State- and local-level mandates are currently being implemented to ensure strict compliance to the new national Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts (CCSS for ELA) and related assessments. These standards provide many potential opportunities to improve literacy education nationally and locally. However, the CCSS for ELA will…

To equip graduates with the capability to meet complex demands of work and life, it is important that higher education teachers engage students in self-sustained learning--the persistent, self-initiated pursuit of expertise development in one's subject area. This requires building a positive synergy between learning and teaching, which implies…

Literacy is an essential means of communication. It enables individuals, communities and institutions to interact, over time and across space, as they develop a web of social relations via language. Effective literacy policies, programmes and practices expand the scale of social communication and interaction. Thus, literacy thrives when a state of…

In 2013, Governor Jerry Brown and the California legislature radically restructured the state's school funding system and accountability systems with a weighted student formula and a mandated local planning process in each district. The new law substitutes local politics and grassroots agency for state-driven mandates and compliance reviews. While…

Continuous learning over the life course is necessary to successfully compete in a knowledge-based global economy. Workers are increasingly encouraged to remain in the labor force at older ages, which for many will require skills upgrading. While a wide range of individual and community factors play a role in whether older workers receive skills…

At the National Bridging the Research and Practice Gap Symposium to discuss evidence-based practice (EBP) in social work, 150 participants attended five breakout groups to address real practice setting applications. These participants from social work academia and practice communities addressed issues and looked for solutions to promote…

A successful internship experience can provide invaluable learning experiences connecting students' classroom knowledge to professional "know-how" in the field. Over the past three decades, post-secondary internship programs have flourished, generating considerable research literature from a variety of disciplinary perspectives; however,…

This brief is part of a series that shares findings from a research collaboration between the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at Stanford University and Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) focused on understanding implementation of the community school model in the district. Community schools aim to address students'…

This is a retrospective analysis of the performance of a large training program in a combat environment looked at through the lens of human performance technology. Van Tiem, Moseley, and Dessinger's performance improvement/HPT model and strategic, operational, and tactical levels are used to describe effective and ineffective applications of human…

There has been a sea change in teacher evaluation over the past eight years. Inspired in part by President Barack Obama's policies, schools have instituted teacher evaluation systems that include multiple measures of teacher impact. Model systems are aligned to systems of continuous improvement, helping teachers identify areas of weakness in their…

The importance of adolescent literacy is well established, and the topic continues to be of both local and national interest. Practitioners need to know not only which programs and practices appear effective, but which have the scientific evidence to support that claim. To identify effective programs and practices for general education students in…

The National Summer Learning Project, launched by the Wallace Foundation in 2011, includes an assessment of the effectiveness of voluntary, district-led summer learning programs offered at no cost to low-income, urban elementary students. The study, conducted by RAND, uses a randomized controlled trial and other analytic methods to assess the…

A paradigm is presented for student learning outcome assessment in information systems education. Successful deployment of the paradigm is illustrated using the author's home institution. The paradigm is consistent with both the scholarship of teaching and learning and the scholarship of assessment. It is concluded that the deployment of the…

Assessing teaching performance is a contentious issue in current educational policy in many countries. In Chile, a national, standards-based, multi-method, mandatory teacher evaluation system has been in place since 2003 to assess the performance of about 70, 000 public school teachers from pre-school to high school and adult education. The…

The use of functional behavioral assessment (FBA) is an effective tool to address a wide range of severe behavior problems of students at risk for or with emotional disabilities (ED). However, the transformation of a procedure proven effective under highly-controlled clinical conditions to a practical and effective strategy for use in applied…