Reading and Math Interventions at the Secondary Level: A Research Brief

Starting in the early 2000’s with the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act, federal and state education authorities promoted the use of accountability policies that require schools to meet certain measures of academic progress overtime. Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) and Annual Measurable Objectives (AMOs) have become the new measure of school success. These policies rely heavily on students’ Math and Reading achievement at particular benchmark grades, leading local educational agencies (i.e. school divisions) to place increased emphasis on the reading and math results of state-mandated testing. In Virginia, pressures to meet AYP and AMOs by improving school performance on the Standards of Learning assessments – especially in academically underperforming schools – has to led to the adoption of various reading and math interventions designed to support student learning. While there is some broadening of school success criteria in the newly authorized Every Student Succeeds Education Act, it is likely that achievement in math and reading will still be a top priority in our education system. Therefore, even amidst changing policy, the importance of identifying and implementing effective interventions still exists. At the secondary level, reading and math interventions play a unique role in student achievement. While there may be students that struggle with math and reading at the secondary level, in most cases secondary course work has moved beyond these basic skills. For example, high school English classes are literature-based, and the teachers at this level are not trained to teach reading skills. For this reason, many local school divisions have had to develop interventions that restructure the form and the content of the curriculum, and draw on new resources for addressing these needs. Strategies include increasing instructional time in math and reading, integrating math and reading skills across the curriculum, and purchasing off the shelf curriculums, many of which are computer based. However, while the implementation of interventions has been widely accepted, some ambiguity still exists around which programs are most effective for school divisions to implement with their students1 . With hundreds of reading and math interventions available to school divisions, it can be challenging to select the most appropriate intervention for local schools. As a result, divisions often adopt multiple interventions that can sometimes appear to be fragmented. In accordance with the Regulations Establishing Accrediting Standards for Public Schools in Virginia (SOA), the Virginia Board of Education has published a list of recommended instructional interventions. While this list is beneficial, it still provides school divisions with a potentially overwhelming number of intervention options and provides little evidence that demonstrate their efficacy.1 As a result, school divisions are left to do their own research to decide which option is most appropriate to implement with their students

MITH API Workshop

Level 1 Start Up funding is requested to support a two-day workshop on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), hosted by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland. The workshop will gather 40-50 Digital Humanities scholars and developers who are using or interested in using APIs in their digital projects, industry leaders who will demonstrate their APIs, and practitioners who will help guide the group through the "working weekend." The workshop will lay the groundwork for the integration of APIs into participant projects, and serve as a platform to develop future ideas for how to share and access humanities data through APIs. Presentations by workshop presenters will be video recorded, and recordings made available online through the workshop and MITH websites. Similarly, workshop activities will be archived on the workshop website, which will act as a clearinghouse and publication of all workshop-related content

UKERC Review of evidence for the rebound effect: Technical report 3: Elasticity of substitution studies

This Working Paper forms part of the TPA’s assessment of evidence for a rebound effect from improved energy efficiency. Technical Report 3 focuses upon empirical estimates of the elasticity of substitution between energy and capital. This parameter has been identified as a key determinant of the likely magnitude of the rebound effect in different sectors. The report clarifies the meaning and importance of this parameter, summarises and compares empirical estimates of this parameter, evaluates the reasons that have been proposed for the differing results, discusses whether a consensus has been reached to whether energy and capital can be considered as ‘substitutes’ or ‘complements’ and draws some implications for the rebound effect

CAFE Increases: Missing the Elephant in the Living Room

In a Joint Center paper, Kleit and Lutter identify externalities of about $0.08 per mile for driving light duty vehicles. Rather than recognize the huge externalities from current driving, they focus on a tiny increment that would come from increasing CAFE standards. A first best policy would tax congestion, pollution emissions and gasoline, and increase safety. If that policy is not politically feasible, a second best policy would increase gasoline taxes$1.75 per gallon. Contrary to Kleit and Lutter, we find sound economic reasons for CAFE.

The chemistry of organo-selenium reagents

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When Does Improving Health Raise GDP?

We assess quantitatively the effect of exogenous health improvements on output per capita. Our simulation model allows for a direct effect of health on worker productivity, as well as indirect effects that run through schooling, the size and age-structure of the population, capital accumulation, and crowding of fixed natural resources. The model is parameterized using a combination of microeconomic estimates, data on demographics, disease burdens, and natural resource income in developing countries, and standard components of quantitative macroeconomic theory. We consider both changes in general health, proxied by improvements in life expectancy, and changes in the prevalence of two particular diseases: malaria and tuberculosis. We find that the effects of health improvements on income per capita are substantially lower than those that are often quoted by policy-makers, and may not emerge at all for three decades or more after the initial improvement in health. The results suggest that proponents of efforts to improve health in developing countries should rely on humanitarian rather than economic arguments.Health; Human Capital; Life Expectancy; Disease Eradication; Fertility; Population Size; Age Structure; Captital Accumulation; Natural Resources; Income Per Capita

Quantifying the Impact of Exogenous Non-Economic Factors on UK Transport Oil Demand

This paper attempts to quantify the impact of exogenous non-economic factors on UK transport oil demand (in addition to income, price, and fuel efficiency) by estimating the demand relationship for oil transport for 1960-2007 using the Structural Time Series Model. From this, the relative impact on UK transport oil demand from income, price, and efficiency are quantified. Moreover, the impact of the non-economic factors is also quantified, based on the premise that the estimated stochastic trend represents behavioural responses to changes in socio-economic factors and changes in lifestyles and attitudes. The estimated elasticities for income, price and efficiency are 0.6, -0.1, and -0.3 respectively and it is shown that for efficiency and price the overall contribution is relatively small, whereas the contribution from income and non-economic factors is relatively large. This has important implications for policy makers keen to reduce transport oil consumption and associated emissions, but not willing to reduce the trend rate of economic growth. Taxes and improved efficiency only have a limited impact; hence, a major thrust of policy should perhaps be on educating and informing consumers to persuade them to change their lifestyle and attitudes and thus reduce their consumption through the non-economic instruments route.Transport oil demand; Structural Time Series Model, STSM; Underlying Energy Demand Trend, UEDT; Exogenous Non-Economic Factors, ExNEF.