Over the course of six years, a diverse group of school districts and charter management organizations in California ran a substantial experiment in implementing the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in elementary and middle grades. WestEd led an extensive evaluation of that effort, the California K-8 NGSS Early Implementers Initiative,…

This report examines traditional calendar school Read to Achieve reading camps implemented in the summer of 2014. Teacher and student survey respondents reported positive reading camp experiences and reading camp was well attended. Based on data for 502 students, a small percentage (16.1%) reached reading proficiency by the end of camp. Gains in…

Few, if any, studies have examined the impact of nature of science (NOS) instruction on science teachers' practices 2 or more years after completing a science teacher education program. Extant studies on preservice and first-year teachers' NOS teaching practices have had disappointing results, with few teachers valuing NOS as a cognitive objective…

National reports reveal one third of American fourth graders read below basic level on measures of comprehension. One critical component of comprehension is fluency: rapid, accurate, expressive reading with automaticity and prosody. Many fluency studies and classroom interventions focus only on reading rate, but this alone is not sufficient. This…

In this paper, we describe the second year of a multi-year project that we developed to foster collaboration between high school teachers and university undergraduates. The project incorporates specific tools that help partners find an approach to collaboration that is right for them, allowing it to offer more flexibility than traditional…

This qualitative study examines the transition of eight elementary preservice teachers into student teaching after participating in a science methods course that included a significant amount of teaching after-school science to elementary grade students. These eight participants had a chance to practice teaching inquiry-based science and to reform…

Differentiated instruction, or designing instruction to meet the needs of a variety of learners, has received much attention in continuing and higher education for several years and the middle school philosophy has centered upon differentiation as fundamental to effective teaching. Vast amounts of human and capital resources have been committed to…

The five instruments and the procedures in this manual were designed to assess teaching competencies selected for the Georgia department of education. The system, designed to assess teaching competence in an on-the-job setting included the following steps: (1) identifying desirable teaching competencies; (2) identifying behaviors that correspond…

The overall purpose of the national Head Start evaluation is to assess the impact, on the children and parents being served, of: the educational services component of Head Start, and a new demonstration program within Head Start, Basic Educational Skills. The evaluation deals with a total of 65 Head Start programs and their families. These…

Oregon Senate Bill 354 has required each school district in Oregon to develop a teacher evaluation plan that would include job descriptions, performance standards, observations, postevaluation, and a written program of assistance, if needed. The Beginning Teacher Evaluation Study (BTES) has drawn some conclusions about teacher effectiveness that…