Latest News
July 12, 2017
Wing 2017–2018 Grant Recipient Awarded to John Romig
The Wing Institute has selected the 2017–2018 student grant fellowship recipient for evidence-based education research. This year’s stipend has been awarded to John Romig, graduate research assistant and PhD candidate at the Curry School of Education, University of Virginia, and whose area of interest is special education.
The Wing Institute offers this annual grant to promote new research in areas of evidence-based education, promote new research across disciplines, encourage graduate students to focus their future professional work in this subject area, and disseminate research findings for application in real-world settings, further bridging the gap between research and practice.
John Romig’s research project is entitled Evaluating a Multimedia Professional Development Package for Improving Implementation of Evidence-Based Instructional Practices. His project examines the implementation of evidence-based writing practices in middle school. Survey results indicated that teachers felt inadequately prepared to implement these practices, and when observed, the teachers failed to implement the programs for a substantial amount of time. Romig’s study is aimed at filling this research-to-practice gap by modeling and coaching the appropriate procedures for teaching writing skills to middle school students.
July 10, 2017
Research recognizes the power of assessment to amplify learning and skill acquisition. Assessing students is a fundamental ingredient of effective teaching. It is the tool that enables teachers to measure the extent to which a student or group of students have mastered the material taught in a lesson or a class or during the school year, and it gives instructors the necessary information to modify instruction when progress falters. Assessment affects decisions about grades, placement, advancement, instructional strategies, curriculum, special education placement, and funding. It works to improve instruction in the following ways: (1) as a diagnostic tool, (2) by providing feedback on progress measured against benchmarks, (3) as a motivating factor, and (4) as an accountability instrument for improving systems.
Citation: States, J., Detrich, R. & Keyworth, R. (2017). Overview of Education Assessment. Oakland, CA: The Wing Institute. http://www.winginstitute.org/student-formative-assessment.
Link: http://www.winginstitute.org/effective-instruction-assessment
June 15, 2017
School Lunch Quality and Academic Performance
Providing children with nutritious school meals continues to be a topic of interest in education policy. It has been argued that a healthy diet can have a positive impact on childhood obesity as well as student achievement. However, there is little empirical evidence to support this popular intervention. A working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research offers insights to help policy makers decide whether to select this option as a way to make a difference in children’s lives. The study, a natural experiment conducted in California public schools, uses a difference-in-difference regression statistical analysis of data from a treatment group and a control group at two or more different time periods, pre-treatment and post-treatment. The study found no evidence to support a reduction in obesity, but it did discover that introducing healthy meals was associated with a 0.036 standard deviation increase in test scores. The improved student achievement, although small, makes nutritious school lunches a viable cost-effective intervention that can boost test scores. It is important to remember that this is a correlational study and thus cannot establish a cause and effect relationship between healthy eating and student achievement.
Citation: Anderson, M. L., Gallagher, J., & Ritchie, E. R. (2017). School lunch quality and academic performance (NBER Working Paper No. 23218). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.
Link: http://www.nber.org/papers/w23218.pdf
June 14, 2017
Creating Supportive School Cultures for Beginning Teachers: Mitigating the Cultural Contextual Factors
This systematic literature review examines factors that affect new teachers as they become employed. It suggests that new teachers experience significant stress as they transition from teacher preparation programs to everyday teaching. The pressures experienced by novice instructors are evidenced by high rates of turnover during the first 5 years of teaching. This initial period entails a steep learning curve as new teachers try to match and adjust what they learned in pre-service training with the unique cultural practices of their new placements. To mitigate the challenges new teachers face, schools have implemented an array of practices subsumed under the heading “teacher induction.” Unfortunately, the literature review finds that the lack of standardization of practices including mentoring to coaching has reduced the overall impact of teacher induction and the ability of schools to effectively align the education philosophy and cultural values of new teachers with the strategies, procedures, needs, and resources of the schools where the new teachers are beginning their careers.
Citation: Kutsyuruba, B, Walker, K. D., and Gooden, L., (2017). Creating supportive school cultures for beginning teachers: Mitigating the cultural contextual factors. International Journal of Educational Organization and Leadership, 24(2), 1–18.
Link: https://ir.library.carleton.ca/pub/26850/
June 13, 2017
Effective ongoing assessment, referred to in the education literature as formative assessment or progress monitoring, is indispensable in promoting teacher and student success. Feedback through formative assessment is ranked at or near the top of practices known to significantly raise student achievement. For decades, formative assessment has been found to be effective in clinical settings and, more important, in typical classroom settings. Formative assessment produces substantial results at a cost significantly below that of other popular school reform initiatives such as smaller class size, charter schools, accountability, and school vouchers. It also serves as a practical diagnostic tool available to all teachers. A core component of formal and informal assessment procedures, formative assessment allows teachers to quickly determine if individual students are progressing at acceptable rates and provides insight into where and how to modify and adapt lessons, with the goal of making sure that students do not fall behind.
