"Technology Initiative for NwT (Natural sciences and Technology) school courses" was an innovative teaching project in cooperation between the University of Furtwangen (HFU), the State Seminar for Didactics and Teachers Education Rottweil and the Fürstenberg Gymnasium (FG) Donaueschingen. The main objectives of this project were the…

This study investigates the experience of an unusually interesting group of schools. There are about 20,000 government-funded primary and secondary schools in England. They are all subject to inspection by the national schools inspectorate for England known as Ofsted (the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills).…

The report is about the effectiveness of the YoungStar system which provides consumers with a simple 5 Star rating system for the quality of early care and education (ECE) programs for children ages 0 to 5. It also explores what was learned from a recent research study of YoungStar, Wisconsin's child care quality rating and improvement system. The…

Research demonstrates that human development and student learning are highly dependent on interpersonal relationships and positive learning environments (Eccles et al., 1993). However, school improvement efforts often focus on students' mastery of academic skills with much less emphasis on students' social and emotional skills, which are integral…

Children's academic and social development before third grade is highly predictive of later success in school and beyond. Research shows that during those early years, the gains children make in language and literacy, mathematics and social skills, and their growth as learners and thinkers are associated with a range of benefits, from academic…

This study investigated the impact of the transformation and turnaround intervention models and leadership perception on the achievement of students attending Kentucky's priority high schools. Repeated-measures analyses of variance were conducted to show the effect of the chosen model on academic achievement of students with test scores obtained…

California educators continue in their struggle to communicate district plans to parents, teachers, and other members of the school community. Local Control Accountability Plans (LCAPs), have ballooned into jargon-laden stacks of tables, impenetrable to all but the most sophisticated reader. Envisioned as a tool to improve transparency, the LCAP…

This qualitative case study examined the role of three support advocates in an urban middle school setting when working with tier 3 students. Support advocates are support staff members who work with a specific caseload of students- identified because they are at risk of early drop out from high school- but defining their role as a wraparound…

We study a California policy that loosened constraints on some local governments by lowering the share of votes required to pass school capital improvement bond referendums. We show that the policy change yielded larger tax proposals that received less support from voters, yet led to a doubling of approved spending. We show that this effect is…

This article describes the author's personal journey translating narrative inquiry research methods into pedagogy for her teacher education course. She uses self-study research methods to frame his journey. Self-study is a widely used method in teacher education to reflectively improve one's practice. It provides the researcher a tool to look…

University administrators may invest significant time and resources with the goal of improving their "U.S. News & World Report" ranking, but the real impact of these investments is not well known since, as other universities make similar changes, rankings become a moving target. This research removes the mystique of the "U.S.…

This article presents the findings of a qualitative study on teacher leadership in the context of university-school collaboration for school improvement (USCSI) on the Chinese Mainland. Through the lens of structuration theory, it explores the process of teacher leaders exercising their power in a USCSI project. During the school improvement…

In this paper, we explore some of the keywords around which the practice of school inspection is ordered in England. As part of a project that explores the role of inspection in governing schooling in England, Scotland and Sweden, we have examined some of the key sources through which Ofsted (The Office for Standards in Education, Children's…

Some of the most promising reforms are happening where school leaders are thinking differently about how to get the strongest student outcomes from the limited resources available. But even principals who use their autonomy to aggressively reallocate resources say that persistent district, state, and federal barriers prohibit them from doing more.…

Purpose: This AERI-NEPC eBrief, the fourth in a series titled "Understanding validity issues around the world", looks closely at issues surrounding the validity of test-based actions in educational accountability and school improvement contexts. The specific discussions here focus testing issues in the US. However, the general principles…