an important aspect of preschool quality.     

Reflection on their first five years of teaching: understanding staying and impact power

Teacher turnover in urban schools is occurring at a breakneck pace; thus, it is important for us to understand the characteristics of teachers who stay and succeed in these settings. In order to address this need, this study examines the preparation and induction experiences of teachers who completed a Transition to Teaching – a funded urban apprenticeship program. Three research questions guided the study: (1) How do participants describe the characteristics that influence their five-year retention? (2) How do participants describe their success as teachers? and (3) How do participants describe the professional support they received in their preparation program and during the subsequent four years after completing the program? Quantitative and qualitative data via interviews, focus group, and an examination of teachers’ district performance scores were utilized, as a means of understanding teachers’ staying and impact power. Staying power refers to the ability to endure or last within challenging contexts by possessing strength enough to persevere. Impact power refers to their ability to influence student learning. Four assertions describe the factors influencing developing teachers who stay and have impact as they teach in challenging urban schools, suggesting that these teachers possess a strong work ethic, seek specific resources to improve pedagogy, have the knowledge and skills necessary to differentiate instruction, and seek teacher leadership opportunities in their schools. This study suggests several implications for teacher educators, educational leaders, administrators, and researchers working with new teachers in urban schools or with populations that are predominantly children of color.     

The noise of thoughts: The turbulent (sound‐)worlds of Jean‐Luc Godard

This article examines the role of noise in various aspects of Jean‐Luc Godard's filmmaking practice. Beginning with an analysis of 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle (1966), it suggests that the loud noise on the soundtrack functions to disrupt the search for meaning in this film that is precisely about knowledge and cognition, providing an image of thought as an unpredictable and uncontrollable process. The influence of 1970s theoretical biology and information theory is analysed in Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1979) which applies Henri Atlan's ‘order from noise’ principle to the composition of shots, the construction of scenes and the development of narrative. Finally Godard's presentation of a complex, deterritorialised capitalist economy is considered in Nouvelle Vague (1990), and it is suggested that Godard's creation of aesthetic events – both through editing and through sound design – implies a different conception of temporality to the sequential logic of financial speculation and risk management.