This qualitative case study reports on processes and outcomes of the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded System-Wide Change for All Learners and Educators (SCALE) project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison). It addresses a critical challenge in studying systemic reform in complex organizations: the lack of methodologies that…

A case study of one child, Alicia, is used to explore how children's identities as readers are constructed across time as they move thorough school. Attention to time helps us attend to how students draw on ongoing, familial, and historical resources in ways that are both recursive and future-oriented as they construct themselves as readers across…

Confidence intervals are beginning to play an increasing role in the reporting of research findings within the social and behavioral sciences and, consequently, are becoming more prevalent in beginning classes in statistics and research methods. Confidence intervals are an attractive means of conveying experimental results, as they contain a…

Title III of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) requires state education agencies to develop progress and attainment benchmarks for school districts, called annual measurable achievement objectives (AMAOs), for English language learners (ELLs). AMAOs must be based on annual assessments of English proficiency in the domains of listening,…

Federal programs, such as the National Science Foundation's Math and Science Partnership program, are promoting partnerships between K-12 school districts and higher education institutions (K-20 partnerships) in hopes of fostering greater alignment and cooperation among participating institutions and pooling resources to address persistent…

A common theme in policy discussions of teacher quality is that K-12 teacher salaries need to be increased. While raising pay may attract more people to the occupation and improve retention, it is not completely obvious how much pay levels should be increased. One way to determine the pay level needed has been to compare teacher pay to pay levels…

Researchers have disagreed about the extent to which differences in achievement based on socioeconomic status (SES) accumulate during the school year as compared to the summer, and the literature has not fully assessed the contributions of social contexts--in the form of both school and neighborhood poverty concentration and racial and ethnic…

This report on the SCALE Institutions of Higher Education (IHE) Case Studies line of work provides preliminary findings about SCALE activities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison). This study focuses on the structural and behavioral dynamics influencing the implementation of the four core SCALE strategies for effecting change in…

This report of the National Science Foundation-funded SCALE Institutions of Higher Education (IHE) Case Studies line of work provides preliminary findings about SCALE activities at the California State University, Northridge (CSUN). This interview-based study (N = 19) includes a descriptive analysis of SCALE activities and an exploratory analysis…

This paper explores the ways in which school leaders are turning to student services staff as local experts in data analysis and use to meet the demands of high-stakes accountability. The authors have been collecting data, as part of a 5-year National Science Foundation-funded study, on how school leaders create data-driven systems to improve…

Formative feedback systems live at the heart of systemic school improvement efforts. Without accurate and timely information on the results of intended interventions, school leaders and teachers fly blind in their efforts to link what they expect to what actually happens in their schools. This paper draws on the results of a 5-year National…

The U.S. Department of Education recently held a competition for grants to support states in their efforts to build longitudinal data systems to track and analyze student and school performance. The Value-Added Research Center (VARC) at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, proposed a Tri-State Partnership…

This study investigates middle school mathematics students' views and interpretations of graphical representations as they use graphs to answer algebraic questions--specifically, questions that require them to extrapolate information from graphs. From data gathered in videotaped interviews, students' verbal responses were analyzed as well as any…

The prominent role of Boolean classes in qualitative data analysis software is viewed by some as an encroachment of logical positivism on qualitative research methodology. The authors articulate an embodiment perspective, in which Boolean classes are viewed as conceptual metaphors for apprehending and manipulating data, concepts, and categories in…

This paper explores a distributed leadership perspective on how leaders create contexts that build and support professional communities in schools. It is argued that professional community results from intentional coordination of social interaction among teachers through the design of structures in a situation of practice. School leaders put these…