ScratchMaths: evaluation report and executive summary

Since 2014, computing has been part of the primary curriculum. ‘Scratch’ is frequently used by schools, and the EEF funded this trial to test whether the platform could be used to improve pupils’ computational thinking skills, and whether this in turn could have a positive impact on Key Stage 2 maths attainment. Good computational thinking skills mean pupils can use problem solving methods that involve expressing problems and their solutions in ways that a computer could execute – for example, recognising patterns. Previous research has shown that pupils with better computational thinking skills do better in maths. The study found a positive impact on computational thinking skills at the end of Year 5 – particularly for pupils who have ever been eligible for free school meals. However, there was no evidence of an impact on Key Stage 2 maths attainment when pupils were tested at the end of Year 6. Many of the schools in the trial did not fully implement ScratchMaths, particularly in Year 6, where teachers expressed concerns about the pressure of Key Stage 2 SATs. But there was no evidence that schools which did implement the programme had better maths results. Schools may be interested in ScratchMaths as an affordable way to cover aspects of the primary computing curriculum in maths lessons without any adverse effect on core maths outcomes. This trial, however, did not provide evidence that ScratchMaths is an effective way to improve maths outcomes

Implications of Interactions Among Society, Education and Technology: A Comparison of Multiple Linear Regression and Multilevel Modeling in Mathematics Achievement Analyses

This research compares and contrasts two approaches to predictive analysis of three years\u27 of school district data to investigate relationships between student and teacher characteristics and math achievement as measured by the state-mandated Maryland School Assessment mathematics exam. The sample for the study consisted of 3,514 students taught by 99 teachers in a small Appalachian school district in western Maryland. The first analytic approach, standard multiple linear regression, produced a model in which each of the predictors is statistically significant: student gender, prior math achievement, student performance on school district mathematics benchmark exams, teacher years of experience, and advanced teacher certification. In the second approach---multilevel modeling with students as the level-1 unit of analysis and teachers as the level-2 unit of analysis---student characteristics are significant predictors of math achievement, and teacher characteristics are insignificant predictors. The study is set within a context of an exploration of relationships among society, education, and technology. Implications of the study\u27s results for K-12 mathematics education practice and policy are discussed including: the need to define teacher effectiveness and to identify teacher characteristics that contribute to student achievement; the promise of benchmarking exam systems; the necessity of effective math education, minimally from early education through Algebra II; the need to evaluate teacher certification criteria and the efficacy of teacher preparation programs; the importance of using appropriate statistical modeling approaches in education research; and a call to put students back into the education equation through student-centered funding models

A model of the determinants of expenditure on children's personal social services

Every year the United Kingdom central government assesses the relative spending needs of English local authorities in respect of the services for which is it responsible. This is done by estimating a Standard Spending Assessment (SSA) for each service, which is intended to indicate the spending requirements of an authority if it were to adopt a standard level of services, given the circumstances in its area. In practice, statistical methods are used to develop SSAs for most services. This report describes the findings of a study designed to review the methods for setting SSAs for a single service: personal social services (PSS) for children, which in 1995/96 accounting for about £1.8 billion of expenditure (4.4% of total local government expenditure). The study was commissioned by the Department of Health and undertaken by a consortium which comprised The University of York, MORI and the National Children’s Bureau. The study was guided by a technical advisory group, comprising representatives from the local authority associations and the Department of Health. In seeking to limit the length of the report, the authors have necessarily omitted a great deal of the technical material produced in the course of the study. We understand that the Department of Health is willing to make this material and the data used in the study available to interested parties, subject to certain confidentiality restrictions. Existing methodology for constructing SSAs had been the subject of some criticism, both in general and specifically in respect of children’s PSS. This document reports the results of a study designed to apply a radically new statistical approach to estimating the SSA for children’s PSS. Previous methods were based on statistical analysis of local authority aggregate data. In contrast, this study is based on an analysis of PSS spending in 1,036 small areas (with populations of about 10,000) within 25 local authorities. A relatively new statistical method known as multilevel modelling, which was originally developed in the educational sector, was used for this purpose.children, SSA, social services

WikiSensing: A collaborative sensor management system with trust assessment for big data

Big Data for sensor networks and collaborative systems have become ever more important in the digital economy and is a focal point of technological interest while posing many noteworthy challenges. This research addresses some of the challenges in the areas of online collaboration and Big Data for sensor networks. This research demonstrates WikiSensing (www.wikisensing.org), a high performance, heterogeneous, collaborative data cloud for managing and analysis of real-time sensor data. The system is based on the Big Data architecture with comprehensive functionalities for smart city sensor data integration and analysis. The system is fully functional and served as the main data management platform for the 2013 UPLondon Hackathon. This system is unique as it introduced a novel methodology that incorporates online collaboration with sensor data. While there are other platforms available for sensor data management WikiSensing is one of the first platforms that enable online collaboration by providing services to store and query dynamic sensor information without any restriction of the type and format of sensor data. An emerging challenge of collaborative sensor systems is modelling and assessing the trustworthiness of sensors and their measurements. This is with direct relevance to WikiSensing as an open collaborative sensor data management system. Thus if the trustworthiness of the sensor data can be accurately assessed, WikiSensing will be more than just a collaborative data management system for sensor but also a platform that provides information to the users on the validity of its data. Hence this research presents a new generic framework for capturing and analysing sensor trustworthiness considering the different forms of evidence available to the user. It uses an extensible set of metrics that can represent such evidence and use Bayesian analysis to develop a trust classification model. Based on this work there are several publications and others are at the final stage of submission. Further improvement is also planned to make the platform serve as a cloud service accessible to any online user to build up a community of collaborators for smart city research.Open Acces

