FAST Program Builds Social Capital

Children perform better in school when their families are supportive and when their parents are involved in school-related activities. Lynn McDonald, a senior scientist at WCER, developed Families and Schools Together (FAST), a program that helps parents establish their own support system around themselves.

Teacher Evaluation and Professional Development

Teacher evaluation plays an important role in teacher selection and induction. But evaluation rarely appears to advance learning for senior teachers, according to research by UW-Madison education profesor Carolyn Kelley and graduate student Victoria Maslow.

Elements of Children's Social Functioning

The most consistent predictor of children's social development through the early school years turns out to be the sensitivity of maternal behavior across the infant, toddler, and preschool years.

Intervention Programs Can Have Powerful Effects

Instructional improvement intervention programs like Accelerated Schools, America’s Choice, and Success for All can have powerful effects on the enacted curriculum in U.S. schools.

Concepts and Procedures Reinforce Each Other

As children develop their problem-solving abilities, what comes first: their conceptual knowledge or their procedural knowledge? Or do these grow in tandem? The debate has long continued. But recent research shows that conceptual and procedural knowledge appear to develop in a hand-over-hand process. Gains in one type of knowledge support gains in the other, which in turn support gains in the first.

Achievement Gap Can Be Narrowed Further

The U.S. Department of Education’s Title I program aims “to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging state academic achievement standards and state academic assessments.”

Early contacts with child welfare agencies or special education programs often do not act as protective factors for students with emotional and behavioral disorders, because contact with these agencies is not sufficiently early, comprehensive, or coordinated across agencies.

Learning mathematics with understanding requires teachers to help students build on what they know and on how they think. Similarly, students' reasoning should be placed at the center of effective instructional decision making and professional development.

Efforts to reform mathematics and science instruction in schools must address three key organizational challenges:

• Providing resources
• Aligning commitments, and
• Sustaining and generating reform.

This knowledge results from 8 years of collaboration among teachers, schools, and researchers at WCER's National Center for Improving Student Learning and Achievement in Mathematics and Science (NCISLA). NCISLA researchers worked to create and study classrooms in which compelling new visions of mathematics and science are becoming the norm.

Is the U .S . producing enough teachers as a nation to fill all of the openings? Yes and no. The number of new teachers is sufficient to meet demand, but the graduates are not necessarily in the subject areas where they are needed, and they many do not want to go to the schools where they are most needed. The effects of the shortages of fully qualified teachers are disproportionately borne by students in low-achieving schools, schools with high numbers of students of color, and schools with high numbers of students who qualify for free and reduced-price lunch.

Many consider proof to be central to the discipline of mathematics and the practice of mathematicians; yet surprisingly, the role of proof in school mathematics has been peripheral at best. Fortunately, the nature and role of proof in school mathematics is receiving increased attention with many math educators advocating that proof should be a central part of the math education of students at all grade levels.

For 8 years, researchers at WCER's National Center for Improving Student Learning and Achievement in Mathematics and Science (NCISLA; http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/ncisla/) worked with teachers and schools to create and study classrooms in which compelling new visions of mathematics and science are becoming the norm.

Some believe that African American children develop oppositional culture against schooling. But there is now a growing research literature documenting urban students' positive orientation toward achievement.

The challenges facing Latino students on their pathway to college are enormous at best, impossible at worst. At almost every educational level, Latino youth face uphill struggles. The cumulative result is that educational opportunity is lost for these youth, who must try harder just to keep up with other students.

"Rewards motivate performance improvement." This belief is common among education policymakers. But little was known until recently about the processes that underlie successful programs linking teacher rewards to improvement in student performance.

Students perform best on tests that assess subject matter content students have had the opportunity to learn. Though supported time and again by research*, this observation is little more than common sense. Until recently, however, educators have had little ability to examine the relationship between the content of assessments and the content of instruction.

Can higher starting salaries attract undergraduate students with career goals related to math, science, or technology to a career in K-12 teaching? If so, what salary levels might be needed?

When it comes to the delivery of mental health services, most people picture a clinical setting. In reality, for children the most common setting is the school. In fact, for many children, school is the only place mental health services are available.

Recommendations for reforming math and science education in the U.S. call for fundamental changes in the math and science content taught in schools and in the approaches to teaching that content.

Politicians are calling loudly for educational improvement, and many insist that more testing and more accountability will usher in an era of improved student achievement. UW-Madison education professor Geoffrey Borman agrees, to a point.

Students are learning more challenging mathematics and science content, thanks to the National Science Foundation's Statewide Systemic Initiatives (SSI) program.

Generally speaking, children in higher quality child care programs perform better on measures of social, language, and cognitive development than children who attend poorer quality settings.

Few new teachers in urban schools receive adequate training as they enter the profession. They face large numbers of students who are poor, who come from varied racial and ethnic families, and who speak a first language other than English.

Block scheduling can take a number of different forms but generally results in fewer but longer classes than traditional schedules permit. Proponents of block schedules have cited several advantages for students, such as more uninterrupted class time and fewer classes in one semester.

