Student Achievement Growth During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Spring 2022 Update

In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced schools to close and abruptly switch to remote learning. Since that time, schools have slowly transitioned back to in-person learning, and school year (SY) 2021–22 was the first full year where most students returned to in-person learning. In this report, we continue the Metro Atlanta Policy Lab for Education’s (MAPLE) research agenda analyzing how the pandemic has affected student achievement in three metro-Atlanta school districts—focusing on recent pandemic-era student achievement growth during SY 2021–22. This report is the third in a series of reports where we measure pandemic-era student achievement growth. In this updated report, Tim Sass and Salma Mohammad Ali utilize administrative data from three metro-Atlanta school districts: Clayton County Public Schools, DeKalb County School District, and Fulton County Schools. We measure student achievement growth in math and reading using scores from the i-Ready and MAP Growth formative assessments. Using national percentile rankings, we compare student achievement during the pandemic to that of students throughout the United States from before the pandemic. We find that the return to near-universal in-person learning in SY 2021–22 did not yield substantial improvements in average math or reading achievement growth. Similar to our previous report, we find that students who were in Grades 1–3 when the pandemic hit fared worse than students who were in middle school, though this pattern is more pronounced for math than reading. The pandemic has impacted students differently, and the subsequent recovery has been uneven across student groups. We find that differences in achievement by race and ethnicity and economic status have grown in some districts but not in others. We also find a narrowing of place-based average achievement differences for one school district. While our findings confirm that some students are now at or near their pre-pandemic achievement levels, many other students remain substantially below their pre-pandemic achievement levels. We suggest that recovery efforts focus on students who experienced the greatest declines in national rankings and have been the slowest to recover. High-dosage small-group tutoring (either in-person or online) is the most promising strategy for promoting academic recovery.https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/gpl_reports/1040/thumbnail.jp

Virtual Tutoring Use and Student Achievement Growth

Numerous prior studies have shown that high-dosage, in-person tutoring can yield substantial gains in student achievement growth. However, staffing in-person tutoring programs can be challenging. Consequently, virtual tutoring has become an attractive option for school districts seeking to accelerate student achievement growth in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In SY 2021–22, Clayton County Public Schools (CCPS) contracted with a virtual tutoring platform, Tutor.com, to provide one-on-one, on-demand virtual tutoring sessions to students in the district. In this report, Tim Sass and Salma Mohammad Ali use individual tutoring session data from CCPS to highlight patterns of usage among students. We disaggregate usage by school, grade level, subject area, and the number of sessions in which students participated. Additionally, we assess the impact of virtual tutoring use on students’ achievement in math, measured by formative assessment scores (i-Ready or MAP Growth) in SY 2021–22. We find usage of the tutoring platform was modest in terms of the number of students that participated and the frequency of sessions. Usage varied by school and was generally higher among elementary and middle school students. The most popular subject for tutoring sessions was math, where pandemic-era declines in achievement growth have been greater than in reading. While students at all prior achievement levels participated in tutoring sessions, usage was generally lower among higher-achieving students. In general, the extent of Tutor.com usage was not correlated with student achievement gains in math, though there is suggestive evidence that high-intensity use could yield gains in student achievement. Unfortunately, the causal relationship between virtual tutoring usage and student achievement is unclear because students chose their level of Tutor.com use. We find that the relationship between the quantity of non-math tutoring and math test scores is similar to the relationship between math test scores and the number of math tutoring sessions. This suggests that our estimates of the impact of math tutoring on math scores are partly a reflection of the characteristics of students who chose to take advantage of virtual tutoring rather than the tutoring itself. Student usage must increase for virtual tutoring to be an effective tool in promoting student achievement growth. Integrating the use of virtual tutoring into the school day would be the most direct way to promote usage. However, incentivizing students to participate in virtual tutoring before or after school and messaging parents to encourage usage may be helpful as well.https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/gpl_reports/1043/thumbnail.jp

