Improving School Leadership: The Promise of Cohesive Leadership Systems

Describes Wallace grantees' work to create a cohesive leadership system of coordinated policies between states and districts and across state agencies, states' and districts' efforts to forge cohesive policies, and the impact on instructional leadership

External and Internal Influences on Institutional Approaches to Student Assessment: Accountability or Improvement?

The purpose of this study is to compare the influences of state characteristics related to student assessment, accreditation emphasis on student assessment, and institutional dynamics supporting student assessment on the approaches to student assessment that institutions have initiated. We conducted this study by examining the relevant literature, creating a national survey instrument, surveying undergraduate institutions throughout the United States, and analyzing the responses of the 885 public institutions who participated in our survey. Separate regressions were run for three different groups of institutional types on three approaches to assessment: cognitive, affective, and post-college. Regressions for the three institutional types explained 21 to 27% of the variance for cognitive assessment, 7 to 21% for affective assessment and 6 to 19% for post-college assessment. With the exception of a minor influence of state characteristics for doctoral and research universities, institutional dynamics and accreditation region were found to be the primary influences on student assessment approaches for all institutional types. We found that the drive for state-level accountability has not exceeded the influence of institutional accreditation and that internal dynamics appear to be the driving force of all three approaches to student assessment.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43623/1/11162_2004_Article_223326.pd

Organizational Practices Enhancing the Influence of Student Assessment Information in Academic Decisions

Student assessment should not be undertaken as an end in itself but as a means to educational and institutional improvement. The purpose of our study is to provide systematic empirical evidence of how postsecondary institutions support and promote the use of student assessment information in academic decision making. We use linear regression to determine which institutional variables are related to whether student assessment data is influential in academic decisions. Our conclusion is that student assessment data has only a marginal influence on academic decision making. Our data show there is slightly more influence on educationally related decisions than on faculty-related decisions, but in neither case is student assessment data very influential. Nonetheless, we did find several significant predictor variables in our model, including: the number of institutional studies relating students' performance to their interactions with the institution; conducting student assessment to improve internal institutional performance; involving student affairs personnel in student assessment; the extent of student assessment conducted; and the extent of professional development related to student assessment that is offered to faculty, staff, and administrators. These findings vary by institutional type.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43622/1/11162_2004_Article_221314.pd

Ready for Fall? Near-Term Effects of Voluntary Summer Learning Programs on Low-Income Students' Learning Opportunities and Outcomes

This report is the second of five volumes from a five-year study, funded by The Wallace Foundation and conducted by the RAND Corporation, designed as a randomized controlled trial that assesses student outcomes in three waves: in the fall after the 2013 summer program (reported here), at the end of the school year following the program, and after a second summer program in 2014 (to show the cumulative effects of two summer programs). The goal of the study is to answer one key question: Do voluntary, district-run summer programs that include academics and enrichment activities improve student academic achievement and other outcomes, such as social and emotional competence

An Evaluation of MacArthur's Window of Opportunity: Preserving Affordable Rental Housing Initiative

In this report, we describe the seven strategies by which the MacArthur Foundation sought ambitious changes in the preservation of affordable rental housing. In brief, these strategies were to* support a cadre of large nonprofit owners of affordable rental housing to both preserve rental housing and act as spokespersons for preservation* increase capital for preservation by investing in special-purpose vehicles, such as preservation-themed loan funds* invest in regional interagency partnerships to retain affordable rental housing* develop business practices, tools, and research for or about preservation* provide loans and grants directly to state and local government agencies that themselves fund preservation transactions* promote low-income tenants' rights to remain in and advocate for affordable rental housing* improve the funding, regulatory, and legislative context for preservation through the foundation's combined investments in nonprofit owners, networks of nonprofit owners, special-purpose vehicles, state and local government agencies, and advocates

Learning From Summer: Effects of Voluntary Summer Learning Programs on Low-Income Urban Youth