Growth of an Interdisciplinary Teaching Team

In recent research on teachers' professional communities, WCER researcher Bruce King and teacher-researcher John Gunn found that the work of high school teaching teams is complex and often contradictory. Even in the best teams, hierarchies can emerge, tendencies toward individualism can persist, and genuine agreement can be elusive.

In recent research for the U.S. Department of Education, UW-Madison education professors Stephen N. Elliott and Thomas R. Kratochwill found that testing accommodations have a positive effect on the reading and math scores of most students with and without disabilities. Testing accommodations are changes made to the administration of standardized tests to provide students with disabilities the opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of constructs measured by the tests without the interference of their disability.

When a new principal arrives at a school she brings fresh insight into ways to improve student achievement. Successful principals work with staff to implement those changes and eventually show evidence that their initiatives are working.

Instituting reform is particularly urgent in urban schools because of the array of obstacles these schools face. Teachers and students work under stressful conditions. Students have higher truancy rates, lower graduation rates, and lower achievement levels than their peers in nonurban settings. In addition, teachers in urban schools are less likely to be adequately prepared or to have access to needed resources. Urban school leaders say that higher academic achievement and teacher recruitment are their schools’ most critical needs.

Student’s educational outcomes are boosted or hindered by their families’ socioeconomic background. Although certainly not fair to the student, such inequality is likely to persist throughout the 21st century, despite much rhetoric and a few policies directed against it.

Teachers get lots of advice and support from a variety of sources about what to teach. But do they really teach what is described in content standards? Do they teach what is in the textbook? Do they teach what is tested?

Academic skills are, and should be, the primary focus of instruction in schools. However, recent research suggests that student achievement also depends on academic enablers. Academic enablers are attitudes and behaviors that allow a student to participate in, and ultimately benefit from, academic instruction in the classroom. These enablers include motivation, interpersonal skills, engagement, and study skills.

Researchers studying schools as organizations often confront a tension between the need to achieve an in-depth understanding of local organizational conditions, on the one hand, and the need to know whether the knowledge gained from such case studies can be generalized more broadly, on the other.

School mathematics curricula in the U.S. have traditionally separated arithmetic and algebra. This historic separation has deprived students of powerful schemes for thinking about mathematics in the early grades, says UW-Madison education professor Thomas Carpenter. Carpenter directs the National Center for Improving Student Learning and Achievement in Mathematics and Science (NCISLA).

Teaching does not begin and end in the classroom. A teacher’s experiences with other faculty members, with the school’s leaders, and with its organizational structure all have a profound effect on the teacher’s influence on students.

Researchers and educators have learned a lot about the teaching and learning of mathematics in schools during the past 30+ years, much of it from the work of the emerging mathematics education research community. However, UW-Madison education professor emeritus Tom Romberg says researchers and educators still have lots to learn about the teaching and learning of mathematics in the “messy” social environment of school classrooms.

Recent education reform efforts require high standards for all students. The inclusion of students with disabilities in statewide assessment systems is now required by law and considered to represent a key aspect of good testing practices. From social and accountability perspectives, this inclusion of students with disabilities is highly valued, especially when their test scores are known to be valid. Unfortunately, many students with disabilities receive testing accommodations of unknown validity.

Since public schools were first instituted in the United States, society's needs have changed. One way for education to keep up with a changing society is through piecemeal reform—that is, programs that offer improvement in specific areas of student achievement. Systemic education reform, on the other hand, offers the possibility of fundamental improvement in American education.

Students with disabilities, even those in mainstreamed classrooms, have historically received lower quality instruction and have often been excluded from the required curriculum.

Recent school violence has shattered the public’s perception that their children are safe.

By the time they get to high school, students have had at least 9 years of learning to play the "game" of school. They know what it takes to win: Just give the right answer. In the field of science, this approach places undue emphasis on the end products of scientific inquiry, depriving students of the opportunity to learn about the practices through which scientific theories and explanations are constructed.

South African science and mathematics education doctoral students studying at U.S. universities in 2001 report that their U.S. work has helped them make progress in their research.

The academic life is challenging, and without networks of support can seem daunting. Faculty and staff continually seek information about teaching in particular and academic community in general. What can be a lonely process is made more pleasant and more productive by an innovative program on the UW-Madison campus.

Out-of home child care in America does not have a good reputation; parents and educators should know whether its negative reputation is deserved.

Data-based decision-making is an important tool for educational improvement. Yet, WCER researchers Bill Clune and Norman Webb remind us that making effective use of data is one of the continuing challenges of building capacity in systemic reform. In order to use data as a guide for continuous improvement around coherent goals of student achievement, schools must develop their organizational, technical and analytical capacities.

The US higher education system is often said to be the envy of the world. And while many doctoral students say they are generally satisfied with the quality of their doctoral preparation, a recent survey shows that the doctoral education could be improved in a number of ways.