Learning Solution – Online Education

It’s been a bit of a roller-coaster year for the education research field. The $650 million Investing in Innovation grants brought a massive influx of both money and district interest to applied research and evaluation, but in the ensuing discussions, education researchers have caught a lot of flack, from policymakers and within their own ranks, that most research takes too long and provides too few results immediately usable by educators.

It’s been interesting to listen to the conversation percolating in comments and emails, about the recent research conference on developing more accurate and nuanced measures of whether students are ready for life after high school. There’s been a lot of frustration on the part of researchers like Keith MacAllum of Westat on the short memory about previous research in the college and career readiness arena: “Wasn’t anybody taking notes during the ’90s when all that School to Career research was going on?” he wrote in an email that spurred a lively group exchange on Monday. “I thought we had established that dependability, work ethic, teamwork, perseverance, and maturity were as important as academic achievement? Did NCLB really erase all of that progress? How are we ever going to fix education if it takes the EXPERTS (that’s us, right?) 10 to 20 years to BEGIN?”

I’ve heard a lot of similar frustration this year, in research conferences and policy meetings alike, over how to ensure research actually gets used.

Fellow blogger and American Enterprise Institute President Rick Hess just unveiled a list of the “most influential” education researchers of 2010 based on the premise that while scholars gain renown &mdash and tenure &mdash for publishing research, they rarely get credit for working to translate that research into policy and practice. As he puts it, “The extraordinary policy scholar excels in five areas: disciplinary scholarship, policy analysis and popular writing, convening and quarterbacking collaborations, providing incisive commentary on topical questions, and public speaking. After all, it’s the scholars who are skilled in most or all of these areas who can cross boundaries, foster crucial collaborations, and bring research into the world of policy in smart and useful ways.”

I don’t have those metrics, but I did look back on the most widely read research posts this year, and they give an interesting perspective on the research that catches our readers’ attention. The posts ranged pretty widely, but for the most part, it was the nuances—the “why?” and “how?”—that intrigued more than the “what?” and “how much?”

One study gave concrete evidence of real trauma inflicted in overly aggressive gym classes that has been the stuff of books and Hollywood movies for generations. Another went beyond the common knowledge that high-need schools tend to hire more teachers after the start of class, but that those teachers never catch up, even years later. Others showed that principal experience and effectiveness is just as important as that of teachers, and that a principal’s instincts tend to align with value-added and other measures of a good teacher during hiring.

And the most popular research post of the year came from a London study that likely lies close to many educators’ hearts: It found that a classroom focused on knowledge and love of learning had students who achieved more than did a class focused on preparing for the latest assessment. A lot of educators shook their heads and said “duh!” to that one, but perhaps a key part of making research more relevant to practitioners is providing clear evidence of which long-held education truisms really deserve support.

For a trip down memory lane, here’s the whole list of the top research blogs this year:
1. Studies Show Why Students Study is as Important as What
2. Study Finds NAEP Scores Rise When Students Are Paid
3. Study: Teaching Credentials Still Matter
4. IES Targets Reading with $100 Million in Grants
5. Kindergarten Program Boosts Students’ Vocabulary in 1st Grade
6. Researchers Say Gym-Class Humiliations Last a Lifetime
7. A Bad Month for Education Research
8. Experience Matters for School Principals, Says New Study
9.Teachers Hired Late Never Catch Up, Data Show
10. Principals Tend to Pick the Best Teachers, a Study Finds

Readers, what sort of research would you like to see in the next year? Send me an email or leave a comment below.

A controversy over the merits of ethnic-studies courses in Arizona’s Tucson Unified School District and how to identify disabilities in English-language learners were two of the hottest topics at Learning the Language in 2010, according to a ranking of the amount of web traffic that blog posts on those topics received.

A post about Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne’s campaign to shut down ethnic-studies courses in Tucson Unified School District was Learning the Language’s most clicked-on post during 2010. Horne, who leaves his job as Arizona’s chief state school officer to become Arizona’s attorney general in January, views the courses as anti-American while administrators in Tucson Unified say they help to make the curriculum relevant for Mexican-American students. I visited the school district in September and wrote a story for EdWeek about the controversy.

The issue will likely get more attention in January because on the last day of this month, a law goes into effect that bans the teaching of ethnic-studies courses in Arizona that are designed for a particular ethnic group or promote ethnic solidarity among a particular group. Arizona’s new chief state school officer, John Huppenthal, a Republican, criticized the ethnic-studies courses in Tucson during his campaign for his new post, so it’s likely he’ll take the same position as Horne has that the courses in Tucson violate the new state law. Back in October, Tucson Unified teachers filed a lawsuit in a federal court challenging the new law.

For the past few years, discussions about how best to serve English-language learners who may also have disabilities have gotten a lot of readership on this blog and that proved to be true also this year. With each year, the field seems to produce more resources to address this issue, but it’s still a thorny one.

Two of the most-read posts for 2010 were actually published in 2008, showing that educators explore some of the same issues from year to year. One of the popular 2008 posts is about what research says about giving help to ELLs by having teachers “push in” to the classroom, or assist them while they are in their regular classes, or having teachers “pull out” students, or serve them in separate special classes. The other well-read 2008 post discusses the nuanced differences in meaning between the “integration” and “assimilation” of immigrants.

Toward the end of this year, the topic that received the most readership on this blog was the fate of the DREAM Act, which if it had been approved by the U.S. Congress, would have provided a path to legalization for some of the undocumented students who graduate from U.S. high schools each year. The U.S. House of Representatives approved the act, but the U.S. Senate did not.

