Exploring Features Within Organizational and Cognitive Factors That Predict Variability in Estimates of Classwide Active Engagement

Adopting an “act-in-context” approach is helpful to researchers investigating situational variability in children’s active engagement in preschool classrooms. Aligned with this approach, we propose an empirical pathway and a conceptual model to support examinations of contextual factors hypothesized to impact active engagement as well as the means by which adults promote it. We defined two overarching factors—cognitive and organizational—and explored the predictive nature of seven features within them. With video recordings from 31 classrooms (inclusive and self-contained) of three instructional routines on three different occasions, we derived averages for classwide active engagement during each observation. A series of linear mixed effects models revealed that instructional routines significantly predicted variability in classwide active engagement as did interactions of other contextual features with instructional routines. These findings provide a foundation for continued, systematic examinations of situational factors and conceptualizations of engagement within carefully specified pathways for improving active engagement.

Critical Thinking, Critical Doing

This chapter outlines five instructional routines utilized by teacher educators to support the development of not only critical thinking but critical doing for future educators. The five routines—collaborative facilitation, behind-the-glass peer reviews, lesson play, virtual peer coaching, and rehearsals—are both described and expanded in a worked example using data from undergraduate coursework for pre-service teachers in literacy education. Individual routines foreground and background particular elements of the teaching process; however, all maintain an emphasis on critical thinking and doing as a core competency. Importantly, these instructional routines were found to be most effective when (1) preservice teachers are given opportunities to engage in multiple iterations of each routine and (2) preservice teacher doing is surrounded by substantial amounts of teacher educator feedback.

How Can Cognitive-Science Research Help Improve Education? The Case of Comparing Multiple Strategies to Improve Mathematics Learning and Teaching

The current article focuses on efforts to understand how a basic learning process—comparison—can be harnessed to improve learning, especially mathematics learning in schools. To harness the power of comparison in instruction, we must investigate three core decisions: what, when, and how to compare. Comparing different strategies for solving the same problem or easily confusable problem types is particularly effective for supporting mathematics learning. Comparing examples early in the learning process can be challenging, but delaying comparison can reduce procedural flexibility. Indeed, comparison is resource demanding, so it is more impactful when carefully supported (e.g., side-by-side visual presentation, explanation prompts). To bridge from research to practice, we communicated research findings to teachers and policymakers and developed curricular materials, instructional routines, and professional-development materials to help math teachers leverage these learning processes. We conclude this review with key open questions.

Ensemble Learning Using Fuzzy Weights to Improve Learning Style Identification for Adapted Instructional Routines

Mobile personalized learning can be achieved by the identification of students’ learning styles; however, this happens with the completion of large questionnaires. This task has been reported as tedious and time-consuming, causing random selection of the questionnaires’ choices, and thus, erroneous adaptation to students’ needs, endangering knowledge acquisition. Moreover, mobile environments render the selection of questionnaires’ choices impractical due to confined mobile user interfaces. In view of the above, this paper presents Learnglish, a fully developed mobile language learning system incorporating automatic identification of students’ learning styles according to the Felder-Silverman model (FSLSM) using ensemble classification. In particular, three classifiers, namely SVM, NB and KNN, are combined based on the majority voting rule. The major innovation of this task, apart from the ensemble classification and the mobile learning environment, is that Learnglish takes as input a minimum number of personal (i.e., age and gender) and cognitive characteristics (i.e., prior academic performance categorized using fuzzy weights), and solely four questions pertaining to the FSLSM dimensions, to identify the learning style. Furthermore, Learnglish incorporates adapted instructional routines to create an individualized learning environment based on students’ learning preferences as determined by their style. Learnglish was fully evaluated with very encouraging results.

How the Science of Reading Informs 21st Century Education

The science of reading should be informed by an evolving evidence base built upon the scientific method. Decades of basic research and randomized controlled trials of interventions and instructional routines have formed a substantial evidence base to guide best practices in reading instruction, reading intervention, and the early identification of at-risk readers. The recent resurfacing of questions about what constitutes the science of reading is leading to misinformation in the public space that may be viewed by educational stakeholders as merely differences of opinion among scientists. Our goals in this paper are to revisit the science of reading through an epistemological lens to clarify what constitutes evidence in the science of reading and to offer a critical evaluation of the evidence provided by the science of reading. To this end, we summarize those things that we believe have compelling evidence, promising evidence, or a lack of compelling evidence. We conclude with a discussion of areas of focus that we believe will advance the science of reading to meet the needs of all students in the 21st Century.