The largest-ever study of summer learning finds that students with high attendance in free, five to six-week, voluntary summer learning programs experienced educationally meaningful benefits in math and reading.The findings are important because children from low-income families lose ground in learning over the summer compared to their more affluent peers. Voluntary, district-run summer programs could help shrink this gap and have the potential to reach more students than traditional summer school or smaller-scale programs run by outside organizations. Yet until now little has been known about the impact of these programs and how they can succeed. Wallace's $50 million National Summer Learning Project seeks to help provide answers.Since 2011, five urban school districts and their partners, the RAND Corporation and Wallace have been working together to find out whether and how voluntary-attendance summer learning programs combining academics and enrichment can help students succeed in school.Starting in 2013, RAND conducted a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in five districts—Boston; Dallas; Duval County, Florida; Pittsburgh; and Rochester—to evaluate educational outcomes, focusing on children who were in 3rd grade in spring of that year. The 5,600 students who applied to summer programs were randomly assigned to one of two groups—those selected to take part in the programs for two summers (the treatment group) and those not selected (the control group). The study analyzed outcomes for 3,192 students offered access to the programs.Researchers found that those who attended a five-to-six-week summer program for 20 or more days in 2013 did better on state math tests than similar students in the control group. This advantage was statistically significant and lasted through the following school year. The results are even more striking for high attenders in 2014: They outperformed control group students in both math and English Language Arts (ELA), on fall tests and later, in the spring. The advantage after the second summer was equivalent to 20-25 percent of a year's learning in math and ELA.These findings are correlational but controlled for prior achievement and demographics, giving researchers confidence that the benefits are likely due to the programs and meeting the requirements for promising evidence under the Every Student Succeeds Act.High-attending students were also rated by teachers as having stronger social and emotional competencies than the control group students; however, researchers have less confidence that this was due to the programs, given the lack of prior data on these competencies.About 60 percent of students attending at least one day met the 20-day threshold that was defined as high attendance.Separately, the study also examined the impact of the programs on all students who were offered access, whether or not they actually attended. Because many students did not attend at a high level, and some didn't attend at all, the average benefits for all of these students were smaller and not statistically significant, with the exception of a modest but educationally meaningful boost in math scores in the fall after the first summer equivalent to 15 percent of a year's learning. These findings are causal, meaning that researchers are confident that they were due to the programs, and meet the standard of strong evidence under the Every Student Succeeds Act.For students to experience lasting benefits from attending summer programs, the report recommends that districts: run programs for at least five weeks; promote high attendance; include sufficient instructional time and protect it; invest in instructional quality; and factor in attendance and likely no-show rates when staffing the programs in order to lower per-student costs

Making Summer Count: How Summer Programs Can Boost Children's Learning

Examines evidence that summer programs can help counter the "summer slide" that disproportionately affects low-income students and contributes to the achievement gap; identifies obstacles to program provision; analyzes costs; and offers recommendations

Positivity of the English language

Over the last million years, human language has emerged and evolved as a fundamental instrument of social communication and semiotic representation. People use language in part to convey emotional information, leading to the central and contingent questions: (1) What is the emotional spectrum of natural language? and (2) Are natural languages neutrally, positively, or negatively biased? Here, we report that the human-perceived positivity of over 10,000 of the most frequently used English words exhibits a clear positive bias. More deeply, we characterize and quantify distributions of word positivity for four large and distinct corpora, demonstrating that their form is broadly invariant with respect to frequency of word use.Comment: Manuscript: 9 pages, 3 tables, 5 figures; Supplementary Information: 12 pages, 3 tables, 8 figure

Long- and short-term outcomes in renal allografts with deceased donors: A large recipient and donor genome-wide association study.

Improvements in immunosuppression have modified short-term survival of deceased-donor allografts, but not their rate of long-term failure. Mismatches between donor and recipient HLA play an important role in the acute and chronic allogeneic immune response against the graft. Perfect matching at clinically relevant HLA loci does not obviate the need for immunosuppression, suggesting that additional genetic variation plays a critical role in both short- and long-term graft outcomes. By combining patient data and samples from supranational cohorts across the United Kingdom and European Union, we performed the first large-scale genome-wide association study analyzing both donor and recipient DNA in 2094 complete renal transplant-pairs with replication in 5866 complete pairs. We studied deceased-donor grafts allocated on the basis of preferential HLA matching, which provided some control for HLA genetic effects. No strong donor or recipient genetic effects contributing to long- or short-term allograft survival were found outside the HLA region. We discuss the implications for future research and clinical application

Abstracts from the NIHR INVOLVE Conference 2017

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