Guest blog post by Jackie Zubrzycki

The International Reading Association, a Delaware-based professional group with 70,000 members, just announced the creation of the Literacy Research Panel, a group of researchers who will "respond to critical issues in literacy" by translating research into practical recommendations. The IRA has previously established its position that there is a gap between literacy research and practice.

The panel will focus on four "critical issues in literacy": closing the achievement gap, student motivation and engagement, standards and assessments, and teacher education, according to a press release. The group will announce more specifics about its priorities and plans on April 30th, as part of the IRA's annual conference.

Virginia Goatley, the organization's research director and a member of the new panel, said a number of factors led to the creation of the group, including the transition to the Common Core.

P. David Pearson, a professor and former dean of the University of California, Berkeley's graduate school of education who's chairing the new committee, agreed, saying, "There's a spirit in the air that we need a correction to the direction that No Child Left Behind took us in....there's a feeling now that things like the Common Core and the movement towards deeper learning are going to make sure we really focus on the ultimate goals of reading and literacy, to prepare kids for the job force and for higher education, and make sure that kids are able to reach their aspirations."

Pearson said the group will be working to "develop a set of research-based practices that we can promote through teacher education and professional development and through standards and curriculum materials and assessment" and to help "set the national agenda when it comes to literacy, research, and practice."

Here's a list of the panel's members:

• Peter Afflerbach, University of Maryland
• Nell Duke, Michigan State University
• Virginia Goatley, University of Albany (and IRA Research Director)
• John Guthrie, University of Maryland
• Kris Gutierrez, University of Colorado, Boulder
• Kenji Hakuta, Stanford University
• Peter Johnston, University of Albany
• Gloria Ladson-Billings, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Nonie Leseaux, Harvard University
• Elizabeth Moje, University of Michigan
• Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar, University of Michigan
• P. David Pearson, University of California, Berkeley
• Victoria Risko, Vanderbilt University (and IRA President)
• Timothy Shanahan, University of Illinois at Chicago
• Catherine Snow, Harvard University
• Karen Wixson, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Ms. Goatley said the group hopes to reach out to a broad audience, including policymakers, teacher educators, school administrators, classroom teachers, parents, and the general public.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 9:38 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

From guest blogger Jaclyn Zubrzycki

The Department of Education's Institute of Education Science is holding a training institute in single-case design research for special education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from June 25-29, 2012. Though it's being run by the National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER), the training is also aimed at researchers from outside the world of special education who might be able to use single-case design.

This is the second year running that the NCSER has run a training on single-case design research. This represents a bit of a shift from the IES's priorities during former director Russ Whitehurst's tenure, when randomized, controlled studies took precedence. The IES still funds significantly more randomized, controlled studies, said Deborah Speece, the NCSER's commissioner, and researchers tend to have more training in that methodology.

But Speece said her department views single-case design research as a "useful complement" to randomized control, within and without of the field of special education. In special education, single-case studies are used for rare conditions, but there are broader applications. For instance, "you might get to the end of a randomized, controledl study and look to see how you could reach kids who didn't respond, or strong responders," Speece said. Single-case design allows researchers to modify interventions used within the context of a single research project, which often isn't possible in a larger experiment.

Speece said her department planned to follow up on how and whether researchers used the training in their research.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 3:37 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

By guest blogger Jackie Zubrzycki

The Council for Opportunity in Education has submitted a Request for Correction to a 2009 study from Mathematica that suggested that Upward Bound, a program that helps low-income students and students whose parents do not have bachelor's degrees pursue college, did not have a significant positive impact on its participants.

The council is a nonprofit group that advocates on behalf of Upward Bound and other programs that work to expand college opportunities for disadvantaged students. It says that, among other design flaws, an unrepresentative program was disproportionately weighted in the study's analysis and resulted in the "ineffective" designation—and that if that data is removed, the study would show a positive impact. The Washington-based group also says that while U.S. Department of Education officials were aware of the study's flaws, the study remained publicly available and the flaws were not addressed.

But though the COE is just releasing this request now, these concerns have been circulating for years, says Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was chief of the Institute for Educational Sciences at the time of this study—and they've already been addressed. The IES did not commission the study, but it conducted a review of the report before it was released in 2009. Whitehurst said that "the reviewers thought that the issues that had been raised were real issues." They agreed that the case the COE's pointing to was unduly weighted but decided that "did not undermine the bottom-line conclusions." Reviewers also looked at a separate analysis of the Upward Bound data conducted by Margaret Cahalan, who was at the Education Department's office of planning, evaluation and policy development at the time and made some of the same criticisms as the COE report, and "didn't find it persuasive," Whitehurst said. Cahalan is now a senior research scientist at the COE's Pell Institute.

