Centerscope

Centerscope, formerly Scope, was published by the Boston University Medical Center "to communicate the concern of the Medical Center for the development and maintenance of improved health care in contemporary society.

'In praise of educational research': formative assessment

In this paper we trace the development of the King’s Formative Assessment Programme (KFAP) from its origins in diagnostic testing in the 1970s, through the graded assessment movement in the 1980s, to the present day. In doing so, we discuss the practical issues involved in reviewing research and outline the strategies we used to try to communicate our findings to as wide an audience as possible (including policymakers and practitioners as well as academics). We then describe briefly how we worked with teachers to develop formative practice in classrooms, and discuss the impact that this has work has had on practice and policy. In the final section, we speculate about some of the reasons for this impact, and make suggestions for how the impact of educational research on policy and practice might be improved

Recent Developments in Intergenerational Mobility

Economists and social scientists have long been interested in intergenerational mobility, and documenting the persistence between parents and children's outcomes has been an active area of research. However, since Gary Solon's 1999 Chapter in the Handbook of Labor Economics, the literature has taken an interesting turn. In addition to focusing on obtaining precise estimates of correlations and elasticities, the literature has placed increased emphasis on the causal mechanisms that underlie this relationship. This chapter describes the developments in the intergenerational transmission literature since the 1999 Handbook Chapter. While there have been some important contributions in terms of measurement of elasticities and correlations, we will focus primarily on advances in our understanding of the forces driving the relationship and less on the precision of the correlations themselves.income transmission, income mobility, education, intergenerational transmission

Recent Developments in Intergenerational Mobility

Economists and social scientists have long been interested in intergenerational mobility, and documenting the persistence between parents and children's outcomes has been an active area of research. However, since Gary Solon's 1999 Chapter in the Handbook of Labor Economics, the literature has taken an interesting turn. In addition to focusing on obtaining precise estimates of correlations and elasticities, the literature has placed increased emphasis on the causal mechanisms that underlie this relationship. This chapter describes the developments in the intergenerational transmission literature since the 1999 Handbook Chapter. While there have been some important contributions in terms of measurement of elasticities and correlations, we will focus primarily on advances in our understanding of the forces driving the relationship and less on the precision of the correlations themselves.Intergenerational Transmission, Educational Mobility

A Construct-Modeling Approach to Develop a Learning Progression of how Students Understand the Structure of Matter

This paper builds on the current literature base about learning progressions in science to address the question, “What is the nature of the learning progression in the content domain of the structure of matter?” We introduce a learning progression in response to that question and illustrate a methodology, the Construct Modeling (Wilson, 2005) approach, for investigating the progression through a developmentally based iterative process. This study puts forth a progression of how students understand the structure of matter by empirically inter-relating constructs of different levels of sophistication using a sample of 1,087 middle grade students from a large diverse public school district in the western part of the United States. The study also shows that student thinking can be more complex than hypothesized as in the case of our discovery of a substructure of understanding in a single construct within the larger progression. Data were analyzed using a multidimensional Rasch model. Implications for teaching and learning are discussed—we suggest that the teacher’s choice of instructional approach needs to be fashioned in terms of a model, grounded in evidence, of the paths through which learning might best proceed, working toward the desired targets by a pedagogy which also cultivates students’ development as effective learners. This research sheds light on the need for assessment methods to be used as guides for formative work and as tools to ensure the learning goals have been achieved at the end of the learning period. The development and investigation of a learning progression of how students understand the structure of matter using the Construct Modeling approach makes an important contribution to the research on learning progressions and serves as a guide to the planning and implementation in the teaching of this topic. # 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 54: 1024–1048, 201

The More the Merrier? The Effect of Family Size and Birth Order on Childrens Education

There is an extensive theoretical literature that postulates a trade off between child quantity and quality within a family. However, there is little causal evidence that speaks to this theory. Using a rich dataset on the entire population of Norway over an extended period of time, we examine the effects of family size and birth order on the educational attainment of children. While we find a negative correlation between family size and children's education, when we include indicators for birth order and/or use twin births as an instrument, family size effects become negligible. In addition, birth order has a significant and large negative effect on children's education. We also study adult earnings, employment, and teenage childbearing, and find strong evidence for birth order effects with these outcomes, particularly among women. These findings suggest the need to revisit economic models of fertility and child 'production', focusing not only on differences across families but differences within families as well.