Citation: States, J., Detrich, R. & Keyworth, R. (2017). Overview of Formative Assessment. Oakland, CA: The Wing Institute. http://www.winginstitute.org/student-formative-assessment.
Link: http://www.winginstitute.org/student-formative-assessment
June 6, 2017
Formative Assessment and Elementary School Student Academic Achievement: A Review of the Evidence
A recent comprehensive search of the research on formative assessment interventions for elementary school students identified 23 studies that met inclusion criteria and allowed conclusions to be drawn about the impact of formative assessment on student outcomes. On average across all the studies, students who participated in formative assessment performed better on measures of academic achievement than those who did not. Across all subject areas (math, reading, and writing), formative assessment had larger effects on student academic achievement when other agents, such as teachers or computer programs, directed the formative assessment.
Citation: Klute, M., Apthorp, H., Harlacher, J., & Reale, M. (2017). Formative assessment and elementary school student academic achievement: A review of the evidence. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics.
Link: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/regions/central/pdf/REL_2017259.pdf
June 2, 2017
In early February, the IDEA hosted website that provides special education resources disappeared prompting concern among some in the special education community and members of Congress that the new administration was permanently eliminating this support for special education. After a prolonged outage, the U.S. Department of Education Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) website, has been revamped and is now back online. The website offers useful information on special education law and policy, topic area reports, grants and funding resources, links to outside resources, and a blog for use by policy makers, parents and educators.
Link: https://sites.ed.gov/idea/
May 31, 2017
Learning in One-to-One Laptop Environments: A Meta-Analysis and Research Synthesis
A recently released paper on the impact of computers on student achievement has concluded that providing each student with a computer has a modest but positive effect on student achievement. This meta-analysis included 10 studies from more than 15 years of research on the topic. The researchers found that one-to-one laptop programs have a statistically significant positive role in improving student test scores in English/language arts, writing, math, and science. This research runs counter to previous studies, which viewed computer impact as overstated and computers as underused in schools. The new study found that providing students with their own computers has a positive impact by making it easier to share drafts of projects and thus increasing access to feedback. The researchers also concluded that more research is needed as only 10 rigorous studies were available for inclusion in the meta-analysis.
Citation: Zheng, B., Warschauer, M., Lin, C. H., & Chang, C. (2016). Learning in one-to-one laptop environments: A meta-analysis and research synthesis. Review of Educational Research, 86(4), 1052–1084.
Link: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0034654316628645
May 15, 2017
Academic achievement of students without special educational needs in inclusive classrooms: A meta-analysis
A newly released multi-national meta-analysis examined the impact of including special education needs students (SEN) in classrooms with students without special needs. Inclusion of SEN students in general education classrooms has been broadly practiced for more than 30 years and is seen as a method for improving SEN student performance. Previous research on the impact of the practice on non-SEN students produced mixed results, prompting the authors to conduct a meta-analysis to estimate the effect size of the relationship between inclusion education and academic achievement of students without special needs. A total of 47 studies with more than 4,800,000 students met the criteria for the meta-analysis. The studies had to be quantitative, assess academic achievement, and measure student academic achievement in at least one of the following subjects: language, mathematics, science, biology, or a foreign language. Also, the participants had to be in grades K–12. The meta-analysis concluded that attending inclusive classrooms is positively, though weakly, associated with the academic achievement of students without special needs. The effect size was determined to be 0.12. This compares with the effect sizes John Hattie found for many popular structural interventions: educational expenditure (0.23), class size (0.21), ability grouping (0.12), within-class grouping (0.16), and charter schools (0.20).
Citation: Szumski, G., Smogorzewska, J., & Karwowski, M. (2017). Academic achievement of students without special educational needs in inclusive classrooms: A meta-analysis. Educational Research Review, 21, 33–54.
Link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1747938X17300131
May 12, 2017
Treatment Integrity Strategies Overview
Student achievement scores in the United States remain stagnant despite repeated attempts to reform the education system. New initiatives promising hope arise, only to disappoint after being adopted, implemented, and quickly found wanting. The cycle of reform followed by failure has had a demoralizing effect on schools, making new reform efforts problematic. These efforts frequently fail because implementing new practices is far more challenging than expected and require that greater attention be paid to how initiatives are implemented. Treatment integrity is increasingly recognized as an essential component of effective implementation in an evidence-based education model that produces results, and inattention to treatment integrity is seen as a primary reason new initiatives fail. The question remains, what strategies can educators employ to increase the likelihood that practices are implemented as designed? The Wing Institute overview on the topic of Treatment Integrity Strategies examines the essential practice elements indispensable for maximizing treatment integrity.
Citation: States, J., Detrich, R. & Keyworth, R. (2017). Overview of Treatment Integrity Strategies. Oakland, CA: The Wing Institute. http://www.winginstitute.org/effective-instruction-treatment-integrity-strategies.
Link: http://www.winginstitute.org/effective-instruction-treatment-integrity-strategies
