Implementing a disciplinary-literacy curriculum for US history: learning from expert middle school teachers in diverse classrooms

In recent years, educators in the USA have emphasized disciplinary literacy as an essential path forward in cultivating adolescents’ understanding of subject matter in tandem with literacy practices. Yet, this agenda poses challenges to teachers who have been tasked with its implementation. Here, we examine two expert US history teachers’ efforts to implement curriculum that integrates reading, writing and thinking in history with academically diverse eighth graders. We conduct qualitative analyses of teacher observations and interviews as well as student work. This analysis provides insight into several issues that emerge in efforts to teach disciplinary literacy in history classrooms: the nuances of teachers’ use of curriculum materials created by people other than themselves, teachers’ appropriation and adaptation of curriculum materials and teachers’ understanding of curriculum materials and disciplinary literacy goals. We find that teachers’ knowledge of the discipline and attention to students’ ideas allowed them to skillfully adapt the curriculum to better meet students’ needs and push students’ thinking. Orienting teachers toward disciplinary learning, ensuring a foundational understanding of their discipline and providing teachers with tools to teach disciplinary literacy are important steps to help students meet the demands of the disciplinary literacy agenda.     

Revising Strategy Instruction in Inclusive Settings: Effects for English Learners and Novice Writers

Twenty‐three students with varying academic and linguistic profiles were taught a strategy for revising expository essays, using the Self‐Regulated Strategy Development model for instruction. Students learned basic revising tactics and to consider text structure as they managed decisions on how to improve their essays. Instructional effects were assessed using a multiple baseline with multiple probes in baseline design. Positive results were found for English learners, including those who were identified as having learning disabilities, or who were low‐, average‐ and high‐achieving writers; moreover, results were equally positive for students who were not English learners. After instruction and 4 weeks later, students revised more, produced more revisions that improved text, and revised longer text segments, which resulted in an improvement in overall quality.     

On time-varying collaboration networks

The patterns of scientific collaboration have been frequently investigated in terms of complex networks without reference to time evolution. In the present work, we derive collaborative networks (from the arXiv repository) parameterized along time. By defining the concept of affine group, we identify several interesting trends in scientific collaboration, including the fact that the average size of the affine groups grows exponentially, while the number of authors increases as a power law. We were therefore able to identify, through extrapolation, the possible date when a single affine group is expected to emerge. Characteristic collaboration patterns were identified for each researcher, and their analysis revealed that larger affine groups tend to be less stable.     

The ethics of information transparency

The paper investigates the ethics of information transparency (henceforth transparency). It argues that transparency is not an ethical principle in itself but a pro-ethical condition for enabling or impairing other ethical practices or principles. A new definition of transparency is offered in order to take into account the dynamics of information production and the differences between data and information. It is then argued that the proposed definition provides a better understanding of what sort of information should be disclosed and what sort of information should be used in order to implement and make effective the ethical practices and principles to which an organisation is committed. The concepts of “heterogeneous organisation” and “autonomous computational artefact” are further defined in order to clarify the ethical implications of the technology used in implementing information transparency. It is argued that explicit ethical designs, which describe how ethical principles are embedded into the practice of software design, would represent valuable information that could be disclosed by organisations in order to support their ethical standing.