This appendix augments a report that updates 2013 guidance to school district leaders and their partners across the country who are interested in launching summer learning programs or improving established ones. In that report, the authors present recommendations based on evaluations, conducted between 2011 and 2016, of summer programs in five…

Multiple data collection or research methods exist for evaluating library spaces. Faced with numerous choices and limited time for gathering data, it becomes challenging for information professionals to determine the best way to proceed with evaluating their libraries' physical spaces. There is a gap in the literature on best practices for…

A valuable supplement to student evaluations of teaching (SETs) is the mid-semester feedback (MSF) technique, an intervention that can facilitate meaningful improvement of the teaching and learning experience. Scheduling time for an MSF enables a systematic, formative evaluation of instruction on a specific student population in a given semester.…

The pilot program, Morning at the Museum (MAM), was offered to children (ages 3-5) and their caregivers weekly for six weeks at the Reynolda House Museum of American Art (RHMAA). Both children and adults explored RHMAA through hands-on activities that encouraged play, movement, observation, music, and art-making. Each session explored a theme…

Social phenomenological analysis is presented as a research method to study gallery talks or guided tours in art museums. The research method is based on the philosophical considerations of Edmund Husserl and sociological/social science concepts put forward by Max Weber and Alfred Schuetz. Its starting point is the everyday lifeworld; the…

In "Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All," NCTM (2014) defines productive struggle as students delving "more deeply into understanding the mathematical structure of problems and relationships among mathematical ideas, instead of simply seeking correct solutions" (p. 48). Hiebert and Grouws (2007, p. 387)…

How are teachers experiencing the more rigorous teacher evaluation systems that many states have mandated in recent years? Donaldson, who has studied teacher evaluation reform over the past eight years, shares insights from a study of 14 Connecticut districts that have implemented the state's 2012 teacher evaluation reforms. In surveys and…

In urban schools overwhelmed by increasing demands to raise test scores, exclusive focus on increasing academic competencies has proven ineffective. School-wide, comprehensive social-emotional and character development (SECD), focused on the cultivation of Noble Purpose, provides an alternative pathway toward life, college, and career success. We…

To draw conclusions from data, we need to understand the context of the data and the measurement units. In 2007, Franklin and colleagues presented the "Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) Report" to provide teachers with a framework to assist in developing students' investigation of statistical…

Regular physical activity (PA) is an important concept to measure in health education research. The health education researcher might need to measure physical activity because it is the primary measure of interest, or PA might be a confounding measure that needs to be controlled for in statistical analysis. The purpose of this commentary is to…

With their sunny stripes and fuzzy bodies, bees are beloved--but unfortunately, they are in trouble. Bee decline, of both wild bees as well as managed bees like honey bees, has been in the news for the last several years. Habitat loss, diseases, pests, and pesticides have made it difficult for bees to survive in many parts of our world (Walsh…

The question of how schools can help parents experience joy in observing their children led to a quest to identify experiences that can contribute to the awakening of consciousness. Workshops, surveys, discussion, and interviews yielded data that led to some unexpected conclusions about sources of personal transformation. [Reprinted from "AMI…

Experiential and active learning exercises can benefit students in sociology courses, particularly, courses in which issues of inequality are central. In this paper, we describe using hunger banquets-an active learning exercise where participants are randomly stratified into three global classes and receive food based upon their class position-to…

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how amateur choral singers experience collective group support as a method of learning "art music" choral work. Findings are derived from a grounded-theory based, socio-musical case study of an amateur "art music" Bach Choir, in the process of rehearsing and performing the Mass in B…

Museums often evaluate various aspects of their audiences' experiences, be it what they learn from a program or how they react to an exhibition. Each museum program or exhibition has its own set of goals, which can drive what an evaluator studies and how an evaluation evolves. When designing an evaluation, data collection methods are purposefully…