Associations between scale scores obtained from a teacher observation-based authentic assessment measure, the "Teaching Strategies GOLD®", and (a) teacher ratings of children's social functioning and learning behaviors, and (b) child performance on external, individually administered direct assessments of academic skills are presented.…

Among the most memorable lessons I learned from my father was based on a comment he often made when I was young: "The days are long and the years are short." During a year as President of the Society for Public Health Education (SOPHE), there were many days that seemed to go on forever; but in retrospect, the entire year seems to have…

The racial achievement gap has persisted in the decades since "Brown v. Board," despite large-scale investment in school reform. Accordingly, some administrators and politicians are reconsidering integration policies as a means of addressing the gap. This study examines one Chicago community's discussion of such integration policy.…

Randomized control trials are considered the gold standard for conducting research and estimating causal effects; however, educational research rarely lends itself to experimental design and true randomization. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in finding new approaches to estimate causal effects in nonrandomized studies in…

This paper explores changes to the educational policy making arena through case study analysis of a Massachusetts law passed in 2012 that limits seniority-based job protections for public K-12 teachers. I use data from interviews with policy stakeholders, observations of public meetings, and policy artifacts to explore struggles over democratic…

Automatic assessment of the quality of classroom discourse can have a transformative effect on research and practice on improving teaching effectiveness. We improve on a previous automated method to measure teacher authentic questions -- open-ended questions without pre-scripted responses that predict student achievement growth -- using classroom…

To be able to provide better support for collaborative learning in Intelligent Tutoring Systems, it is important to understand how collaboration patterns change. Prior work has looked at the interdependencies between utterances and the change of dialogue over time, but it has not addressed how dialogue changes during a lesson, an analysis that…

Educational games have become hugely popular, and educational data mining has been used to predict student performance in the context of these games. However, models built on student behavior in educational games rarely differentiate between the types of problem solving that students employ and fail to address how efficacious student problem…

The gold standard for identifying more effective pedagogical approaches is to perform an experiment. Unfortunately, frequently a hypothesized alternate way of teaching does not yield an improved effect. Given the expense and logistics of each experiment, and the enormous space of potential ways to improve teaching, it would be highly preferable if…

In this study, the researcher examined student conceptions of "Whiteness" as it relates to past and present U.S. history. Using Critical Race Theory as the lens, this study employed mixed methods, analyzing teacher observations, classroom artifacts/student work, survey, and interview data from White students and students of color at an…

We present a machine learning model that uses particular attributes of individual questions asked by teachers and students to predict two properties of classroom discourse that have previously been linked to improved student achievement. These properties, uptake and authenticity, have previously been studied by using trained observers to live-code…

It is common to see students multitasking or switching between different tasks on the computer while also listening to the teacher lecture in the front of a classroom. In today's classrooms, students have much greater control over how they use their time, with the classroom integration of computers and mobile devices combined with social media and…

The introduction of demand-driven funding following the Bradley Review has seen the progressive removal of constraints on the number of undergraduate places that universities can offer, therefore allowing universities to set their own growth levels. In South Australia, there is little unmet demand for university places. Traditionally, universities…

As lines between research paradigms continue to blur with the ever-increasing popularity of mixed methods research, there are useful, and occasionally oxymoronic, opportunities for educational researchers to juxtapose tools from opposing methods. The gold standard is just not possible in so much of what we do with small-scale research, nor is it…

Historically, responses to the Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) were required to be collected by self-administered paper or online questionnaire to be eligible for official analysis. CEQ responses collected by telephone were excluded from the final analysis file to minimise the potential for bias due to mode effects: systematic variation in…