School Improvement by Design: Lessons From a Study of Comprehensive School Reform Programs

This CPRE report is a reprint of a chapter that originally appeared as Chapter 49 of the Handbook of Education Policy Research, edited by Gary Sykes, Barbara Schneider, and DavidN.Plank and published for theAmerican Educational Research Association by Routledge Publishers in 2009. The reprinted chapter presents key findings from A Study of Instructional Improvement, a study that was conducted under the auspices of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education and directed by Brian Rowan, David K. Cohen, and Deborah Loewenberg Ball (all at the University of Michigan).This study examined the design, implementation, and instructional effectiveness of three of America’s most widely disseminated comprehensive school reform programs (the Accelerated Schools Project,America’s Choice, and Successful forAll) over a four year period that encompassed the school years 2000–2001 through 2003–2004. During the course of the study, data were collected in 115 elementary schools in every region of the United States,with more than 5,300 teachers, 800 school leaders, and 7,500 students and their families participating

Using instructional logs to identify quality in educational settings

When attempting to identify educational settings that are most effective in improving student achievement, classroom process (that is, the way in which a teacher interacts with his or her students) is a key feature of interest. Unfortunately, high-quality assessment of the student-teacher interaction occurs all too infrequently, despite the critical role that understanding and measuring such processes can play in school improvement. This article discusses the strengths and weaknesses of two common approaches to studying these processes—direct classroom observation and annual surveys of teachers—and then describes the ways in which instructional logs can be used to overcome some of the limitations of these two approaches when gathering data on curriculum content and coverage. Classroom observations are expensive, require extensive training of raters to ensure consistency in the observations, and because of their expense generally cannot be conducted frequently enough to enable the researcher to generalize observational findings to the entire school year or illuminate the patterns of instructional change that occur across the school year. Annual surveys are less expensive but often suffer from self-report bias and the bias that occurs when teachers are asked to retrospectively report on their activities over the course of a single year. Instructional logs offer a valid, reliable, and relatively cost-effective alternative for collecting detailed information about classroom practice and can overcome some of the limitations of both observations and annual surveys.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/62153/1/294_ftp.pd

Practice as Prize: Citizenship Education in two Primary Classrooms in Ireland

While citizenship education forms part of the formal curriculum at primary level in Ireland, its inclusion as a strand unit of Social, Personal and Health Education, rather than as a discrete subject, tends to make it less visible. In practice, citizenship education is strongly influenced by external agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) active in the field as the dominant producers of teaching resources and programmes in the area. In many cases, these programmes are award-driven, requiring schools to compete with others for recognition or to exemplify a particular standard of practice.  Using thick description (Geertz 1973) and teachers' narratives, this article presents two cases based on the practice of two experienced primary teachers who negotiate the complex space between professional practice and the particular agendas of external agencies and NGOs. Focusing on two exemplars of their teaching, the article locates their work within the broader context of citizenship education in Ireland, highlighting the extent to which the exemplars chosen typify or challenge existing practice. The article includes the outline plans used by the participating teachers and draws on an extended dialogue between the participants and the researchers in which issues relating to citizenship education, classroom and whole school practice and the broader educational context were discussed and probed

Measuring ligand-dependent and ligand-independent interactions between nuclear receptors and associated proteins using Bioluminescence Resonance Energy Transfer (BRET(2))

Bioluminescent resonance energy transfer (BRET(2)) is a recently developed technology for the measurement of protein-protein interactions in a live, cell-based system. BRET(2) is characterized by the efficient transfer of excited energy between a bioluminescent donor molecule (Renilla luciferase) and a fluorescent acceptor molecule (a mutant of Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP(2))). The BRET(2) assay offers advantages over fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) because it does not require an external light source thereby eliminating problems of photobleaching and autoflourescence. The absence of contamination by light results in low background that permits detection of very small changes in the BRET(2) signal. BRET(2) is dependent on the orientation and distance between two fusion proteins and therefore requires extensive preliminary standardization experiments to conclude a positive BRET(2) signal independent of variations in protein titrations and arrangement in tertiary structures. Estrogen receptor (ER) signaling is modulated by steroid receptor coactivator 1 (SRC-1). To establish BRET(2) in a ligand inducible system we used SRC-1 as the donor moiety and ER as the acceptor moiety. Expression and functionality of the fusion proteins were assessed by transient transfection in HEK-293 cells followed by Western blot analysis and measurement of ER-dependent reporter gene activity. These preliminary determinations are required prior to measuring nuclear receptor protein-protein interactions by BRET(2). This article describes in detail the BRET(2) methodology for measuring interaction between full-length ER and coregulator proteins in real-time, in an in vivo environment

Using Teacher Logs to Measure the Enacted Curriculum: A Study of Literacy Teaching in Third‐Grade Classrooms

In this article we examine methodological and conceptual issues that emerge when researchers measure the enacted curriculum in schools. After outlining key theoretical considerations that guide measurement of this construct and alternative strategies for collecting and analyzing data on it, we illustrate one approach to gathering and analyzing data on the enacted curriculum. Using log data on the reading/language arts instruction of more than 150 third‐grade teachers in 53 high‐poverty elementary schools participating in the Study of Instructional Improvement, we estimated several hierarchical linear models and found that the curricular content of literacy instruction (a) varied widely from day to day, (b) did not vary much among students in the same classroom, but (c) did vary greatly across classrooms, largely as the result of teachers’ participation in 1 of the 3 instructional improvement interventions (Accelerated Schools, America’s Choice, and Success for All) under study. The implications of these findings for future research on the enacted curriculum are discussed

The Ecology of School Improvement: Notes on the School Improvement Industry in the United States

This paper explains how organizations otherthan schools and governing agencies affect thescope and pace of change in American education.In particular, the paper discusses a set oforganizations operating in what can be calledthe school improvement ``industry'' in the UnitedStates, that is, a group of organizationsproviding schools and governing agencies withinformation, training, materials, andprogrammatic resources relevant to problems ofinstructional improvement. The paper shows howthe structure and functioning of theseorganizations explain patterns of change inAmerican education – including why schools inthe United States experience wave after wave ofinnovation and reform while at the same timemaintaining a stable core of instructionalpractices.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43001/1/10833_2004_Article_5100347.pd