Mathematica, the Princeton, N.J.-based policy research group that produced the study, agreed that advocacy group's concerns aren't new, and that the report's findings are still valid. "Mathematica stands behind the findings of its report, which went through multiple peer reviews and was approved and released by the U.S. Department of Education," Mathematica's communications director Joanne Pfleiderer wrote in an email.

The COE says the study has helped result in stagnant funding for Upward Bound and is frequently cited by the program's detractors. But according to Maureen Hoyler, the executive vice president at COE, "The biggest negative impact is that it suggests that you can't impact college-going by working intensively with low-income students." Ms. Hoyler says the COE hopes the request for correction will result in the study's removal from the Education Department's website and that "it sheds light on national evaluations on programs for low-income people, especially students. I hope everyone learns from it, and that it helps them do better evaluation."

Whitehurst, however, adds that the COE's advocacy led to the cancellation of a rigorous, randomized evaluation of Upward Bound that was to begin in 2006, and might have helped settle some of the uncertainty around the program's effectiveness. He referred to this as a "low point" for federal program evaluation. "The programs need to be rigorously evaluated. The COE seems to think rigorous evaluation places programs at risk, but it only does so if they're ineffective or not willing to change." He said the Mathematica report indicated that Upward Bound might be more effective if "it focused on students who were younger in high school and less likely to go to college—high-risk kids."

In other research news, a study that questions the idea that 'stereotype threat' contributes to the gender gap in math ability is featured over on Curriculum Matters. Check it out!

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 4:38 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

UPDATED

By guest blogger Jackie Zubrzycki

A new report by the New York-based education & social research organization MDRC indicates that students in 105 of New York City's 123 so-called "small schools of choice" grew more academically and were more likely to graduate than students in New York's larger public high schools.

The positive outcomes held true for all subgroups, including African-American and Latino males, students who tested at all levels of proficiency in math, and students who were eligible for free and reduced price lunch.

New York City's small schools initiative resulted in 216 new schools being opened between 2002 and 2008, and was sponsored by prominent funders like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. (Gates also provides some support to Editorial Projects in Education, the publisher of Education Week.)

Once widely popular, the movement to carve up large high schools into smaller, more personal schools has lost some of its early momentum. The new MDRC report focuses on 123 nonselective small schools, which the researchers dubb small schools of choice and describe as the "heart of the small schools movement."

The researchers are touting the study's rigor and scale. Because students apply to New York City high schools, students who attend small schools can be reliably compared against a control group of students who applied to the same schools but didn't get in. When asked whether the 18 small schools of choice that weren't included might have different results (Perhaps they're not oversubscribed because they're not as successful?), report author Rebecca Unterman said, "We feel 105 out of 123 is a large proportion, and think it's pretty representative."

The study tracks 21,000 students, most from poor neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx, who entered 9th grade in 2004 and 2005. The difference in academic performance from one cohort to the next was not statistically significant. Students from both cohorts at the small schools of choice were significantly more likely to score 75 points (the City University of New York's cut-off rate for requiring remedial coursework) or above on the state's English Regents exam and had higher graduation rates than the control group. The small schools of choice also graduated a higher percentage of kids within four years AND within five years.

Gordon Berlin, the MDRC's president, said the results were particularly striking given the demographics of the students enrolled at the small schools of choice. "This is reform where we most need it," he said. "Eighty-three percent of these kids qualify for free and reduced lunch. Ninety-three percent are black or Hispanic. More than 63% enter 9th grade behind grade level." Berlin noted that though the schools did not fully close the achievement gap between racial groups, "We should not let the perfect become the enemy of very good. These schools are serving a remarkably disadvantaged group of students."

The MDRC released its first report on small schools in June of 2010, as we reported , and those results were also positive. The main new development is that this year, the addition of the second cohort of students allowed researchers to probe further into different subgroups' performance and to discover the impact on five-year graduation rates.

The MDRC plans to follow these cohorts into college and career. James Kemple, the executive director of the Research Alliance for New York City Schools (who helped design this study while at MDRC), said his organization is also planning to follow up on the MDRC's results by looking into the "how" and "why" of the improvement.

Kemple said, "One thing that seems clear, based even on work that MDRC has done, is that it's not just smallness for smallness' sake [that boosts student achievement]. How do you take advantage of smallness to create an effective learning environment?"

Update:
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan issued a statement about the study this morning, calling it "important" and "encouraging" and saying that it upends "conventional wisdom about the impossibility of turning around chronically low-performing high schools," which he refers to as drop-out factories.

Duncan echoes MDRC's stance that reformers should build on the small schools' successes. The statement reads, "For too long, educators have tinkered around the edges in low-performing schools, consigning generations of students of color to receiving an inferior education. It's time to transform chronically low-performing schools. It's time to put an end to the tireless tinkering."

