Games Based Assessment: Capturing Evidence of Learning in Play

Why do students like video games? Well-designed games reward players for mastering required content and strategies. They facilitate players’ advancement toward more complex activities, engage players in organized social interaction toward shared goals, and allow players to monitor their progress.  Could video games be used to assess student achievement?

Professionally Speaking: CEW Careers Conference

The 27th Annual Careers Conference, organized by the Center on Education and Work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will provide quality professional development for those who work with students and adults of all ages on career and education issues.

Value-Added Measurement: What It Is and Is Not

Whether we’re measuring teacher skills or school performance, value-added evaluation continues to shape our definition of successful education.

Engineering Success

Golnaz Arastoopour, a third-year student of David Shaffer and a researcher for the Epistemic Games Group, was chosen to lead a group of researchers in reviewing submitted grant proposals.

How Reading Recovery Implementation Fails African American Students

UW–Madison education professor Catherine Compton-Lilly says that broad views of program effectiveness can overlook inequities that affect a program’s success.

Code Talker: David Woods

Over the past 10 years, David Woods has created an incredibly effective and versatile piece of transcription software used by thousands of researchers across the globe.

The Glass Ceiling

UW–Madison education professor Jerlando Jackson directs Wisconsin’s Equity and Inclusion Laboratory. He recently examined how the glass ceiling operates in the academic world.

Cultural Brokering Stresses Students, Families

When moving to a new country, families often need help navigating the culture and language. Iin immigrant families, children often act as translators and interpreters during phone calls and daily conversations.

When Teaching Decisions Collide with Organizational Norms

Matthew Hora, a researcher at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, studies instructional policies and practices at institutions of higher education.

Using Research to Narrow Gaps

African-American, Latino, and other students of color have much poorer odds of succeeding in public schools than do their White counterparts. But those odds can be improved.

Learning to Speak the Language

A student’s English language proficiency affects his or her school experience in fundamental ways. This holds especially true for English Learner (EL) students, whose life trajectories are shaped by how effectively teachers evaluate their proficiency in academic English and content knowledge.

Hot Topics, Civil Discussions

UW–Madison education professor Diana Hess says the need for discussing controversial political issues in school is more important than ever.

Assessing Teaching Practice

Former WCER researcher Tony Milanowski, now with Westat, urges evaluators to adopt recent advances in measuring teaching practice and to use them along with the developing technology for measuring outcomes.

Data-driven Reform Efforts Can Improve Achievement Significantly

Geoffrey Borman and graduate students Deven Carlson and Michelle Robinson discovered that good information empowers educators to improve teaching and student learning.

Team Teaching Practices Affect Value-Added Measurements

A recent study by Jeffery Watson and colleagues assessed a large urban school district’s student information system to determine whether and how student-teacher linkage data matched the reality of schools and classrooms, including accounting for team teaching.

Exploring the Paradox: Adolescent Reasoning

UW Madison education professors Eric Knuth, Charles Kalish, Amy Ellis, and colleagues explored the paradoxes of adolescent reasoning in mathematical and non-mathematical domains.

Online Mentoring as Good as In-Person

WCER researcher Elizabeth Bagley found that “virtual” environments made possible by computer games are well positioned to provide students with high-quality environmental education.

Best Practices in Hiring and Evaluation

Benefits and Drawbacks of Social Media in Education

Tangibility for Teaching, Learning and Communicating Mathematics

The Challenge and Promise of Education Partnerships

When a student is an unmarried parent

UW-Madison education professor Amy Ellis studies the processes that support students’ productive generalizing in their math classrooms.

The Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL) works to improve STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) teaching and learning by preparing graduate students and post-doctoral fellows to be future faculty who are both excellent researchers and excellent teachers.

Richard Halverson and colleagues helped produce a guide for the U.S. Department of Education, “Using student achievement data to support instructional decision making.”

Classrooms across the country are welcoming an ever-growing number of students whose native language is not English. Learning English is tough enough, especially so when you’re a student learning academic content at the same time.

Desegregating schools has long been considered a matter of equity, justice, and improved student achievement. But there is still a lot to learn about exactly how having diverse classrooms improves student achievement.

How students learn to see themselves as writers is a question that has fascinated UW-Madison education professor Cathy Compton-Lilly for decades

UW-Madison education professor Sharon Derry chaired a national task force of scholars in writing guidelines for researchers who use video and who want to better design formal and informal learning environments.

UW–Madison education professor Eric Camburn and Sociology graduate student Seong Won Han reviewed and analyzed evidence on instruction from all surveys conducted between 1987 and 2005 that used nationally representative samples to measure classroom instruction.

What aspects of teaching most influence student learning?
What specific local strategies most improve student achievement?

 SMHC is pressing for a comprehensive and substantive national policy agenda on human capital reform in education.

A plausible case can be made that distributing leadership to teachers can support instructional change, says UW–Madison education professor Eric Camburn.

How can teachers best organize students for instruction? Every approach has disadvantages as well as advantages, and the consequences vary by context.