Co-Researching the Concept of 'Noticing and Adjusting' in Monitoring Literacy Learning

The present article describes the rationale, development and initial evaluation of a framework for enquiry that enabled a team of educational psychologists from four local education authorities to co-research the concept of 'noticing and adjusting' in relation to children's literacy progress. The work is based on reflective practice where psychologists and teachers considered the usefulness of the framework in developing interactive assessment and teaching approaches in the classroom. The collaborative work helped us to focus on teacher practice and innovative thinking rather than child, teacher or resource/environmental deficits.     

Examining charter student achievement effects across seven states

Since their inception, charter schools have been a lighting rod for controversy, with much of the debate revolving around their effectiveness in improving student achievement. Previous research has shown mixed results for student achievement; this could be the consequence of different policy environments or varying methodological approaches with differing assumptions across studies. In our analysis, we discuss these approaches and their assumptions and estimate charter school achievement effects using a consistent methodology across seven locations.     

Effect of taste context and ambient context changes on successive negative contrast

Rats shifted from 32% sucrose to 4% sucrose lick less than rats that experience oniy the 4% solution. Previous experiments have found this negative contrast effect to be reduced (“disinhibited”) by the addition of a novel tone in the postshift period. In Experiment 1 of this paper, the negative contrast effect was enhanced when a novel flavor was added to the sucrose solution in the postshift period. In Experiments 2–4, changes in the ambient context, even changes sufficient to produce disruptions in licking, did not alter the degree of negative contrast. Tiese results suggest that (1) rats compare rewards across substantially different contexts, (2) contrast may serve to enhance taste neophobia, and (3) a disinhibitory effect may be confined to the presentation of punctate, nontaste, novel stimuli within a familiar context.     

Impact of family abuse on running away, deviance, and street victimization among homeless rural and urban youth

PROBLEM: Various demographic and familial risk factors have been linked to runaway behavior. To date, there has not been a systematic investigation of the impact of size of community on runaway behavior. This study will compare runaways from smaller cities and rural areas to their urban counterparts. METHODS: A convenience sample of 602 adolescents was interviewed between 1995 and August of 1996 in Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas, USA. Multiple regression was used to examine the association between gender, neglect, sexual abuse, physical abuse, geographic and family structure change, and community size of first runaway to predict age at first runaway, deviant subsistence strategies, and street victimization. RESULTS: Findings indicate that adolescents exposed to neglect (beta=-.20) and sexual abuse (beta=-.16) ran away sooner and were more likely to be victimized on the street. Rural adolescents who experienced higher levels of physical abuse relied more heavily on deviant subsistence strategies (beta=.15) and remained in abusive homes longer (beta=.15) than their similarly situated urban counterparts. CONCLUSIONS: Rural youth who have been subjected to elevated levels of familial abuse are at greater risk of deviant subsistence strategies, which increase the likelihood of street victimization.     

WormClassroom.org: an inquiry-rich educational web portal for research resources of Caenorhabditis elegans

The utilization of biology research resources, coupled with a “learning by inquiry” approach, has great potential to aid students in gaining an understanding of fundamental biological principles. To help realize this potential, we have developed a Web portal for undergraduate biology education, WormClassroom.org, based on current research resources of a model research organism, Caenorhabditis elegans. This portal is intended to serve as a resource gateway for students to learn biological concepts using C. elegans research material. The driving forces behind the WormClassroom website were the strengths of C. elegans as a teaching organism, getting researchers and educators to work together to develop instructional materials, and the 3 P's (problem posing, problem solving, and peer persuasion) approach for inquiry learning. Iterative assessment is an important aspect of the WormClassroom site development because it not only ensures that content is up-to-date and accurate, but also verifies that it does, in fact, aid student learning. A primary assessment was performed to refine the WormClassroom website utilizing undergraduate biology students and nonstudent experts such as C. elegans researchers; results and comments were used for site improvement. We are actively encouraging continued resource contributions from the C. elegans research and education community for the further development of WormClassroom.     

Using automated analysis to assess middle school students' competence with scientific argumentation

Argumentation is fundamental to science education, both as a prominent feature of scientific reasoning and as an effective mode of learning—a perspective reflected in contemporary frameworks and standards. The successful implementation of argumentation in school science, however, requires a paradigm shift in science assessment from the measurement of knowledge and understanding to the measurement of performance and knowledge in use. Performance tasks requiring argumentation must capture the many ways students can construct and evaluate arguments in science, yet such tasks are both expensive and resource-intensive to score. In this study we explore how machine learning text classification techniques can be applied to develop efficient, valid, and accurate constructed-response measures of students' competency with written scientific argumentation that are aligned with a validated argumentation learning progression. Data come from 933 middle school students in the San Francisco Bay Area and are based on three sets of argumentation items in three different science contexts. The findings demonstrate that we have been able to develop computer scoring models that can achieve substantial to almost perfect agreement between human-assigned and computer-predicted scores. Model performance was slightly weaker for harder items targeting higher levels of the learning progression, largely due to the linguistic complexity of these responses and the sparsity of higher-level responses in the training data set. Comparing the efficacy of different scoring approaches revealed that breaking down students' arguments into multiple components (e.g., the presence of an accurate claim or providing sufficient evidence), developing computer models for each component, and combining scores from these analytic components into a holistic score produced better results than holistic scoring approaches. However, this analytical approach was found to be differentially biased when scoring responses from English learners (EL) students as compared to responses from non-EL students on some items. Differences in the severity between human and computer scores for EL between these approaches are explored, and potential sources of bias in automated scoring are discussed.     

Practical Production Work Within an Integrated English and Media Curriculum: Acquisition of Theory or Creative Exploration?

This is an account of an action research project carried out, in the summer of 1999, in a secondary school in Devon. My aim was to investigate ways of introducing media theory into the GCSE practical production module in Media Studies. I did this specifically with notions of audience in mind ‐an area, which I was aware, had been problematic in my teaching before then.     

Generating Multivariate Normal Data in Excel

This article gives further information about generating multivariate Normal data, including a single‐cell Microsoft Excel formula to undertake a Choleski decomposition. References are also made to the bivariate case and the ‘common elements’ approach.