Gender Mainstreaming Analysis At The Management Level

It was an exploratory study that was conducted with the main objectives to: provide basic information to stakeholders and planners about gender imbalance and its implications for Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa (KP) province and Pakistan.  The study attempted to: discover the existing gender scenario in the management cadre of public sector of the province; identify barriers and problems to gender equity and equality in the management roles; and suggest ways and means to remove gender disparity at the management level in the sampled devolved departments of social sector of KP.  Survey Questionnaires, interviews and stakeholders’ workshop were used as tools to collect data from 117 respondents of the sampled departments. Main causes of low female participation at higher level included lack of opportunities, inadequate facilities to female officers, rising element of insecurity in the province, men specific positions, discriminations and socially evolved gender bias. On the basis of results and findings a couple of suggestions like organizing gender awareness sessions, ensuring implementation of sanctioned quota, promotion of higher education for women, capacity development and incentives for potential female officers and revival of posts of female District Education Officers, have been made

Pemanfaatan Limbah Kaca Dan Batu Laterit Sebagai Subtitusi Sebagian Material Penyusun Beton Terhadap Nilai Kuat Tekan Beton

Beton merupakan bahan bangunan yang banyak digunakan dalam konstruksi pembangunan gedung dan perkerasan jalan. Agregat kasar dan semen merupakan 2 dari 4 komponen yang utama sebagai bahan penyusun beton. Sebagian agregat kasar yang digunakan pada penelitian ini yaitu laterit serta bubuk kaca (fritz) yang digunakan sebagai pengganti sebagian semen. Dengan memanfaatkan limbah kaca dan laterit yang telah dihancurkan menggunakan stone crusher sebagai pengganti sebagian material penyusun beton (agregat kasar dan semen) dengan tujuan penelitian untuk menentukan kuat tekan optimum beton campuran laterit dan bubuk kaca serta membandingkan hasil tersebut terhadap kondisi beton normal (tanpa penggunaan laterit dan bubuk kaca). beton campuran laterit dan bubuk kaca ini dibuat dengan 20 silinder berdsarkan masing- masing variasi bubuk kaca, dengan menggunakan campuran laterit “variasi 4” sebagai pengunci/penahan karena memiliki nilai kuat tekan tertinggi pada pengujian pendahuluan, oleh karena itu dikombinasikan dengan bubuk kaca berdasarkan presentase yang telah ditentukan. Komposisi material campuran laterit variasi 4 yang digunakan adalah semen : 10,31 kg , air : 6,92 liter , pasir palu : 22,95 kg , batu palu ½ : 11,56 kg, batu palu ⅔ : 11,75 kg, laterit ½ : 5,21 kg, laterit ⅔ : 5,10 kg. Sedangkan untuk komposisi penggunaan bubuk kaca adalah 3% : 0,31 kg, 6% : 0,62 kg, 9% : 0,93 kg, 12% : 1,24 kg. Berdasarkan perbandingan tersebut, dapat diketahui kadar bubuk kaca optimum beton campuran laterit variasi 4 + bubuk kaca adalah 6% dengan nilai kuat tekan karakteristik sebesar 25.08 MPa. Dengan hasil tersebut nilai kuat tekan beton campuran laterit dan bubuk kaca mampu mencapai kuat tekan yang direncanakan, yaitu 25 MPa

Stuck in the Permissions With You:Developer & User Perspectives on App Permissions & Their Privacy Ramifications

While the literature on permissions from the end-user perspective is rich, there is a lack of empirical research on why developers request permissions, their conceptualization of permissions, and how their perspectives compare with end-users’ perspectives. Our study aims to address these gaps using a mixed-methods approach.Through interviews with 19 app developers and a survey of 309 Android and iOS end-users, we found that both groups shared similar concerns about unnecessary permissions breaking trust, damaging the app’s reputation, and potentially allowing access to sensitive data. We also found that developer participants sometimes requested multiple permissions due to confusion about the scope of certain permissions or third-party library requirements. Additionally, most end-user participants believed they were responsible for granting a permission request, and it was their choice to do so, a belief shared by many developer participants. Our findings have implications for improving the permission ecosystem for both developers and end-users

