Research on Scaling Up Evidence-Based Instructional Practice: Developing a Sensitive Measure of the Rate of Implementation

Few evidence-based instructional practices achieve large-scale use, often remaining only in the schools directly involved in their development. Research on scaling up effective educational practice often lacks sensitive measures of the practice's implementation and the required research protocol. This article describes how we used rate of implementation as a sensitive measure to help identify barriers to implementation of class-wide peer tutoring (CWPT). Using communication technologies and a learning management system, we monitored the rate of CWPT implementation and its research protocol across nine schools in five states. Rate of implementation was defined as the number of weeks in which a school successfully completed the 12 implementation tasks required to reach full implementation. We discuss factors related to the variation in implementation rate (30-50 weeks) between schools, and implications of this measurement strategy for research on instructional practices and the technology used to facilitate scalability research.     

Children's literacy funds of knowledge in an urban Mexican elementary school: changing the approach

In this article, we share the vernacular literacy practices of a sixth grade students in Mexico City. From a sociocultural, ethnographic perspective and based on the contributions of the sociolinguistics of mobility and funds of knowledge, we describe the experiences and knowledge that children bring with them from home and the community to school, to write and read texts on their own during class. The findings show how they appropriate literacy practices to provide meaning to their reading and writing through the relationship between school and everyday literacy and the continuum between their oralities and literacies. Children construct literacy according to their day-to-day experiences, in and out of the classroom, and embed their literacy practices within their funds of knowledge developed at home with their families. Based on these findings, we question the significance and quintessential role that has been attributed to the school in the teaching of reading and writing, as well as the prevalence of individualistic and rigid approaches to the teaching of reading and writing.     

Food Engineering Education in Mexico, Central America, and South America

ABSTRACT: The teaching of food engineering (FE) in Mexico and Central and South America began more than 50 years ago, initially with programs related to Chemical Engineering and Chemistry. The first programs clearly denominated as FE emerged during late 1960s and early 1970s; the support of the Organization of American States (OAS) and United Nations (UN) in some cases and the Science and Technology for Development Program (CYTED), launched in the early 1980s, stimulated and strengthened the development of FE. Relevant developments on FE in Latin-America can be traced down to topics such as: evaluation of physicochemical and transport properties, water activity, high and intermediate moisture foods, food drying, modeling and simulation of processes, hurdle technology, minimal processing, and emerging technologies. At present, FE Education in Latin-America interacts and coexists with the new paradigms related to the design of preservation processes and the development of Biotechnology.