Computer-based ‘learning objects’ show promise in helping adult (re)learners recover and re-connect their previously disconnected knowledge..

UW–Madison’s Wisconsin Program for Scientific Teaching helps science graduate students and postdoctoral researchers communicate more effectively, discuss mentoring approaches, consider issues of human diversity, and to apply a “scientific teaching” approach to mentoring.

In a 2008 study, Eric Camburn determined that configuring and activating teacher leadership positions can support the adoption of specific instructional practices advocated by the America’s Choice program.

How can teachers best organize students for instruction? On one hand, schools are asked to provide all students with a common set of cognitive and social skills essential for success as adults. On the other hand, schools are structured to sort and select students for different career paths based on their individual orientations and capacities.

New findings from a study of instructional improvement reveal important insights about the process of school improvement by design and how to study this process.

Value-added assessment is not sufficient on its own as an indicator of teaching performance.

WCER’s Value-Added Research Center is helping the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) District evaluate its Integrated Resource Information System (IRIS).

Women and people of color are underrepresented at all ranks of the computer science professorate.

Transana 2.40 has recently been released. Transana lets researchers analyze and manage video data, and is developed and supported at WCER. With this new release, users can bring into a single episode multiple camera data or data from both video and audio recorders. 

David Williamson Shaffer and colleagues have won $4.5 million in federal grants to devise new ways to use computer games to teach and to assess what students have learned.

Algebra plays a critical role as a gatekeeper in school mathematics and in society beyond school years. Eric Knuth and colleagues are focusing on the ways early algebra education affects students' mathematical achievement as they enter more formal mathematics in middle grades.

Schools are increasingly held responsible for teaching certain kinds of knowledge and skills, and for adopting the technologies that help students achieve common learning goals.

Teachers’ gestures play an important role in helping students learn.  Martha Alibali, Mitchell Nathan, and Eric Knuth are building an empirical basis for recommendations about how teachers can use gestures more effectively in K-12 mathematics classes and in higher education statistics courses.

The Wisconsin Scholars Grant (WSG) targets graduates of Wisconsin public high schools who are enrolled at any of the 2-year or 4-year public colleges statewide and who receive Pell Grant money as part of their aid package.

Arne Duncan, Tim Pawlenty, and Ted Strickland are among the speakers invited and scheduled to speak at the Strategic Management of Human Capital in Education conference, Nov. 3-4 in Washington, DC.

The  influence of principal leadership on student achievement works indirectly. What specifically are the mediating factors? Eric Camburn and Douglas Harris are pursuing four related research questions.

New work on classroom assignment and instruction has identified approaches that may capture the benefits of differentiation for meeting students’ varied needs without giving rise to the consequences for inequality that commonly accompany tracking and ability grouping.

Catherine Compton-Lilly documents how one student from a low-income families accumulated ‘writing capital’ over 10 years.

David William Shaffer and team are developing a computer simulation game for these students that will test a theory of professional learning in a novel context. Nephrotex: The Dialysis Redesign Project is modeled on authentic engineering practices.

Jerlando Jackson is working to broaden African American participation in tenure track faculty and research scientist positions within the education pipeline.

WCER researchers are helping the Chicago Community Trust develop plans and assessment instruments for its Education Program.

In August 1964 the University of Wisconsin-Madison signed an agreement with the U.S. Office of Education to establish what is now WCER.

Patricia Burch and Rob Meyer have embarked on an evaluation of the implementation and effects of Supplemental educational services.

School principals often elevate teachers to leadership positions such as team leaders, coaches, and leaders of professional learning communities.

Efforts to change the culture of teaching and learning in STEM departments should focus on illuminating and then shifting faculty's cultural schema.

The Wisconsin Mentoring Seminar helps science graduate students and postdoctoral researchers learn to communicate more effectively, discuss mentoring approaches, consider issues of human diversity, and to apply a “scientific teaching” approach to mentoring.