ERUDITE: Human-in-the-Loop IoT for an Adaptive Personalized Learning System

Thanks to the rapid growth in wearable technologies and recent advancement in machine learning and signal processing, monitoring complex human contexts becomes feasible, paving the way to develop human-in-the-loop IoT systems that naturally evolve to adapt to the human and environment state autonomously. Nevertheless, a central challenge in designing many of these IoT systems arises from the requirement to infer the human mental state, such as intention, stress, cognition load, or learning ability. While different human contexts can be inferred from the fusion of different sensor modalities that can correlate to a particular mental state, the human brain provides a richer sensor modality that gives us more insights into the required human context. This paper proposes ERUDITE, a human-in-the-loop IoT system for the learning environment that exploits recent wearable neurotechnology to decode brain signals. Through insights from concept learning theory, ERUDITE can infer the human state of learning and understand when human learning increases or declines. By quantifying human learning as an input sensory signal, ERUDITE can provide adequate personalized feedback to humans in a learning environment to enhance their learning experience. ERUDITE is evaluated across $15$ participants and showed that by using the brain signals as a sensor modality to infer the human learning state and providing personalized adaptation to the learning environment, the participants' learning performance increased on average by $26\%$. Furthermore, we showed that ERUDITE can be deployed on an edge-based prototype to evaluate its practicality and scalability.Comment: It is under review in the IEEE IoT journa

Enhancing the Students’ Learning Motivation by Using Instructional Media for Thailand’s Municipal School

In today’s era, the idea of conducting student exchanges and teaching practices overseas continues to grow. In this way, the cooperating countries can share their recent innovations in the field of education. The existence of a language barrier, however, may hinder learning and teaching in the classroom. Language barrier refers to the lack of a common language that prevents people from speaking to or understanding each other. It should be overcome as the information shared between teachers and students might be misinterpreted. This research was carried out as the researcher believed that the existing language barrier could be helped by increasing students’ motivation in the classroom. The aim of this study was to integrate the use of instructional media to enhance the students’ learning motivation of primary school in Thailand’s municipal school. This research used Classroom Action Research (CAR) design. The data was collected through the use of worksheets, still pictures, video recordings, interview guides, and field notes. The research results fulfilled the three criteria of success, namely classroom atmosphere, students’ learning motivation, and the strategy’s practicality. The researchers found that the use of instructional media could enhance students’ learning motivation and overcome the language barriers in the classroom

EBE, an AP2/ERF Transcription Factor Highly Expressed in Proliferating Cells, Affects Shoot Architecture in Arabidopsis

We report about ERF BUD ENHANCER (EBE; At5g61890), a transcription factor that affects cell proliferation as well as axillary bud outgrowth and shoot branching in Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana). EBE encodes a member of the APETALA2/ETHYLENE RESPONSE FACTOR (AP2/ERF) transcription factor superfamily; the gene is strongly expressed in proliferating cells and is rapidly and transiently up-regulated in axillary meristems upon main stem decapitation. Overexpression of EBE promotes cell proliferation in growing calli, while the opposite is observed in EBE-RNAi lines. EBE overexpression also stimulates axillary bud formation and outgrowth, while repressing it results in inhibition of bud growth. Global transcriptome analysis of estradiolinducible EBE overexpression lines revealed 48 EBE early-responsive genes, of which 14 were up-regulated and 34 were downregulated. EBE activates several genes involved in cell cycle regulation and dormancy breaking, including D-type cyclin CYCD3;3, transcription regulator DPa, and BRCA1-ASSOCIATED RING DOMAIN1. Among the down-regulated genes were DORMANCYASSOCIATED PROTEIN1 (AtDRM1), AtDRM1 homolog, MEDIATOR OF ABA-REGULATED DORMANCY1, and ZINC FINGER HOMEODOMAIN5. Our data indicate that the effect of EBE on shoot branching likely results from an activation of genes involved in cell cycle regulation and dormancy breaking.Fil: Mehrnia, Mohammad. Institut Max Planck Fur Molekulare Physiologie; AlemaniaFil: Balazadeh, Salma. Institut Max Planck Fur Molekulare Physiologie; Alemania. University of Potsdam. Institute of Biochemistry and Biology; AlemaniaFil: Zanor, María Inés. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Rosario. Instituto de Biología Molecular y Celular de Rosario; Argentina. Institut Max Planck Fur Molekulare Physiologie; AlemaniaFil: Mueller Roeber, Bernd. Institut Max Planck Fur Molekulare Physiologie; Alemania. University of Potsdam, Institute of Biochemistry and Biology; Alemani