Assessing School Readiness: Validity and Bias in Preschool and Kindergarten Teachers' Ratings

As a part of efforts to evaluate and monitor the increasing public investment in early childhood education, teachers are being asked to assess children's school readiness. In this study, preschool teachers and kindergarten teachers rated children's skills in three areas (kindergarten readiness, academic skills, and communication skills), and these ratings were compared with direct assessments of the children's skills. Ratings by both groups of teachers tended to be more highly related to basic skills, such as counting and number naming, than to abilities such as solving applied problems and using expressive and receptive vocabulary. Preschool teachers' ratings had a lower association with children's observed skills and abilities than kindergarten teachers' ratings. Ratings of children attending Head Start were systematically inflated, but this relationship was mediated to a significant extent by the teachers' levels of education. More educated teachers rated children in a manner consistent with the children's directly assessed skills. Implications of these findings for informing future efforts to assess school readiness by using teacher ratings are discussed.     

Reform and UK Higher Education in the Enterprise Era

Higher education in the United Kingdom is centrally funded, centrally planned, and insulated from market forces. It bears many similarities to the non-market centrally planned economies (CPEs) of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe while they struggled to reform but to retain a system of planning and central control. Examination of UK higher education and the CPEs before the transformation to market based systems highlights some of the issues facing higher education today. It also highlights the need for reforms, as well as the difficulties involved in them. Such comparison can also bring home problems faced by reformers in the transition economies.
Despite allegedly extensive reforms in UK higher education, the sector faces problems like those facing the centrally planned economies of Eastern Europe and the former USSR in the 1970s and 80s. Parallels in a number of areas are particularly striking.     

Relationship of Physique and Developmental Level to Physical Performance

Abstract

A study was made of the relationship of physique and developmental level, determined by use of the Wetzel Grid, to performance of junior high boys on four fitness tests: pull-ups, 50-yd. dash, standing broad jump, and softball throw. Subjects of different physique groups (heavy, medium, and thin) who were alike developmentally (accelerated, normal, and retarded) differed more markedly in performance than did subjects of different developmental levels who were alike with regard to physique. Subjects who were medium in physique and normal in development were the best performers. Subjects of heavy physique (many overweight) were the poorest performers. This would seem to indicate the need for a restudy of classification methods, particularly when norms are to be used for evaluating performance.     

Comparative Bayesian Confirmation and the Quine-Duhem Problem: A Rejoinder to Strevens

By and large, we think (Strevens's [2005]) is a useful replyto our original critique (Fitelson and Waterman [2005]) of hisarticle on the Quine–Duhem (QD) problem (Strevens [2001]).But, we remain unsatisfied with several aspects of his reply(and his original article). Ultimately, we do not think he properlyaddresses our most important worries. In this brief rejoinder,we explain our remaining worries, and we issue a revised challengefor Strevens's approach to QD.

1 Strevens's ‘clarifications’

2 Strevens's new-and-improved ‘negligibility arguments’

     

Creating Positive Lived Experiences in Schools for International Relocatee Parents and Their Children

Early Childhood Education Journal - Children benefit from strong home–school relationships. Yet, parents who are immigrants and refugees are expected to follow frameworks for school...     

Heterogeneity in the Effects of College Course Placement

Traditionally colleges have relied on standalone non-credit-bearing developmental education (DE) to support students academically and ensure readiness for college-level courses. As emerging evidence has raised concerns about the effectiveness of DE courses, colleges and states have been experimenting with approaches that place students into credit-bearing coursework more quickly. To better understand which types of students might be most likely to benefit from being placed into college-level math coursework, this study examines heterogeneity in the causal effects of placement into college-level courses using a regression discontinuity design and administrative data from the state of Texas. We focus on student characteristics that are related to academic preparation or might signal a student’s likelihood of success or need for additional support and might therefore be factors considered for placement into college-level courses under “holistic advising” or “multiple measures” initiatives. We find heterogeneity in outcomes for many of the measures we examined. Students who declared an academic major designation, had bachelor’s degree aspirations, tested below college readiness on multiple subjects, were designated as Limited English Proficiency (LEP), and/or were economically disadvantaged status were more likely to benefit from placement into college-level math. Part-time enrollment or being over the age of 21 were associated with reduced benefits from placement into college-level math. We do not find any heterogeneity in outcomes for our high school achievement measure, three or more years of math taken in high school.