In summer 2008, CIRTL will offer an opportunity for non-tenured faculty members, post-doctoral associates, and academic-track Ph.D. students to strengthen their preparation as college teachers.

To improve the quality of the nation's teachers, the public education system has long relied on requirements and rewards for formal teacher education, experience, and other traits.

The process of improving teacher quality requires interpreting research and understanding the practical realities of schools.

UW-Madison spent $30 million of externally generated funds on education research in fiscal 2006, more than any other U.S. university.

More than 220 Madison Metropolitan School District mathematics teachers have attended professional development inservice sessions with support from WCER's DiME project.

When she begins her new job teaching mechanical engineering at Egypt’s Ain Shams University in spring 2008, graduate student Aya Diab will use teaching skills she nurtured in the Delta Program at UW-Madison.

The National Minority Student Achievement Network has made its new home at WCER to deepen its engagement with research.

WCER researcher Shihmei Barger is an evaluation researcher for a program that helps elementary and secondary schools implement research-based methods for improving history teachers' content knowledge.

The U.S. education system needs a coherent, comprehensive, sustained, and integrated nationwide approach to improving the quality, accessibility, and real-world relevance of science, math, engineering, and technology (STEM) education.

Teaching-related professional development projects aimed at aspiring college/university educators have emerged in the U.S. in the last decade. A new WCER Working Paper reports on this trend.

To make algebra instruction more meaningful to more students, Mitchell Nathan and colleagues investigate how middle school students learn from teachers' instructional languages in their algebra classes.

A new Policy Brief discusses how CPRE finance research has begun to link the level and use of education resources with strategies that districts and schools can deploy to double student performance.

A new series of articles illustrates key concepts of the SCALE Partnership's work within the major themes of the National Science Foundation's Math and Science Partnership Program.

In a new working paper, UW-Madison education professor Jeffrey Lewis discusses "solidarity in community" as a framework for understanding the process by which children develop positive social and academic behavior.

WCER's Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL), and the Value-Added Research Center have both increased their reach with new funding and partnerships.

The CIRTL Guidebook Collection features eight versatile course guidebooks that result from the work of a community of research-active faculty, graduate students, and others in the STEM disciplines.

Teacher logs can be used in large-scale research on teaching, and data from teacher logs can be used to investigate methodological and substantive questions about classroom instruction.

When teaching mathematics for social justice, teachers face several challenges. For example, how do they perceive social justice in relation to their students? How do they open the classroom to discussions of racism?

Ten Wisconsin school districts and the UW-Madison are collaborating to improve middle school students' achievement in science through professional development opportunities for their science teachers.

Public education may not necessarily serve as the "great equalizer," according to a new study by James Benson and Geoffrey Borman.

Analysing instructional conversation in a middle school mathematics class, Mitchell Nathan and Suyeon Kim observed how teachers regulate student participation in classroom discussion.

LADDER is a new comprehensive program of data-driven professional development that reflects current research, theory, and practice.

Students' performance on annual math and science assessments improved in almost every age group when their schools were involved in a program that partners K-12 teachers with their colleagues in higher education.

Douglas Harris and colleagues are examining criteria used to certify teachers and measuring how each one contributes to explaining variation in teachers' impact on student learning.

The new book "How to Create World Class Teacher Compensation," written by Allan Odden and Marc Wallace, is available from Freeload Press.

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act and calls to improve pre-service teacher education have prompted policymakers to rethink models of instructional improvement and teacher preparation.

WCER director Adam Gamoran, and scholars in sociology, economics, psychology, and education policy offer recommendations for the implementation and impending reauthorization of NCLB. This book will be published by Brookings Institution Press in October.

Many inventive and innovative students with engineering skills and interests are discouraged or prevented from entering the practice. Research intended to reframe engineering education as a set of developmental experiences could attract more people to the field.

Effective system school improvement efforts depend on formative feedback systems. Richard Halverson, Reid B. Pritchett, and Jeffrey G. Watson summarize results of a 5-year study of how school leaders help teachers work with student achievement data.

Supplemental Educational Services (SES) policies specified by the No Child Left Behind Act are hampered by political, technical, instructional, and organizational problems. A new policy brief by Patricia Burch makes recommendations on this issue.

The CoMPASS project helps students access digital libraries such as the National Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education Digital Library.

Wisconsin high school graduates from low income families are much less likely to attend college even when they have the same academic qualifications as wealthier students. This has significant consequences for those students and their families, and reduces the quality of life for the entire state.

Fourteen presentations from a February CPRE conference on teacher compensation and school finance policy are now available for download.

A new report summarizes the past 15 years of research from WCER's Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE).

Some 25 states are using WCER’s online Web Alignment Tool to guide and automate the process of aligning the state’s education standards with its standardized tests.

WCER’s SCALE project was well represented at this year’s National Science Teachers Association Conference in St. Louis.

Two hundred faculty and staff from UW-Madison are in Chicago this week at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.

Title II of the Higher Education Act enables K-12 schools and institutions of higher education to form partnerships for improving teacher preparation and to target critical needs.

Allan Odden and colleague Larry O. Picus designed a better school funding model for Arkansas.

Graduate students and post-docs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics meet regularly by teleconference to exchange advice, answer questions, make connections, and provide tips to streamline projects, through a new initiative called CIRTLink.

With funding from the Spencer Foundation, Catherine Compton-Lilly is engaged in a ten-year study of literacy.

UW-Madison education professors Gloria Ladson Billings and Diana Hess are contributing to a curriculum project to accompany Spike Lee’s film, “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.”

Literacy and Academic Achievement was the theme for the Tenth Annual WCER Conference for Wisconsin Cooperative Education Services Agencies (CESAs).

The WCER Working Paper series opens 2007 with the release of two new papers.

WCER's Diversity in Mathematics Education Center for Learning and Teaching (DiME) project involves 3 universities and 3 school districts working to prepare mathematics education leaders. Abstracts of six dissertations prepared by graduate fellows are posted.

More education researchers are documenting classroom interaction using digital video. More than 40,000 researchers have downloaded Transana, a computer program that allows users to transcribe and analyze large video and audio data collections.

Researchers Richard Halverson and colleagues have formed a Games, Learning, and Society program that offers graduate-level courses for students interested in studying games, game culture, the design of games for learning, and the impact of games on society.

Building on the tools of measurement, design, and statistices in education and the social sciences, WCER's Interdisciplinary Training Program for Predoctoral Research in the Education Sciences is training a new generation of researchers who can bring the most rigorous tools of quantitative social science to bear on the practical problems of education.

As part of the University of Wisconsin, WCER contributes to the “Wisconsin Idea,” a tradition begun by UW President Charles Van Hise in 1904. Van Hise declared that he would “never be content until the beneficent influence of the university reaches every family in the state.” Three current WCER initiatives involve particularly close work with policymakers and practitioners in our own state.

Meeting Adequate Yearly Progress goals as delineated by the No Child Left Behind Act  forces school leaders to understand how to develop local systems for translating student testing data into the kinds of information teachers and staff can use to improve student learning.

By the year 2010, over 30 percent of all school-age children will come from homes in which the primary language is not English. NCLB requires states to identify and test all English Language Learners in K-12 public schools.