To build collective capacity within organizations, schools and districts across the world have implemented coaching as an effective method for systemic reform. Vermont in particular has a wide variety of coaches, including instructional coaches and systems coaches, as well as a variety of interpretations of the coaching practice. Many schools…

Student learning measures have rapidly become common in teacher evaluation systems across the United States. Over half of the country's states have required, recommended, or identified "student learning objectives" (SLOs) as a measure of student growth for use in educator evaluation. Although SLO-type measures vary significantly in terms…

Motor vehicle safety and tobacco control are among the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As the number of miles traveled in the United States multiplied 10 times from the 1920s to the 1990s, the annual motor vehicle crash death rate per vehicle mile traveled…

The purpose of this article is to describe published scholarly and research work to determine the extent to which they contributed to the physical education reform during 2000-2010 in China. Using an analytical reasoning approach, we analyzed 730 scholarly articles on K-12 physical education published in the 6 top kinesiology scholarly journals.…

Issues affecting inclusion of young children with disabilities over the last 25 years are discussed. A brief history of early childhood inclusion is followed by a discussion of definition, terminology, and models for inclusive services. A summary of synthesis points derived from the research literature focuses on critical outcomes for children…

This report uses the three-component framework to categorize and synthesize major recommendations to Congress for the ESEA (Elementary and Secondary Education Act) reauthorization and briefly analyzes them from the perspective of the third component. The analysis illuminates fundamental gaps in the prevailing recommendations. In particular, this…

The implementation of programs and practices that reflect the best available research and evaluation is a new and very promising development in the out-of-school time field. However, successfully implementing a new, evidence-based program or practice is a major challenge for practitioners. This challenge is due, in large part, to a lack of…

This report identifies and synthesizes what is known about specific program features for children and youth aged 6-17 that might be manipulated or regulated-components such as staff wages, group size, activities, and theoretical approach that make up the "how" of program implementation. The authors have culled information from the limited extant…

Discusses the historical development of "hard" and "soft" systems thinking traditions and examines how these traditions have been understood and applied in the field of instructional development. Proposes the need for a synthesis of the two traditions in planning, implementing, and evaluating instructional programs. (AEF)