Here is a list of the top-ten most-clicked-on posts at this blog in 2010, ranked in order of popularity.

Horne to Tucson Schools: Funds at Risk Over Ethnic Studies
Study Explores How Best to Identify ELLs With Disabilities
Research on Push-In Versus Pull-Out (2008)
ELL Civil Rights Probes Span From Coast to Coast
What Duncan’s Speech on Foreign Languages Didn’t Say
Feds Add New Categories for Civil Rights Reporting
Immigrant Integration, or Assimilation? (2008)
U.S. Reps. Push for Foreign-Language Teaching in ESEA
Study: How One School Carried Out RTI for ELLs Badly
House Passes DREAM Act; Senate Vote Expected

A guide by two professional-development consultants spells out in great detail how teachers can tailor instruction for English-language learners according to the students’ levels of English proficiency. The book, Differentiating Instruction and Assessment for English Language Learners: A Guide for K-12 Teachers, by Shelley Fairbairn and Stephaney Jones-Vo, arrived in my mailbox a few months ago, but I’ve just now taken advantage of the peace and quiet in the office during this holiday time to skim it and evaluate its usefulness to educators.

The writers of the book are careful to cite research to back up their guidelines for differentiating instruction. I don’t deem to be able to discern whether they have highlighted the research that deserves to be featured. But the book is very clearly written and comes with a poster organizing its recommendations that would enable teachers, in my view, to run with the information in planning lessons.

The book aligns its suggestions for tailoring instruction for ELLs according to five levels of English proficiency based on English-language-proficiency standards created by the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages Inc. Those TESOL standards are an augmentation of standards produced by the World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment, or WIDA, consortium. Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia are members of WIDA, so presumably quite a few states are in a position to take advantage of the suggestions for standards-based lesson planning in the book.

In tailoring lessons for Level 1 ELLs, or those just starting to learn English, for example, a teacher might teach writing by having students organize information with concept maps, Venn diagrams, and charts. But for Level 5 ELLs, students with advanced English skills, teachers should expect their students to produce extended written discourse, and expect the language to be precise and grammatically varied, the book says. In teaching reading to Level 1 students, teachers should provide a great deal of visual support and possibly emphasize guided reading. By contrast, in teaching reading to Level 5 students, teachers should use grade-level texts.

The book also has tons of principles that teachers should use in planning lessons for ELLs of all language levels, such as to inform students of daily objectives for both language and content, provide regular opportunities for ELLs to interact with native speakers of English, and target correction of errors for specific, level-appropriate aspects of the language.

In reading this guide, I could envision why experts in the field of educating ELLs are saying that teachers will need more explicit instructions for how to implement common-core standards for ELLs of different English-proficiency levels than what the standards document currently provides. I think that most teachers in the United States need some assistance in planning the kinds of activities and supports appropriate to get content across to ELLs at their various levels of proficiency.

The nation’s schools with high rates of student mobility have larger than average percentages of students who are low-income, receive special education, and are English-language learners, according to a recent study released by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. I wrote a story about this study published at edweek.org last week. The study is based on data from the U.S. Department of Education only for K-8 students in schools.

The GAO researchers consider a school to have a high rate of mobility if more than 10 percent of K-8 students left by the end of the school year. They found that 11.5 percent of U.S. schools fall in that category.

At least one other study, based on data only from the state of Arizona, was released this year that showed a link between student mobility and English-language learners. A report prepared by the Regional Educational Laboratory West for the Institute of Education Sciences found that Arizona’s English-language learners are more likely to change schools than other students.

Happy holidays, everyone! For those who want some reading to help digest their weekend turkey and trimmings, here‘s an interesting research perspective on teacher data use from across the pond at the University of Southampton.

Great Britain, like the United States, is in the middle of a major push to use student achievement data to improve instruction and school policy. And, like us, the implementation is still a bit hit or miss. Study authors at the university Anthony Kelly, a professor of school improvement and political economy, Christopher Downey, an education lecturer, and Willeke Rietdijk, a research fellow, analyzed the reports of a nationally representative sample of 813 teachers and administrators on their data use across 178 secondary schools in 2009.

While 85 percent of faculty overall said they used student data “frequently,” only a little more than a third of lead subject teachers and fewer than one in four classroom teachers reported doing so. Moreover, school leaders voiced more satisfaction with the quality of student data than did teachers. Most schools used a “data manager” at the assistant principal or department head level, and classroom teachers often had limited access to data systems. Moreover, while more than 80 percent of teachers and administrators used assessment data to evaluate students’ performance and set targets for them, fewer than half used the data to evaluate or adjust their own teaching strategies.

“Classroom teachers feel that ranking schools according to performance (and other ‘external’ reasons) is why the government collects pupil performance data, and there is considerable resentment about this because it is thought the government does not trust teachers to act professionally,” the researchers found.

Teachers preferred to use their own data, generated from classroom assessments, homework and the like, to improve instruction. Teachers trusted their own data as more accurate, consistent, and timely, and they could more easily interpret the data in the context of students’ motivation and other class issues. They also trusted their own judgement more than the national test scores, believing the latter to be unreliable and useless to inform non-tested subjects.

None of those sentiments would be unfamiliar among American teachers. And education leaders here might take a lesson from the differences among British teachers who did and did not use data. More experienced teachers and those given more access and training in how to analyze the information they received were more likely to actually use it to inform their instruction.