During the 2004 legislative session, the Colorado General Assembly enacted Senate Bill 189 (SB189), which established the first system of college vouchers in the United States. The supporters of SB189 hoped that the voucher system, called the College Opportunity Fund (COF), would: 1) stabilize the flow of state funding to higher education; 2)…

The project reported here served to assess a curriculum for EFNEP to ensure theory compliance and content validity. Adherence to Adult Learning Theory and Social Cognitive Theory tenets was determined. A curriculum assessment tool was developed and used by five reviewers to assess initial and revised versions of the curriculum. T-tests for…

Every Child a Writer is a genre-based model of writing instruction promoted by the National Literacy Coalition. This paper reports on Colorado schools implementing the model. Statistical analyses of achievement patterns in implementing schools were compared to statewide achievement results. A student cohort design across multiple years was…

States, programs, and schools have long focused on the inputs of teacher preparation--the rules for candidates and the preparation programs they attend--because inputs were thought to predict teacher effectiveness, and because they were often the best option available. But in the early 2000s, policymakers began trying to evaluate preparation…

The evidence that teacher preparation programs have an impact on teacher quality is often limited. Progress in research on this topic will remain rather limited in its influence on practice until more proximal measures of teacher education outcomes can be established. The dearth of variables to measure the impact of teacher preparation programs on…

Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP) is a federal program aimed at equalizing access to higher education for low-income students. GEAR UP, created in 1998, attempts to provide information and support about higher education to students beginning no later than the seventh grade while promoting lasting…

This paper describes the longitudinal impacts of a partnership between the University of Colorado Boulder's K-12 Engineering Education initiative and the St. Vrain Valley School District. Together, university and high school educators created a replicable pre-college engineering model in a nine-school feeder system, which serves many Colorado…

Math experts developed Formative Assessment Lessons that teachers can incorporate throughout the year's curriculum. Both tools target the "instructional core." A study by Research for Action (RFA) examining the first year of piloting the Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) and Math Design Collaborative (MDC) tools (2010-11) found…

Comprised of seven tables, this compilation of community attitude responses for the Western States Small Schools Project includes data derived from Arizona (8 communities); Colorado (16 communities); Nevada (4 communities); and Utah (2 communities). Data are presented in terms of the following categories: administration; general attitude; finance;…

Course management software enables faculty members to learn one software package for web-based curriculum, assessment, synchronous and asynchronous discussions, collaborative work, multimedia and interactive resource development. There are as many as 109 different course management software packages on the market and several studies have evaluated…