The report was just released last night, so stay tuned for additional reactions.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Guest post by Jackie Zubrzycki

Today's National Handwriting Day, and researchers, educators, and administrators are gathering in Washington, D.C. to discuss the state of research on handwriting. The American Association of School Administrators and Zaner-Bloser, an educational company that makes handwriting materials, are co-sponsoring Handwriting in the 21st Century? An Educational Summit, where researchers Virginia Berninger, Steve Peverly, Steve Graham, Jane Case-Smith, Karin Harman-James, and Gerry Conti are presenting (or, at this point in the day, have presented) findings in areas ranging from occupational therapy to neuroscience that document the impact of handwriting on kids' learning. My most recent article in Ed Week takes up this conversation about the role of handwriting in school. Check it out.

All of the research presented at the conference indicates that teaching handwriting is beneficial. That's not surprising, as the conference is being sponsored by a handwriting curriculum company, but the presenters come from a broad range of fields and present a convincing case. One of the most striking findings comes from Karin Harman-James at Indiana University, who's presenting on some research in which fMRI scans of children's brains showed that writing by hand activated parts of the brain associated with language development, while keyboarding did not. I also talked to Virginia Berninger at the University of Washington in Seattle. She's presenting research that indicates that keyboarding may not be an easy solution for kids who struggle with handwriting, as the problems that lead kids to struggle with writing seem to lead them to struggle at the computer.

There's also a question of writerly authority: Steve Graham and Tanya Santangelo from Vanderbilt University are presenting a meta-analysis of research that shows that a paper written neatly scores significantly higher than the same paper written in sloppier handwriting. We can see evidence of this phenomenon out of school from folks like Indiana state Senator Jean Leising, whose new bill about cursive handwriting was prompted partly by the bad handwriting (and grammar) of thank-you notes she's received from students in her office and partly by an outcry from her constituents when they found out cursive lessons were no longer going to be mandatory in Indiana.

You can see summaries of some of the other research on the agenda here.

Let us know what you think. Any other interesting handwriting research out there?

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

By guest blogger Jackie Zubrzycki

The Corporation for National and Community Service and the White House Council for Community Solutions just released a report called "The Economic Value of Opportunity Youth", in which they analyze the social and taxpayer burdens of "Opportunity Youth"—16-24-year-olds who are "not investing in their human capital or earning income" by working or being educated. They estimate that 3.4 million Americans in this age bracket are "chronic opportunity youth", while an additional 3.3 million are "under-attached" (occasionally or partially engaged in the workforce or school). These 6.7 million students account for 16% of the total U.S. population in this age range.

Henry M. Levin and Rachel Rosen of Columbia Teachers College and Clive Belfield of CUNY's Queens College look into the lost earnings, lower economic growth, and higher government spending that result from this trend. They calculate that the taxpayers will lose approximately $1.6 trillion over the lifetime of this cohort, or $234,680 per youth, while the social costs will amount to $4.7 trillion, or $704.020 per youth. Opportunity youth are likely to make almost $400,000 less over the course of their careers than the average worker.

The factors that lead young people to leave the workforce or school vary by demographic, but the lagging economy has played a factor in the increase in the number of opportunity youth. Only 50% of young adults have a job, down from 57% in 2008, and only about a third of African-American youth are employed.

Levin, Rosen, and Belfield don't offer recommendations for re-engaging opportunity youth, but write that by "understanding the magnitude and reasons for youth who are not participating in these activities, we will be better able to consider ways of incorporating this group more fully in society."

Many young people are clearly not making a smooth transition from school into the workforce. What are schools doing to support this cohort?

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 3:03 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

From guest blogger Christina A. Samuels:

A follow-up to a major national study on the performance of charter school networks shows that they have varied results on their students' high school graduation rates and on their postsecondary enrollment.

The study shows that, of the six charter-management organizations for which data were available, three have significant positive impacts on graduation compared to the traditional public schools in their area. One of those organizations increased the probability that its students graduate from high school in four years by 23 percentage points.

Two other charter-management groups have positive but not statistically significant impacts on graduation. And one network had a serious negative impact on the graduation rates of its students compared to the local public schools, reducing the probability that students would graduate on time by 22 percentage points.

The report was released by Mathematica and the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington Bothell. The groups released a study in November showing similarly mixed results on the academic performance of students in charter networks, but that report was based on middle school results. The update includes new data on high school and college performance, but the conclusions are essentially the same.

The researchers examined 40 CMOs with 292 schools in 14 states, all of which were nonprofits that controlled at least four schools and had at least four schools open in the fall of 2007. The report does not, however, disclose the names of the networks involved in the study. It was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation of Seattle and the Walton Family Foundation with project management assistance from the NewSchools Venture Fund, which focuses on changing public education for low-income children. (In the interest of disclosure, Gates provides operating support for Editorial Projects in Education, the nonprofit that runs Education Week and edweek.org and Walton helps supports coverage of parent-empowerment issues in Education Week.)