School Climate and Public High School Student Achievement

The goal of this study was to examine the influence of school ecology, milieu, social system, and culture on public high school student achievement. Utilized data from the ELS:2002 restricted-use dataset, a series of multilevel model analyses were conducted. The results indicate that performance gaps exist between 12th-graders of different ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds, but they are merely reflections of the differences that already existed two years prior in 10th-grade. Further, the gap between high and low achieving students becomes narrower from 10th-grade to 12th-grade. The highest mathematics course taken in 12-grade produces a positive estimate of mathematics achievement in 12th-grade, and ethnic minority and lower SES students are less likely to be enrolled in the advanced level courses. Contradicting to the classic view of school influences on achievement, public high schools exhibit relatively little variability in mathematics performance after controlling for student individual characteristics. Among all school climate variables, school average prior mathematics achievement is significantly positively associated with later mathematics achievement. The nonsignificance of contextual effect, however, suggests that the differences across schools do not matter; rather, the differences among students do. Students in schools located in economically disadvantaged communities make more gains in advanced mathematics course-taking than their peers in more affluent schools. The gap between high and low-achieving students grows slightly wider in schools located in more affluent communities, but becomes slightly narrower in fully computerized schools. Contradicting to most existing findings, school size, noisy environment, quality of light, ethnic composition, teacher certification rate, counselor-student ratio, safety concern, student civility, and general positive climate do not show significant influence on achievement. Suggestions about implications and limitations are provided

USE OF COMPUTER SOFTWARE TO DO MATHEMATICS AND THE MATHEMATICS ACHIEVEMENT OF STUDENTS IN PUERTO RICO USING RESTRICTED 2015 NAEP

This quantitative study explored the relationship between the mathematics achievement patterns of eighth grade students in Puerto Rico and their use of computer software application programs for doing mathematics. The theoretical framework used is the educational production function, which allowed the use of a function to analyze this relationship. The researcher analyzed 2015 restricted National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics data. Data analysis consisted of descriptive statistical analysis and multilevel modeling analysis. Control variables to measure socioeconomic status and absenteeism were included in the multilevel model. Results of this study showed that average scores on NAEP 2015 were higher for students who use computer programs to do mathematics with less frequency than students who use it with more frequency. Understanding the relationship between the use of computer programs to do mathematics and the mathematics achievement of these students help the mathematics education community to cautiously create policies that do not focused on frequency of using technology. The researcher provided a discussion of the results and implications for researchers, administrators and teachers that would help them to target on the improvement of mathematics achievement of students in Puerto Rico. Este trabajo cuantitativo exploró la relación entre patrones de aprovechamiento matemático de estudiantes de octavo grado en Puerto Rico y el uso de programas de computadora para hacer matemáticas. El marco teórico es la función de producción educativa, el cual permitió el uso de una función para explicar esta relación. La investigadora analizó datos restringidos del 2015 de la Evaluación Nacional del Progreso Educativo de Matemáticas (NAEP, por sus siglas en inglés). El análisis de datos consistió en estadística descriptiva y análisis multinivel. En este último, la investigadora utilizó variables control para medir el nivel socioeconómico y el ausentismo de los estudiantes. Los resultados de este estudio mostraron que los estudiantes que usaron programas matemáticos con mayor frecuencia obtuvieron puntajes promedio más altos en NAEP 2015 que los estudiantes que los usaron con menor frecuencia. Entender la relación entre el uso de programas de computadora y el aprovechamiento académico de estos estudiantes ayuda a la comunidad de educadores en matemática a crear, con cautela, políticas educativas que no se enfoquen en la frecuencia del uso de tecnología. La investigadora incluyó una discusión de los resultados así como implicaciones para investigadorxs, administradorxs y maestrxs que pueden ayudarlos a identificar prácticas que mejorarán el aprovechamiento matemático de estudiantes en Puerto Rico

Coming to grips with the achievement divide and the distribution of effective teachers

"This study explored the significance of deploying effective teachers to schools most heavily impacted by poverty as a strategy for reducing the achievement divide. The degree to which teacher assignments affect students' performance on Algebra I End-of-Course and Eighth Grade Math End-of-Grade tests was examined. Estimates of the effect of a series of effective or ineffective teachers on the students' scores were generated. Achievement scores of all students who participated in Algebra I and eighth grade math testing in Guilford County Schools, Greensboro, North Carolina in 2005 were matched with records in the value added databases maintained by SAS Institute. A variety of descriptive analyses were conducted to demonstrate the relationship between the cumulative effects of teacher quality and student achievement as measured by students' performance on Eighth Grade Math End-of-Grade and Algebra I tests. Even after adjusting for the entering achievement of the students in fourth grade, the impact of the previous fifth, sixth and seventh grade teachers, was quite significant on how eighth grade students performed on the Algebra I End-of-Course and the End-of-Grade tests. Further, the study investigated the relationship between teacher effectiveness scores and teacher years of experience. The study confirmed that teachers with more years of experience tended to be more effective than non-experienced teachers. The poorer schools were also more likely to have a higher percentage of less experienced teachers. In addition, the distribution of teachers based on their teacher effectiveness estimates was examined across the Guilford County public school system. Generally, the highest percentage of effective teachers were assigned to schools that were least impacted by poverty. The results of the study should serve as a necessary catalyst for policy makers and personnel of Guilford County Schools and other districts across the nation to make decisions regarding the equitable deployment of effective teachers as a viable means of reducing the achievement gap."--Abstract from author supplied metadata