Eye on Research

This weekly Eye on Research feature focuses on education-related scholarship. The section is supported by a grant from the Spencer Foundation.

Updated: May 14, 2008  Preliminary findings suggest that in three states where voters decided to replace bilingual education with structured English immersion may be producing less-than-stellar results.

Updated: May 6, 2008  As value-added research designs gain in popularity and undergo increasing scrutiny, experts are beginning to wave cautionary flags about how best to make use of them in education.

April 28, 2008  The California Dropout Research Project was created in part to help determine how many students quit school before they graduate.

April 22, 2008  A project at Stanford University works with local communities to collect data from multiple child-serving agencies to inform policy and program decisions.

Updated: April 16, 2008  Grassroots organizing efforts are driving a boost in parent involvement, more-equitable distribution of funding, and better academic achievement, according to researchers from the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.

April 8, 2008  The Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education specializes in calculating and comparing the long- and short-term costs—and probable payoffs—of different educational strategies that promise to improve students’ lives.

March 28, 2008  The U.S. Department of Education is reviewing a less stringent set of rules for maintaining federal security and protecting the privacy of people who take part in federally subsidized research.

Updated: March 25, 2008  A new volume of research papers makes the case that innovations aimed at giving families more say in where their children go to school can be whatever their architects make of them.

March 18, 2008  New research suggests that having to hire substitutes affects more than just a district’s finances.

March 7, 2008  Training in the arts might contribute to improving the general thinking skills of children and adults, a study concludes.

March 4, 2008  Observers are trying to divine what the upcoming political shifts in Washington might mean for the U.S. Department of Education’s effort to make education an “evidence based” field.

Updated: March 6, 2008  Smaller classes may help some students, but not all, research shows.

February 15, 2008  According to a new survey, 77 percent of students and more than 80 percent of teachers and parents say homework is important or very important.

February 12, 2008  Experts are beginning to contend that the case is growing stronger for physical activity's link to improved brain function.

February 5, 2008  An ambitious project run by two universities is the largest, most comprehensive and representative study to date of children’s development in rural America.

January 29, 2008  In an era when the U.S. Supreme Court is putting sharp limits on race-conscious student-assignment policies, the guidance from an upcoming book is bound to draw detractors.

January 18, 2008  The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching will soon have a new president with a strong national reputation as a precollegiate education researcher.

January 15, 2008  Research from a recent wave of K-8 conversions suggests that determining what kind of grade configurations are best for students is still a complicated and unsettled matter.

January 8, 2008  Few studies have examined whether culture-based instruction affects the achievement of language-minority students, despite its popularity with many educators.

December 18, 2007  A forthcoming research review analyzes school-based programs designed to foster children’s social and emotional skills.

December 11, 2007  While it may sound like a given that added learning time can translate to better test scores, research suggests that whether it does remains an open question.

December 3, 2007  Implicit in some of the coverage was the hopeful idea that many children eventually grow out of the disorder. But that’s not exactly true.

November 27, 2007  Students who regularly attend top-notch after-school programs end up academically far ahead of peers who spend more out-of-school time in unsupervised activities, a study found.

November 8, 2007  The Brookings Institution has unveiled a volume of studies on the potential effects of the federal law’s various provisions on this vulnerable population of students.

November 2, 2007  Students from low-income households could constitute more than half of K-12 enrollment in public schools nationally within 10 years, a report contends.

October 26, 2007  At schools that are part of the New Century High Schools initiative, 78 percent of students graduate in four years, compared with 58 percent at the city's other high schools.

October 23, 2007  Researchers are developing tools and techniques to improve the academic achievement of students who are most likely to suffer from negative stereotypes in the classroom.

October 16, 2007  Children with disabilities may face challenges in maintaining healthy body weights, including a lack of outlets designed to help them engage in physical activity.

October 9, 2007  Producing work that educators actually want to use is the raison d’être for an ambitious national research-and-development program known as the Strategic Education Research Partnership.

October 2, 2007  More than 30 years’ worth of studies of elementary-level peer-tutoring programs suggests that both the tutor and the tutee learn better when they teach each other.

September 24, 2007  The job of school boards is being redefined, and weakened, by changes taking place at the national, state, and local levels.

September 18, 2007  A new book tells a cautionary tale about large high schools that are divided up into smaller subunits.

September 10, 2007  Four research centers are working on classifying learning disabilities and improving understanding of interventions for children with reading problems.

September 4, 2007  Studies find that ‘highly qualified’ definitions differ broadly across states.

August 23, 2007  The National Charter School Research Project has spent three years trying to bring a neutral perspective to the contentious charter school debate.

August 14, 2007  The research base on successful turnaround strategies in education is too new and too thin to be of much help to schools, scholars say.

July 26, 2007  The U.S. Education Department's statistics arm, citing budget and staffing constraints, won't take part in a 2008 study of physics and upper-level-math performance.

July 16, 2007   Studies suggest that recruits have higher college-entrance examination scores and degrees from choosier colleges.

June 13, 2007  At a research workshop hosted by the National Academies, scholars debated what students need to know for future employment.

June 12, 2007  Experts estimate that only three states have looked to see if "supplemental educational services" are boosting students’ scores on state tests.

June 4, 2007  Recent studies have shown that a computer-based training program developed in Sweden helps sharpen the “working memory” skills of children and teenagers with ADHD.

May 21, 2007   Policymakers and educators are urged to become better ‘consumers’ of knowledge born from studies in education research.

May 14, 2007  The Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration program effectively died in 2006, but a new study offers a fitting epitaph for the program: Models matter.

May 7, 2007  College and university programs that prepare the nation’s education researchers suffer from mission muddle, a lack of common and rigorous standards, and inadequate resources.

May 1, 2007  Peggy McCardle has kept a lower profile than that of her predecessor, G. Reid Lyon, which observers say reflects a changing tone in debates over reading instruction methods.

April 24, 2007  Some children are helped, but others become distracted by in-class "manipulatives."

April 17, 2007  In many countries, disappointing test results have been a major impetus for school improvement efforts.

April 17, 2007  Far greater shares of students are proficient on state tests than on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a study concludes.

Updated: March 6, 2008  The kind of research experiments championed by federal officials are not the only reliable measures of what works in education, experts say.

April 5, 2007  Approaches highlighted in a new volume by the Brookings Institution range from pay incentives to better training and conditions.

May 17, 2008 | Receive RSS RSS feeds

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