The researchers were able to gather postsecondary information on four of the charter-management organizations. Two had large positive impacts on college enrollment rates—increasing the likelihood of college entry by 21 and 23 percentage points, respectively. Two other networks did not have any noticeable impacts on college entry rates.

"The message for a city or a district that wants to work with one of these groups is to be sure to look at the overall record for success at each of these schools," said Robin Lake, the associate director of the CRPE.

The study of charter management networks showed some common themes among high-performing networks: strong student-behavior policies (often referred to as a culture of high expectations) and intensive teacher coaching and monitoring. The researchers plan to release a report in March that examines those practices in more detail.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 5:55 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

By guest blogger Jackie Zubrzycki

Parents of children enrolled in Head Start programs spend more time reading, attending museums, and engaging in academic activities with their children, according to a December 2011 paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Fathers who don't live with their children spend more time with children when the children have enrolled in Head Start, and continue to do so even after the children have left the program.

Researchers Alexander M. Gelber and Adam Isen, both of the University of Pennsylvania, looked at the 2010 Head Start Impact Study, or HSIS, which gathered information about children and parents from 84 "nationally representative" Head Start programs. They compared the level of parent involvement—defined as "activities that parents undertake that require time or effort and directly involve their children"— for children who were selected to attend Head Start and a control group that applied to but was not randomly selected for the program. Control group members may or may not have attended other preschool or daycare programs; a small group of them attended Head Start programs that were excluded from the experimental group.

The researchers find that while being enrolled in Head Start increases the number of hours a child spends in childcare away from parents, parents of these students actually spend more hours investing more deeply in their children and continue to do so after leaving Head Start.

The parent-child activities that increased most are those that the researchers deem "most likely to impact child human capital directly," such as reading, math, and tracking their child's development. Interestingly, the study notes that children enrolled in higher-performing Head Start programs experience a greater increase in parent involvement.

The researchers put out several hypotheses for the increase, ranging from the straightforward—Head Start encourages parents to volunteer and be engaged in children's development—to the more indirect—the free child care provided by Head Start might reduce parents' time and budget constraints. I was struck by the suggestion that the Head Start programs might make children "more pleasant to be with" and thus cause parents to want to spend more time with their children. The researchers also seem to like this explanation, saying that the data point to "parents' reaction to the impact of Head Start on child [cognitive and social] characteristics" causing the increase in parental engagement.

The report leaves open the question of whether and how this increase in parent involvement actually affects children. Previous studies of Head Start participants have found that Head Start's effect on test scores fades over time, but that Head Start participants experience a slew of other benefits, including positive impacts on mortality and future schooling. The authors suggest that the increased parental involvement could potentially explain some of those other positive impacts.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 3:41 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

From guest blogger Jackie Zubrzycki

Over on his Straight Up blog, the American Enterprise Institute's Rick Hess has published the 2012 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Presence Rankings. Hess ranks 121 scholars' public presence as determined by a rubric that includes the numbers of publications, citations, and mentions the scholars receive in the educational press (including Education Week), blogs, newspapers, and the Congressional Record. He lays out the metrics and rationale (and makes it clear that he's open to feedback or pushback) in this post.

Hess says he's trying to measure the "footprint" of scholars, or their influence on the public discourse. He hopes the list will encourage academics to "step into the fray," which he says is too-often dominated by advocates who simplify complex topics, " and to push back on the academic norms" rewarding hyperfocused research aimed at a small audience. So it's no surprise that the list is topped by familiar figures such as education historian Diane Ravitch (a fellow Education Week blogger) and Stanford University scholar Linda Darling-Hammond, who've produced works for a more general audience and have addressed big questions in the field.

The top nine (and 12 of the top 15) names on the list come from three universities: New York University, Harvard, and Stanford. The list includes economists, political scientists, sociologists, and professors of teacher education and curriculum. While well-established researchers who have had time to amass references and publications fare well in the rankings, Hess also points out some younger researchers who are already gaining notice.

What do you think about the list? Do the metrics make sense? Should scholars step outside of the academy? Does the Edu-Scholar Public Presence Rankings help accomplish that goal?

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

It's easy for a research reporter to get buried in the technical details of education science and miss out on exploring the real-life implications of all those lab findings.

After more than a year and a half covering studies from language acquisition to some of the more unusual benefits of parent involvement, I've decided to to take a more embedded approach—what you might call a single case study—to education research:

On December 26, 2011, my husband Dan and I welcomed our first child, Brenden—a slightly belated Christmas present.

I seriously doubt I will go as gonzo in-depth as the lead researcher at the Human Speechome Project, but I am looking forward to watching my own little one learn about the world. I'll be out of the office until mid-April, though I'll still be popping in from time to time when a study catches my (admittedly bloodshot) eye.

In the mean time, keep a watch here for guest blogs on top education research news.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 5:13 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend