Research and Education Reform Roles for the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (1992) / Chapter Skim
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2 RESEARCH AND THE IMPROVEMENT OF EDUCATION
2 RESEARCH AND THE IMPROVEMENT OF EDUCATION
Pages 19-53
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From page 19... ...
If relative funding levels are any indication, Congress is clearly not convinced that federal support of research can benefit public education in the way it has benefited the nation's health and agriculture. Members of Congress are not alone in their general low regard for research as an integral part of a robust system of education: teachers commonly indicate that they do not use research and do not see its connection to what they do on a daily basis in the classroom (Louis et al., 1984~.
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From page 20... ...
Improvement in education will occur only if all participants parents, students, teachers, the public, and policy makersare willing to make strong intellectual commitments to work together using new insights, approaches, and techniques to improve education. The undistinguished reputation of education research is also partly attributable to some of the work.
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From page 21... ...
The third section describes some of the major efforts to monitor the status of American schools and teachers and the achievement of students. Finally, we discuss some of the ways in which Congress and congressional agencies have used education research.
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From page 22... ...
According to cognitive theorists, individuals have several schemata, each of which may result in a different interpretation of an event. Thinking skills are sets of strategies for analysis and self-regulation that build on prior knowledge and experience and generate increasingly complex frameworks for understanding (Chipman et al., 1985; Glaser, 1984; Resnick, 1989~.
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From page 23... ...
The principles of cognitive science have provided important guidance to the developers of many promising programs on curriculum design and teaching approaches. Two examples are Cognitively Guided Instruction and Reciprocal Teaching (described below)
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From page 24... ...
, to examine written and oral communication from the standpoint of information processing theory. The group concluded (Miller, 1973~: "NIE should actively support efforts to understand the cognitive processes involved in acquiring basic reading skills and the cognitive processes involved in comprehending linguistic messages." More than 100 researchers were subsequently involved in a consensus building process to plan an appropriate research program.
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From page 25... ...
However, when researchers tried to teach writing and reading simultaneously to first and second graders, they were not only successful, but they also serendipitously found that writing instruction accelerated the acquisition of reading skills (Graves, 1983~. Research on reading and writing has contributed to the development of innovative programs, such as Reciprocal Teaching, Reading Recovery and Success For All, and has informed parents, teachers, and policy makers through a series of widely distributed publications.
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From page 26... ...
The other reading program, Reciprocal Teaching, demonstrates Vygotsky's model of guided intervention and provides a direct test of the theory of the centrality of comprehension monitoring in strategic reading. Reciprocal Teaching also offers an example of an extensive basic research program designed to study metacognition that has also begun to benefit educational practice.
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From page 27... ...
Student Team Learning, a cooperative learning program created by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Social Organization of the Schools, is an example of a program based on prior research in social and organizational psychology and modified by the developers' own subsequent research and evaluations. All of the programs described in the section used research designs in which the performance of students in an experimental group was compared with national norms or with the performance of students in a control group.
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From page 28... ...
The results show that students in the Project IMPACT classes significantly outperformed students in control classes in thinking skills, mathematics, and reading at all three grade levels. According to the analysis, the magnitude of the gains for IMPACT students was 1 standard deviation on both the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills and the Cornell Critical Thinking Test, compared with an average gain of 0.1 standard deviations for students in control classes (Winocur, 1983~.
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From page 29... ...
Reading Recovery Program Description Reading Recovery is an early intervention program designed to assist the lowest 20 percent of readers in the first grade, as determined by a special battery of diagnostic tests developed by Marie Clay (1985~. The goal of this field-initiated program is to teach these children reading skills that are comparable to those of the average students in their class.
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From page 30... ...
Teacher leaders go through a year-long program at a university training site and then return to their local regions to provide a full year of training for other teachers. During training the teachers learn how to prepare lesson plans and administer the program, how to create diagnostic summary reports, and how to assess student progress.
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From page 31... ...
In addition, the developers found that Reading Recovery students made an average normal curve equivalent gain on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills of 8.6 for the school year, compared with -0.2 for students in the control group. At the end of the first grade, Reading Recovery students (the 73 percent who had successfully completed the program)
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From page 32... ...
Reciprocal Teaching Program Description Reciprocal Teaching is a 10-year, field-initiated program of basic research funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to test the theory that the skills that define "comprehension monitoring" are central in strategic reading. The comprehension monitoring activities selected for study include summarizing (self-review)
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From page 33... ...
Testing and Evaluation The first two experiments of reciprocal reading were conducted with seventh grade students who could read but were at least 2 years behind on standardized scores of reading comprehension (Palincsar and Brown, 1984~. In the first study, some students received the Reciprocal Teaching approach from the program developers, and other students were assigned to one of three comparison groups.
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From page 34... ...
During the study the peer tutors' comprehension rose from an average of 72 percent correct to an average of 87 percent correct during their training and tutoring, and the tutorees comprehension rose from an average 53 percent to an average of 77 percent correct. In another study using Reciprocal Teaching to develop listening skills, Brown and Palincsar (1989)
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From page 35... ...
CSMP is one of the few mathematics programs that conforms to many of the elements of the recently developed Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for Schools Mathematics (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1989~. The program uses a "pedagogy of situations"-gamelike problem situations and story settings to teach both content and processes.
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From page 36... ...
