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WCER Today

February 2012

IN THIS ISSUE

Feature Story: Team Teaching Practices Affect Value-Added Measurement

Research Notes:

• Strengthening Community Colleges
• Engaging Researchers and Education Service Agencies
• Evaluating Individualized Learning Plans
• Professional Practice Simulations in a First-Year Engineering Course
• Improving Mentor-Mentee Collaboration

Feature Story

Team Teaching Practices Affect Value-Added Measurements

Schools can be closed. Compensation for teachers and principals can be affected. Classroom Value-Added analysis metrics are now being applied in a variety of ways, ranging from simple school and classroom level reporting to high-stakes decisions. As school districts and states use these classroom value-added estimates in such high-stakes contexts it’s important to fully understand any limitations in the links between student achievement and teacher performance.

Linking performance data of students to their teachers might seem like something that district data systems automatically and routinely do, yet in most cases doing so is a real a challenge. That’s because most school student information systems were not designed to account for team-teaching approaches.

Jeffery Watson, a researcher with WCER’s Value Added Research Center, explains that most states and districts lack the capacity to measure the effects of team teaching. Their data systems don’t account for innovative models of instructional organizational and can’t verify such student-teacher linkages. The validity of student-teacher linkage data and classroom-level value-added estimates depends on two things: the degree to which team teaching and innovative practices occur, and the degree to which a district is able to systematically record classroom-level practices.

Read the full article here.

Research Notes

Strengthening Community Colleges

Sara Goldrick-Rab has been appointed to The Century Foundation’s Task Force on Preventing Community Colleges from Becoming Separate and Unequal. The group will address and the growing economic and racial divide between two- and four-year colleges. Two-year institutions historically have educated a broad cross-section of students, but recent enrollment trends may be weakening their political and social capital. More...

Engaging Researchers and Eudcation Service Agencies

WCER and the Office of Education Outreach and Partnerships look forward to hosting staff from Wisconsin’s Cooperative Educational Service Agencies (CESAs) at our annual meeting 21 February. This year’s conference will center on the topic of engaged research. Sometimes referred to as translational research, engaged research seeks to integrate teaching, research, and service to respond to the current and evolving challenges facing PK-16 and higher education. Wisconsin’s CESAs help school districts share staff, purchasing, and services, including special education for students with disabilities. More....

Evaluating Individualized Learning Plans

There is strong consensus among parents, teachers, and students that individualized learning plans (ILPs) help improve student outcomes. The ILP is a strategic planning tool that helps students align courses with their career goals. ILPs help schools to build climates that are conducive for learning and they’re are an important tool for building relationships between teachers and students. The Center on Education and Work is collaborating with the National Collaborative on Workforce and Disability for Youth to evaluate the effectiveness of ILPs. In particular, they’re measuring the extent to which students with disabilities and students without disabilities achieved equitable access to the ILP processes and ILP experiences of comparable quality. More...

Professional Practice Simulations in a First-Year Engineering Course

Naomi Chesler and colleagues in the Epistemic Games project developed a first-year engineering design course that meets the criteria and constraints of several traditional stakeholders. It also provides a platform for studying the ways a first-year engineering student progresses from thinking like a novice to thinking like a professional engineer. Chesler and colleagues developed a computer-based professional practice simulator for use in pre-existing first-year Introduction to Engineering courses. It requires minimal resources from course directors and requires no expertise in an engineering discipline. The simulation provides an introduction to professional communication styles, the engineering design process, library skills and citation requirements, and the engineering disciplines. Completing the simulation’s two design-build-test cycles require no engineering knowledge. Instead, the simulation emphasizes managing conflicting client requirements, making trade-offs in selecting a final design, and justifying design choices. More...

Improving Mentor-Mentee Collaboration

Because it's important to create a strong mentoring environment for junior investigators in clinical and translational sciences, Christine Pfund and colleagues are testing the effectiveness of a research mentor training program. An eight-hour curriculum, UW Clinical and Translational Research Mentor Training, focuses on six key mentoring competencies: (1) maintaining effective communication between mentor and mentee; (2) establishing and aligning expectations between mentor and mentee; (3) assessing mentees' understanding of scientific research; (4) addressing diversity within mentor-mentee relationships; (5) fostering mentees' independence; and (6) promoting mentees' professional career development. More...

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Part of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the 44-year-old Wisconsin Center for Education Research receives funding from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and private foundations. http://www.wcer.wisc.edu

Contact the editor: pbaker@wisc.edu