Beyond the Bubble: Technology and the Future of Student Assessment

Provides an overview of information technology's potential to enable better assessments of student achievement. Outlines promising models for testing complex skills, cognition, and learning and for utilizing such assessments to improve instruction

Integrating Technology With Student-Centered Learning

Reviews research on technology's role in personalizing learning, its integration into curriculum-based and school- or district-wide initiatives, and the potential of emerging digital technologies to expand student-centered learning. Outlines implications

Learning for the Future: Changing the Culture of Math and Science Education to Ensure a Competitive Workforce

This report argues that improving the math and science skills of our nation's youth is an important step in ensuring and promoting innovation-led economic growth in the coming decades. The report calls for the implementation of a strategic plan that will increase student "demand" for and achievement in mathematics and science

'Democracy begins in conversation’: the phenomenology of problem-based learning and legal education

Learning is complex for any number of reasons. One of these is that it doesn’t take place in a laboratory: it happens in real places, within and between real people, and as a consequence it takes place in multi-factorial environments. At every stage of learning in Higher Education (HE), from student choice of institution and programme, to the transfer of learning from theory to practice, to a single institution’s or a teacher’s evaluation of teaching and learning, there are many causal factors that affect educational process and outcome. The complexities and variables created by the interaction of such multiple factors, well known in the field of education, make learning a highly complex phenomenon to analyse and understand

Two Alternative Yet Complementary Conceptual Frameworks for Financing American Education

Outlines strategies to integrate systemic performance-based reform, which assumes that improving the school system will help all students meet standards, and out-of-school interventions, which attempts to mitigate the effects of poverty and other factors

Improving Underrepresented Minority Student Persistence in STEM.

Members of the Joint Working Group on Improving Underrepresented Minorities (URMs) Persistence in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)-convened by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute-review current data and propose deliberation about why the academic "pathways" leak more for URM than white or Asian STEM students. They suggest expanding to include a stronger focus on the institutional barriers that need to be removed and the types of interventions that "lift" students' interests, commitment, and ability to persist in STEM fields. Using Kurt Lewin's planned approach to change, the committee describes five recommendations to increase URM persistence in STEM at the undergraduate level. These recommendations capitalize on known successes, recognize the need for accountability, and are framed to facilitate greater progress in the future. The impact of these recommendations rests upon enacting the first recommendation: to track successes and failures at the institutional level and collect data that help explain the existing trends

Science lives: School choices and ‘natural tendencies’

An analysis of 12 semi-structured interviews with university-based scientists and non-scientists illustrates their life journeys towards, or away from, science and the strengths and impact of life occurrences leading them to choose science or non-science professions. We have adopted narrative approaches and used Mezirow's transformative learning theory framework. The areas of discussion from the result have stressed on three main categories that include ‘smooth transition’, ‘incremental wavering transition' and ‘transformative transition’. The article concludes by discussing the key influences that shaped initial attitudes and direction in these people through natural inclination, environmental inspirations and perceptions of science

Monitoring What Matters About Context and Instruction in Science Education: A NAEP Data Analysis Report

This report explores background variables in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to examine key context and instructional factors behind science learning for eighth grade students. Science education is examined from five perspectives: student engagement in science, science teachers' credentials and professional development, availability and use of science resources, approaches to science instruction, and methods and uses of science assessment