Continued Progress: Promising Evidence on Personalized Learning

The findings are grouped into four sections. The first section on student achievement finds that there were positive effects on student mathematics and reading performance and that the lowest-performing students made substantial gains relative to their peers. The second section on implementation and the perceptions of stakeholders finds that adoption of personalized learning practices varied considerably. Personalized learning practices that are direct extensions of current practice were more common, but implementation of some of the more challenging personalized learning strategies was less common. The third section relates implementation features to outcomes and identifies three elements of personalized learning that were being implemented in tandem in the schools with the largest achievement effects. Finally, the fourth section compares teachers' and students' survey responses to a national sample and finds some differences, such as teachers' greater use of practices that support competency-based learning and greater use of technology for personalization in the schools in this study with implementation data

Motivating EFL Students with Conversation Data

Motivating learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) to improve their speaking fluency is challenging in environments where institutions emphasize reading and listening test performance. The focus tends to shift to strategic reading and listening first in order to attain acceptable test results, often at the expense of communicative competence. Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) is well positioned to assess and develop communicative competence for EFL learners, and to motivate them to speak. This article introduces the Objective Subjective (OS) Scoring system, a CALL system which sets clear immediate goals on the path to better communicative competence with data from videoed conversation sessions. It motivates learners to improve on their data in every consecutive conversation session, whereby an environment is created which facilitates conversation practice as well as individual error correction

Tutoring Students with Adaptive Strategies

Adaptive learning is a crucial part in intelligent tutoring systems. It provides students with appropriate tutoring interventions, based on students’ characteristics, status, and other related features, in order to optimize their learning outcomes. It is required to determine students’ knowledge level or learning progress, based on which it then uses proper techniques to choose the optimal interventions. In this dissertation work, I focus on these aspects related to the process in adaptive learning: student modeling, k-armed bandits, and contextual bandits. Student modeling. The main objective of student modeling is to develop cognitive models of students, including modeling content skills and knowledge about learning. In this work, we investigate the effect of prerequisite skill in predicting students’ knowledge in post skills, and we make use of the prerequisite performance in different student models. As a result, this makes them superior to traditional models. K-armed bandits. We apply k-armed bandit algorithms to personalize interventions for students, to optimize their learning outcomes. Due to the lack of diverse interventions and small difference of intervention effectiveness in educational experiments, we also propose a simple selection strategy, and compare it with several k-armed bandit algorithms. Contextual bandits. In contextual bandit problem, additional side information, also called context, can be used to determine which action to select. First, we construct a feature evaluation mechanism, which determines which feature to be combined with bandits. Second, we propose a new decision tree algorithm, which is capable of detecting aptitude treatment effect for students. Third, with combined bandits with the decision tree, we apply the contextual bandits to make personalization in two different types of data, simulated data and real experimental data

Removing the Obstacles that Confront: The Impact of a Nontraditional School Reform Model on the Graduation Rate in an Urban School District

Although access to education in the United States has improved for students across race, class, ethnicity, and gender, not all demographic groups’ progress has kept pace with access (Mujic, 2015). Over the past two decades, more high school dropouts have been enrolled in public schools serving predominantly African American and Hispanic students of low socioeconomic status (Mujic, 2015). This portraiture study involved interviewing and observing six participants in an established nontraditional educational setting. The study aimed to examine educators’ perceptions regarding using a nontraditional school reform model to improve graduation rates in an identified urban school district serving predominantly African American and Hispanic students of low socioeconomic status. National, state, and local education may benefit from these findings to improve graduation rates nationwide. School districts and individual schools may also benefit from these findings and adopt the strategies employed to increase the graduation rates for the students they serve.Ruttencutter, Gwen S.Gunn, Nicole P.Ed.D.Educational leadershi

The implementation of the exit slip strategy to examine the advancement of paraphrasing and summarizing Shakespearean text

The purpose of this action research study was to help mediate areas of deficiency that were identified in the essay and composition writing of a group of freshman Honors\u27 students. During this study, students were provided with specific strategies to interpret texts so they could begin to understand the author\u27s intended message to the audience. They could then translate those understandings into their written work. Specifically, the exit slip strategy was implemented to help develop students\u27 summarization and paraphrasing skills. Teacher feedback was also integrated onto the learning process to help reinforce and refine the skill development process. The findings in this study highlighted the importance of implementing and equipping students with specific writing strategies to interpret and make meaning from new and unfamiliar texts. The findings further suggest that individualized teacher feedback supports new skill development. This study explored the effectiveness of the exit slip strategy in helping students develop their paraphrasing and summarization skills. This study also documented the students\u27 ability to transfer these skills to various written assessments that were incorporated into the then current unit of study, Shakespeare\u27s Romeo and Juliet

Factors Contributing to the Success of Students in an Alternative Learning Center with an Online Curriculum: A Multiple Case Study

The purpose of this qualitative, multiple case study was to discover the factors which contribute to the success of students in alternative learning centers with online curriculums in Central Virginia. The main theory guiding this study was Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory as it proposes that learning occurs in social environments through an interaction with people, the environment, and behavior. Self-regulation theory was also used as it posits that learners are active participants in the learning process. The central question guiding this study was: What factors contribute to the success of students in an alternative learning center with an online curriculum in Central Virginia? Purposeful sampling coupled with criterion sampling was utilized to procure three cases, who were students of an alternative learning center for one semester or longer and made improvements in behavior and/or grades. These three students along with their parents, teachers, and administrators from the school sites were included in the study. Data in this qualitative multiple case study was collected through interviews, document analysis, and graphic representations from participants. A cross-case synthesis technique was used to analyze the three cases

