Rural school districts face unique challenges in procuring funds, recruiting staff, and obtaining high-quality technical assistance. This environment creates problems in identifying high-quality instructional materials and implementing best practices. A collaborative learning network can address these challenges by providing access to professional…

"Transforming Science Assessment: Systems for Innovation," is a series of resources designed to provide state education leaders with: (1) Information about how states are currently pursuing statewide assessment systems in science; (2) Analyses of what features influence different approaches, with an eye to supporting state leaders as…

"Transforming Science Assessment: Systems for Innovation," is a series of resources designed to provide state education leaders with: (1) Information about how states are currently pursuing statewide assessment systems in science; (2) Analyses of what features influence different approaches, with an eye to supporting state leaders as…

In conjunction with the relaunch of the Digital Learning Transition (DLT) Massive Open Online Course for Educatos (MOOC-Ed) in September 2013, the Alliance and the Friday Institute released "The Digital Learning Transition MOOC for Educators: Exploring a Scalable Approach to Professional Development", a new paper that describes the…

"Transforming Science Assessment: Systems for Innovation," is a series of resources designed to provide state education leaders with: (1) Information about how states are currently pursuing statewide assessment systems in science; (2) Analyses of what features influence different approaches, with an eye to supporting state leaders as…

By 2013, all 50 states and the District of Columbia had adopted college- and career-ready standards in English language arts and mathematics, placing a greater emphasis on argument writing to prepare students for life after high school. Solving the specific problem of how to help teachers teach to new standards for argument writing as well as the…

Background/Context: As implementation of the Common Core Literacy Standards moves ahead, teachers, students, and schools are discovering that the standards demand a great deal of them in order to achieve the vision of college, career, and citizenship in the global-digital world outlined in the standards. To accomplish the goals and high…

In the field of medicine, research and practice are joined in teaching hospitals. In these institutions, researchers work alongside doctors to incorporate recent advances in medical research into practice and track results. There is a growing movement in the field of education to create analogous institutions in education called research schools.…

The concept and the activities of nurturing are vital to the teacher education classroom. It is essential that student teachers have the ability to understand their own students' connection to learning and thus to the need those students have for a particular and indispensable form of sustenance. Nurturing unites identity and subject matter…

American businesses and industries have long identified shortages in key career and technical areas--some of these areas require two- or four-year college degrees, whereas others simply require industry certifications. Career and technical education (CTE) has the potential to play a central role in filling these gaps. The current Carl D. Perkins…

This article describes several stages in the integration of assistive technology (AT) into and across the curriculum of a teacher education program. The multi-year initiative included several projects and strategies that differentially affected faculty ability to integrate training and evaluation in using AT in their coursework. All strategies…

This article examines the meanings and impact of "Assessment for Learning" initiatives in schools against the back drop of assessment reform in Singapore since 1997. It is argued that "Assessment for Learning" is understood in different ways, and these different meanings do not always benefit students' learning. The different…

The article analyses the main benefits of a Portuguese programme, launched in 1996, which was designed to support schools in segregated districts (TEIPs). The first part of the article presents a theoretical framework, before moving on to the main features of the TEIP programme in contemporary Portuguese society and education. An explanation of…

The Hint Factory is an implementation of our novel method to automatically generate hints using past student data for a logic tutor. One disadvantage of the Hint Factory is the time needed to gather enough data on new problems in order to provide hints. In this paper we describe the use of expert sample solutions to "seed" the hint generation…

In K-12 education, formative assessment is a pedagogical process gathering momentum among researchers and practitioners. It has become a common theme at educational conferences, a key Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) research theme since 2002 and the subject of increasingly frequent requests for government funding in…