How Grades 4 to 8 Teachers Can Deliver Intensive Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension Interventions to Students With High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder

This article discusses use of a multicomponent intervention to develop the reading skill and performance of grades 4 to 8 students identified with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder. Reading intervention targets for this population are vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. Reading intervention elements involve explicit vocabulary instruction, repeated reading with sentence-level comprehension, question-answering relationships, and main idea summarization. Included in the article are explicit instructional routines and curricular materials supported by empirical evidence for the intervention elements.

Practice-Based Teacher Education

Practice-based teacher education (PBTE) is an approach to preparing novice teachers that focuses on the importance of developing novices’ ability to enact teaching practices. Ambitious approaches to PBTE attend to the development of teacher belief, knowledge, and judgment but do so through work on practicing instructional routines that occur with frequency in the work of teaching (e.g., facilitating discussion, modeling). Some scholars of PBTE have emphasized the role of practices or common professional activities in PBTE, while others have foregrounded the importance of practicing teaching for the purpose of improvement. PBTE contrasts with other approaches to teacher education that focus on building teachers’ knowledge or beliefs without focusing on how that knowledge and belief gets instantiated in action.

Teaching Academic Vocabulary to Sixth-Grade Students With Disabilities

Adolescents with disabilities have great difficulty with academic content in middle school, and their teachers have difficulty teaching them to understand and use academic language. We taught teachers of sixth-grade students with learning disabilities, more than half of whom were also English language learners (ELLs), to implement about 15 min of daily interactive vocabulary instruction in their intact special education English/language arts classes. Three schools were assigned randomly to treatment (two schools) or control conditions (one school, 52 students total). We developed instructional routines to introduce four new words per week in three 4-week units to test for replicability. ANCOVAs (with each cycle’s pretest and intelligence quotient as covariates) were conducted on taught vocabulary, all of which favored the treatment condition with effect sizes ranging .6 to .7 per cycle. Near-transfer effects to vocabulary usage were weaker, with significant effects in the last two cycles. Effects were similar for students with disabilities who were ELLs and native English speakers. Treated students maintained their knowledge of words 4 to 24 weeks following the close of treatment.

Critical Thinking, Critical Doing

This chapter outlines five instructional routines utilized by teacher educators to support the development of not only critical thinking but critical doing for future educators. The five routines—collaborative facilitation, behind-the-glass peer reviews, lesson play, virtual peer coaching, and rehearsals—are both described and expanded in a worked example using data from undergraduate coursework for pre-service teachers in literacy education. Individual routines foreground and background particular elements of the teaching process; however, all maintain an emphasis on critical thinking and doing as a core competency. Importantly, these instructional routines were found to be most effective when (1) preservice teachers are given opportunities to engage in multiple iterations of each routine and (2) preservice teacher doing is surrounded by substantial amounts of teacher educator feedback.

Effectiveness of Teachers’ Guides in the Global South: Scripting, Learning Outcomes, and Classroom Utilization

This report presents the results of RTI International Education’s study on teachers' guides across 13 countries and 19 projects. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, we examine how teachers’ guides across the projects differ and find substantial variation in the design and structure of the documents. We develop a scripting index so that the scripting levels of the guides can be compared across projects. The impact results of the programs that use teachers’ guides show significant impacts on learning outcomes, associated with approximately an additional half year of learning, showing that structured teachers’ guides contribute to improved learning outcomes. During observations, we find that teachers make a variety of changes in their classroom instruction from how the guides are written, showing that the utilization of structured teachers’ guides do not create robotic teachers unable to use their own professional skills to teach children. Unfortunately, many changes that teachers make reduce the amount of group work and interactivity that was described in the guides, suggesting that programs should encourage teachers to more heavily utilize the instructional routines designed in the guide. The report includes a set of research-based guidelines that material developers can use to develop teachers’ guides that will support effective instructional practices and help improve learning outcomes. The key takeaway from the report is that structured teachers' guides improve learning outcomes, but that overly scripted teachers' guides are somewhat less effective than simplified teachers' guides that give specific guidance to the teacher but are not written word for word for each lesson in the guide.