The program has been adopted in more than 125 school districts in 34 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and Canada. Cognitively Guided Instruction Research Description Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI)
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From page 37... ...
The teachers use this knowledge and skills with their existing curriculum materials to assist their students in gaining correct mathematical concepts. In a CGI classroom, teachers work interactively with the whole class, asking all children to participate by giving their solutions to interesting, everyday problems that represent problem types in the addition-subtraction word problem taxonomy developed by program researchers.
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From page 38... ...
The taxonomy gave the teachers some direction on what questions to ask and what to listen for in the students' solutions. The children learned through interaction with the teacher and through listening to the solutions presented by other children: this is a common thread with Reciprocal Teaching (Palincsar and Brown, 1984~.
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From page 39... ...
One example of a successful cooperative learning program is Student Team Learning, developed by Slavin and his associates at Johns Hopkins' Center for Social Organization of the Schools, which was supported by OERI and NIE from 1967 to 1985. Student Team Learning, designed primarily for elementary education, includes three programs Student Teams Achievement Division, Teams-Games-Tournament, and Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition.
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From page 40... ...
Research began in 1972 and is still continuing. In 1975 TeamsGames-Tournament was certified as effective by OERI's National Diffusion Network for dissemination (see Chapter 3~; in 1978 Student Teams Achievement Division was added; and in 1988 Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition was accepted.
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From page 41... ...
The principle underlying many of the second wave themesfrom school-site management to teacher professionalism to parental choiceis the notion that if school personnel are held accountable for producing change and meeting outcome objectives, they will expend both their professional knowledge and their creative energies to finding the most effective ways possible to do so. Two examples of promising field-initiated, school restructuring projects are James Comer's School Development Program and the Outcomes Driven Development Model (ODDM)
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From page 42... ...
, the School Development Program was designed to include: (1) a steering committee composed of school administrators, teachers, parents, and representatives from the Yale Child Study Center; (2)
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From page 43... ...
The program was further evaluated by developers in a 1987 study using a randomly selected sample of 306 African American students in grades 3-5. Of the total sample, 176 students were attending seven School Development Program schools around the country, 91 were attending four control schools (comparable schools not using the program)
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From page 44... ...
Between 1985 and 1987 third grade students in Comer's program schools gained 18 percentile points in mathematics, 17 in language and 9 in reading; throughout the district, students gained 10 percentile points in mathematics, 8 in-language, and 5 in reading. At the fourth grade level, students in the program schools gained more than 20 percentile points in mathematics, 12 in language, and 7 in reading, compared with district-wide gains of 11, 7 and 4 percentile points respectively.
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From page 45... ...
In Utah, five districts have used ODDM for 3 or more years; four of them have data showing dramatic improvements, using pretest and posttest performance on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills. One district showed average increases of two and three grade levels by fifth and sixth grade students; a second showed math score increases of 1.5, 2.0, and 3.0 grade levels by students in the third, fourth, and fifth grades, respectively; a third raised the average reading percentile approximately 5 points and the average math percentile by 10-20 points; and the fourth raised reading and language arts percentiles by approximately 10 points and mathematics percentiles by 15-20 points.
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From page 46... ...
Longitudinal Studies Longitudinal studies provide important information about the changes in the behavior and performance of a cohort of students over time. NCES has supported three particularly notable large-scale longitudinal studies of students: the 1972 National Longitudinal Study, the 1980 High School and Beyond Study, and the 1988 National Educational Longitudinal Study.
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From page 47... ...
The 1988 National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS-88) was designed to examine the major factors contributing to student achievement, persistence in school, and participation in postsecondary education.
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From page 48... ...
The matrix sampling of test items, the analysis of potential items for bias, and the scale scores used in reporting findings are the result of complex psychometric work accomplished over the past three decades by psychologists, statisticians, and education researchers. Without this work, NAEP would have been more time-consuming for students to take, more expensive to administer, and less accurate as a measure of achievement.
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From page 49... ...
For example, NCES has contributed to the 1982 Second International Mathematics Study, the 1984 International Education Association (IEA) Writing Study, the 1985 Second International Science Study, the 1988 International Assessment of Education Progress, and the 1991 IEA Reading Literacy Study, and it is currently funding the planning of performance assessments for the upcoming Third International Science Study (TIMSS)
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From page 50... ...
, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the National Institute of Mental Health. All four congressional agencies have used reports from NCES's High School and Beyond study, and one staffer described it as a "treasure trove." Several staff members mentioned that the federal government is usually the only source of longitudinal studies, and several reported using NAEP data and reports.
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From page 51... ...
Two of the programs-Reciprocal Teaching and Cognitively Guided Instructionwere designed as basic research on theories developed by cognitive scien
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From page 52... ...
The Learning Research and Development Center and the Wisconsin Center for Educational Research have been leaders in research on cognitive science and its contributions to education; the Center for the Study of Reading has been a leader in reading research (and produced A Nation of Readers) ; the Central Midwestern Regional Laboratory designed the Comprehensive School Mathematics Program, and the Midcontinent Regional Educational Laboratory disseminated it; and the Johns Hopkins' centers have developed and expanded Student Team Learning.
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From page 53... ...
Our review demonstrates that successful education research and development requires a sustained investment of time and money for research, development, and dissemination. We conclude that no one mechanism for the support of research should dominate federal grant-making policy.
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