Voices of reform from the classroom: teachers’ approaches to change

Abstract

This paper reports on case studies of three teachers managing an education reform focussed on assessment, during a busy period of curriculum change in an Australia state Participants attended multiple professional development opportunities including a number of state-wide, systemically-facilitated assessment workshops. The most significant finding to emerge, as narratives of change unfolded over a nine- month period, was the diversity of teachers’ approaches to change. All three were insightful about practices that required change and could identify personal and professional attributes that would assist their management of change. All teachers attended the same systemic workshops and all had access to the Education Department’s published literature about assessment. Yet they organised and implemented change in very different ways. Each teacher’s approach was based on personal assumptions about learners and learning, the reform they agreed to implement, and their preferred approaches to incorporating new assessment practices into their existing repertories. Approach taken was a major determinant of experience of change and thus is an aspect of change management important to inservice-providers, teachers and school leaders. The paper concludes with an overview of a PD package designed with the findings of this research project in mind.     

What to do next: an exploratory study of the post-secondary decisions of American students

Research on college choices is the new tool used by Higher Educational Institutions to help them identify the influences and factors affecting potential student populations. To measure the growing rate of working students in higher education, we propose to examine the decisions made after graduating from high school to current demographic changes. In this study, we use data from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS: 2002) to estimate the influence of individual variables on post graduating high school choices using multinomial logistic regression analysis. Untangling the individual choices allows us to examine, four possible after high school life choices—students who decide to pursue post-secondary education (student); those who decide to work while attending a post-secondary institution (working student); those who decide to enter the workforce (worker) or high school graduates who neither work nor enroll in postsecondary education (unemployed). Results suggest that aside from socioeconomic status and achievement, interesting patterns for gender, ethnicity and family composition and its effect on the likelihood of a high school graduate’s life choices emerged. As an example, Asian students are more likely to enter their next phase in life as a student than a working student in comparison to white ones. That result is a clear example that not all high school students are alike in their life choices; therefore, for a better understanding in the needs and decision making ways of high school graduates, this paper addresses different factors that lead to a post-secondary decision in order to accommodate their transition to HEI.     

Genetic and Environmental Influences on Vocabulary IQ: Parental Education Level as Moderator

This article examines how parental education level moderates the genetic and environmental contributions to variation in verbal IQ. Data are from 1909 non-Hispanic Whites and African American sibling pairs from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which obtained nationally-based samples of identical (MZ) twins, fraternal (DZ) twins, full and half siblings, cousins (in the same household), and biologically unrelated siblings. In the whole sample, the variance estimate for heritability (h2 = .57, SE = .08) was greater than that for shared environment (c2 = .13, SE = .04). Both heritability and the shared environmental estimate were moderated, however, by level of parental education. Specifically, among more highly educated families, the average h2 = .74 (SE = .10) and the average c2 = .00 (SE = .05). Conversely, among less well-educated families, heritability decreased and shared environmental influences increased, yielding similar proportions of variance explained by genetic and environmental factors, average h2 = .26 (SE = .15), and average c2 = .23 (SE = .07).     

Text Mining 101: What You Should Know

ABSTRACT

Scholars increasingly use text and data mining (TDM) methods to discover trends and relationships within complex digital data sets. In order to support this development in scholarly communication, librarians and publishers need to be knowledgeable about TDM methods, build partnerships with TDM researchers, and address challenges related to licensing and access to large document sets. The presenters of this NASIG session shared their experiences of supporting TDM as a library subject liaison, acquisitions librarian, and publisher representatives. Audience members discussed issues involving TDM of data from multiple publishers, local hosting of data sets and TDM activity by undergraduate students.     

Finding the diamond in the rough: Exploring communication and platform in crowdsourcing performance

Ideas that rise to the top in crowdsourcing platforms are assumed to succeed because they are perceived to be the best ideas, but questions about the factors that influence the outperformance of one solution over another remain underexplored. The Peer Vetted Ideas model is proposed as an explanation of elements that affect performance in crowdsourcing for creative ideation solutions. Using content analysis and hierarchical multiple regression, the study examined the relationship between performance in a public sector crowdsourcing competition and (a) design concepts, (b) communication about the designs, and (c) platform context. Results indicate that crowdsourcing is not always a meritocratic process to produce the objective “best” ideas, but rather also depends on subjective communicative, temporal, and platform factors.     

Unify and present: Using Monroe's Motivated Sequence to teach team presentation skills

Courses: Public speaking, business and professional communication, group communication

Objectives: This activity will introduce Monroe's Motivated Sequence as a way to organize persuasive arguments; improve students’ ability to deliver presentations with consistent content, voice, and style; and improve team-based delivery skills.     

Teachers’ agency,efficacy, engagement,and emotional resilience during policy innovation implementation

This multiple case study investigated 143 teachers’ responses to focus group questions about their experiences with the simultaneous implementation of three disruptive innovations as part of the U.S. Race-to-the-Top (RTTT) agenda: the Common Core Learning Standards, data-driven instruction, and annual professional performance reviews. We asked: How do teachers describe their experiences implementing these three RTTT innovations? How do teachers describe supports for their adaptation to these innovations? And, for each of these questions, and since the study purposefully included schools with above-predicted student outcomes (i.e. odds-beaters) as well as a comparison set of typically performing schools, we inquired: In what ways do odds-beating school teachers’ experiences differ from their peers in typically performing schools? Guided by an emergent framework that emphasizes the relationships among teacher agency, engagement, efficacy, and emotional resilience and how these vary in different school contexts, findings suggest that district office innovation leadership and resource allocations, school leadership structures and strategies, and collaborative teams and communities of practice vary and relate to teachers’ experiences of innovation implementation. This study advances an empirically-grounded and theoretically rich framework for investigation of teachers’ performance adaptation during policy innovation implementation and suggests implications for future research, policy, and practice.