Over the last 25 years, the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP) has invested nearly $5.3 billion into the charter school sector, directing funds to schools in 43 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico. Approximately 60% of students in CSP grantee schools are from low-income backgrounds and 64% are Black or Hispanic. The CSP has played a critical role in…

Purpose: In January 2015, the Northwest Board of Cooperative Educational Services (NW BOCES) received a five-year Investing in Innovation (i3) grant to develop and implement the System for Educator Effectiveness Development (SEED) program--an innovative professional development (PD) system designed to provide geographically isolated educators an…

This Annual Plan presents the major initiatives and priorities the U.S. Department of Education (Department) Office of Inspector General (OIG) intends to undertake to assist the Department in fulfilling its responsibilities to America's taxpayers and students. The Department will face several challenges in FY 2021; perhaps most significant among…

The process of conducting peer interviews has not been widely reported on as a participatory method. Youth gardens are known to support individual and community health and well-being. Producing for the Future utilized the principles of community-based participatory research within a gardening and microenterprise program for low-income youth. In…

In an effort to promote learning in classrooms, political science instructors are increasingly turning to interactive teaching strategies--experiments, simulations, etc.--that supplement traditional lecture formats. In this article, I advocate the use of student-generated data as a powerful teaching tool that can be used in a variety of ways to…

Professional development is central to teacher competence and, with particular attention to larger-scale, structured and formal professional development interventions (PDIs), this article discusses how the impact of professional development can be conceptualized and evaluated. Various kinds of impacts on teachers, organizations and systems, and…

Advocates of Oracy-Dialogics argue that it should play the major role in teaching and learning, yet it has also been argued that it plays little part in many teachers' pedagogic repertoire. This paper considers what is meant by Oracy-Dialogics. Then it describes research in a Cambridge Primary Review flagship school; it analyses the whole school…

Significant research has been conducted on skills' enhancement school programs, since their importance has been well established. The presented study evaluates "Steps for life", a Greek, universal, annual, teacher-taught programme, designed to improve personal and social skills in young elementary students by the use of questions,…

Medical schools with a diverse student body face the challenge of ensuring that all students succeed academically. Many medical schools have implemented prematriculation programs to prepare students from diverse backgrounds; however, evidence on their impact is largely lacking. In this study, we analyzed participants' demographics as well as the…

At the beginning of the 2016 academic year 77,214 freshman students at 44 campuses began the fall semester participating in the Re-Imagining the First Year (RFY) initiative of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU). These 44 institutions have formed a learning community that reviews and shares evidence-based practices,…

Although written lesson plans are a standard requirement in teacher training programs, limited information exists about effective methods for reviewing and assessing these documents. Vanderbilt University faculty designed and implemented a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning research study to evaluate the impact of in-person and written feedback…

We used a comparative interrupted time series design to examine the impact of the Massachusetts' Wraparound Zone Initiative on student achievement, attendance, retention, and suspension. This initiative was designed to create coordinated district systems that allow schools to proactively and systematically address students' nonacademic needs. The…

The authors examined the effectiveness of the electronic home note program (EHNP). The program features an emailed version of the traditional home note intervention. In addition, the program uses motivational strategies for increasing rates of on-task behavior, academic productivity, and parent involvement. The authors used a multiple-probe,…

At many higher education institutions, admissions decisions often rely on standardized test scores and high school grades; yet, they are less reliable predictors for applicants falling slightly below cutoff points, what we call borderline applicants. Since borderline applicants are often from underrepresented backgrounds and diverted to 2-year…

Teachers' problem-based learning knowledge, abilities, and attitudes are important factors in successful K--12 PBL implementations. This article describes the development and use of a free, online module entitled "Design a Problem-Based Learning Experience." The module production, aligned with theories of andragogy, was a partnership…