How Teachers Of Predominantly Or Entirely Online Schools Perceive The Possibility Of Online High School For An Entire District

The research question for this project was: How do teachers of predominantly or entirely online schools perceive the possibility of online high school for an entire district? It documents one teacher\u27s examination of the topic through the use of interviews and surveys conducted with current online education schools in order to illuminate the possibilities for the future. The author was interested in the possibility of an automated learning system in which the program adjusted based on response in order to efficiently educate massive amounts of students per teacher. The research delves into the early programs of student driven adaptive programs coupled with the study of virtual worlds and their use in education. The findings illustrate the importance of not only self-driven students for the success of an online system, but it also reveals the teacher as playing a vital role and a necessary component for the success of the program. It also revealed that virtual spaces have been shown to enhance learning and may be an avenue for future learning. As technology continues to advance, new projects should explore how virtual spaces could be brought further into education

School-Based Instructional Leadership and Problem Solving: Principals’ Descriptions of Shared Issue Resolution

Over the last half century, researchers added to a body of knowledge regarding principals’ effective behaviors with few insights about how or why they acted. Current models purport that leadership emerges through various collaborative interactions among principals and other school-based leaders (i.e. teacher leaders, instructional coaches, content department heads, etc.) as they tackle academic and social-behavioral issues. To illuminate these collaborations more clearly, I used the Critical Incident Technique (CIT) to investigate how selected South Carolina secondary school principals described their interactions with other school-based leaders as they collaboratively tackled instructional issues. For this study, instructional issues covered concerns regarding alignment of curriculum, instruction, and assessment, student assessment scores, and instructional delivery. Six selected secondary (grades 6 through 12) South Carolina principals recounted their examples of successful and unsuccessful examples of addressing instructional issues by interacting with other school leaders. Principals related incidents they deemed representative of collaborative problem-solving about instruction. They participated in face-to-face interviews and reviewed their transcripts from the audio-recorded sessions. The analysis protocol derived from a synthesis of studies on leadership and problem-solving in the realms of business (Grint, 2005) and a two-decade series of studies in education by Leithwood and colleagues in the 1980s which was then replicated in the 2000s by Spillane’s teams of researchers. Both sources identified a range of responses to addressing problems of various types and structures. Both sources showed a similar tendency among typical and novice leaders to lean into an individualistic style as opposed to more sophisticated leadership approaches that involved more expertise and shared knowledge for addressing complex problems. This synthesis of sources produced an a priori coding list which I applied to the transcripts. Findings confirmed the original similarities among the business and education studies about leadership and problem-solving. Among these six principals’ recall of their successful and unsuccessful approaches to instructional issues, their dominant problem-solving style was authoritarian, even when describing collaboration. Their narratives showed that collaboration extended into implementation of a decision that either the principal or the district already made before sharing the instructional issue

Digital Literacy: The Impact of a Blended Learning Model on Student Motivation and Achievement

Educators continue to search for a balance between preparing students for a marketable future and integrating face-to-face instruction. Many factors influence various educational models related to best instructional methodologies. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between student perceptions regarding student motivation to read and the corresponding effect on student achievement within a blended learning environment. This mixed methods study determined whether the use of digital collaborative learning, as it applies to literacy, within a blended learning environment would have any corresponding effects on student motivation and achievement. Participants included fifth-grade students at the elementary level and students enrolled in a teacher cadet course at the secondary level. Quantitative data were analyzed using paired t tests, while qualitative data were coded for themes. The results of the study led to a revised conceptual framework that included a personalized learning component. A key finding emerged at the conclusion of the study: Data indicated increased levels of engagement and overall enthusiasm for reading in a blended learning environment. Two secondary findings included: The teacher cadets believed the use of digital collaborative literacy in a blended learning environment served to provide students with an individualized, targeted focus on reading instruction and a significant difference existed in participant pre and posttest scores, with student levels of achievement having increased at the conclusion of the study. The results of the study indicate the use of digital collaborative literacy within a blended learning environment has a direct impact on student motivation, engagement, and achievement

Systematic Barriers to Success: The Impact of Redlining on Modern Educational Outcomes in Omaha Public Schools

The systemic denial of mortgages, loans, and other financial services to specific neighborhoods on the basis of race, a practice known as redlining, has continued to have a disproportionately negative effect on communities of color since its inception in the 1930s. The contemporary impacts of redlining can be seen in ongoing disparities in household income, property values, generational wealth, and more. This paper uses a three-pronged approach to extensively examine the history, application, and implications of redlining, with an emphasis on how the practice affects modern educational outcomes in Omaha public schools. The paper analyzes statistical data from the Nebraska Education Profile, interprets results from a survey sent to Omaha public high school graduates, and compiles information collected from questionnaires and interviews conducted with Omaha education professionals. Although the scope of the paper is limited to Omaha schools, the paper concludes with significant findings that schools in formerly redlined neighborhoods have less access to opportunities and resources for success, impacting student achievement. The paper ends with potential pathways and solutions on how to create a more equitable educational network