Teacher Leaders Building Foundations for Data-Informed Teacher Learning in One Urban Elementary School

ABSTRACT

We examine how teacher leaders (TLs), working in a low-income urban elementary school, supported their colleagues to learn how to collect quality formative data and to discuss it in collaborative conversations in order to make their students’ learning visible. The TLs faced challenges reflecting consequences resulting from the district’s high stakes accountability policies restricting teachers’ agency with instructional decision-making and limiting their definitions of data as summative test scores. We document how the TLs worked to reframe teachers’ understanding of data to include evidence of student thinking and supported their colleagues to reclaim teaching as professional versus technical work.     

A comparison of the short-term memory performances of pigeons and jackdaws

Two experiments employed a delayed conditional discrimination procedure in which half the trials began with the presentation of food and half with no food; following a retention interval, subjects were presented with a choice between red and green keys, a response to one of which was reinforced according to whether the trial had started with food or no food. In Experiment 1, after 38 training sessions during which the retention interval was gradually increased, pigeons performed at a moderate level with intervals of 5 to 7.5 sec. A final test produced a steep forgetting function for food trials, but not for no-food trials; performance was unaffected by the duration of the intertriai interval (10 or 40 sec). Experiment 2 used the delayed conditional discrimination procedure to compare short-term memory in jackdaws (Corvus monedulus) with that in pigeons. Although the performance of the jackdaws was below that of the pigeons at the start of training, they showed more rapid learning over long delays, and, in the final test, a shallower forgetting function for food trials than that shown by pigeons. The results suggested superior short-term memory in jackdaws, which may help to explain the better performance of corvids in general when compared with that of pigeons in certain complex learning tasks.