Category: Educational Administration and Leadership

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Educational Administration and Leadership Maths and Science Learning Secondary School Education

Are immigrant children more likely to pursue STEM careers?

Findings from a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggest that immigrant children study more math and science in high school and college, which means they are more likely to pursue STEM careers.

Marcus Rangel and Ying Shi looked at the trajectories of more than 286,000 children born outside of the U.S., and who moved to the U.S. before age 16, using nationally representative datasets including the 2010-2016 waves of the American Community Survey, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, and the National Survey of College Graduates.

They found that :

  • Among U.S.-born children, about 20% of college students major in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).
  • However, among those born outside the US – particularly those who moved to the U.S. after age 10, and don’t come from English-speaking or northern-European countries where the native language is linguistically close to English – this number is much higher, with around 36% majoring in STEM subjects.
  • Children arriving after age 10 earn approximately 20% more credits in math-intensive courses than they do in English-intensive courses. This focus then continues throughout college, which in turn leads to pursuing a career in a STEM field.

The authors suggest that older children who immigrate to the U.S. from a country where the native language is very dissimilar to English may choose subjects that rely less on language skills and build more on skills they are relatively more comfortable with, such as math or science.

Source (Open Access): Rangel, M. A., & Shi, Y. (2019). Early patterns of skill acquisition and immigrants’ specialization in STEM careers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(2), 484–489. … Read the rest

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Achievement Educational Administration and Leadership Programme Evaluation Secondary School Education

Behavior incentives improve exam results for low-achieving students in the U.K.

Low-achieving students respond to incentives to increase their effort and engagement at school and do better than predicted on GCSE exams as a consequence (GCSEs are national high-stakes exams given at the end of secondary school in the U.K.). That is the main finding of a research published by the University of Bristol.

The project, led by Simon Burgess, Director of the Centre for Market and Public Organisation (CMPO), included more than 10,000 year 11 students (the final year of compulsory schooling leading up to the GCSE assessments) in 63 schools. The schools were recruited in the poorest parts of neighborhoods in England and were randomized to one of the following treatment groups: financial incentives, non-financial incentives, or control. Students in the incentive treatment groups earned rewards every half-term based on inputs such as attendance, conduct, homework, and classwork, rather than for outputs such as assessment results. The financial incentive rewarded students with cash up to the value of £80 per half-term, while the non-financial incentive offered students the chance to qualify for a high-value event determined jointly by the school and students, such as a sporting event or trip to a theme park.

The researchers hoped to find that the incentives would improve effort and engagement and ultimately lead to improved GCSE performance even though the results themselves carried no rewards. The analysis showed that :

  • Overall the impact of either financial or non-financial incentives on achievement was low, with small, positive but statistically insignificant effects on exam performance.
  • However, among students with low predicted GCSE grades, those in the intervention groups got better marks than students in the control group, with treatment effects stronger for the financial incentives than the non-financial incentives (particularly in science).
  • For students who were expected to do well, and already making an effort at school, the incentives made little difference.

The authors suggested that targeting incentives to subgroups of underperforming students might have a significant impact on their performance, which could help closing achievement gaps.

Source (Open access): Burgess, S., Metcalfe, R., & Sadoff. S. (2016). Understanding the response to financial and non-financial incentives in education: Field experimental evidence using high-stakes assessments (Discussion Paper 16 / 678). University of Bristol. … Read the rest

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Educational Administration and Leadership Secondary School Education Social and Motivational Outcomes

The effects of engaging teachers

Brookings’ Evidence Speaks series featured an article by Susanna Loeb and Jing Liu describing the effects of teacher engagement on students’ later life outcomes. The article explains that teachers who keep their students engaged are more likely to have students attend their classes, which leads to higher graduation rates. Research shows that absence rates double between middle and high school in the U.S., due to multiple factors including difficulty getting to school, students’ preferring to work to bring in money, and the unpleasantness of being in certain classes. Many students only miss partial days of school, skipping classes that are either too difficult or too easy.

In order to isolate the effects of individual teachers on student attendance, Loeb and Liu examined teachers’ abilities to engage with students as measured by class-period absence rates versus whole-day absence rates. They found that

  • Teachers who improved their students’ class-period attendance rates, and therefore were deemed engaging teachers, were a positive influence on these students’ graduation rates.
  • However, teachers who were deemed as engaging didn’t necessarily improve test scores.
  • The teachers who improved test scores didn’t necessarily improve attendance.

Given that higher attendance rates lead to higher graduation rates, the researchers recommend that the same policies governing the development of teaching practices to improve student achievement could also lead to improvement in student engagement by making attendance one of the Every Student Succeeds Act indicators. This would act as an impetus to states to examine what classroom strategies increase student engagement and directly teach student engagement practices to educators.

Source (Open access): Liu, J., & Loeb, S. (2016) Going to school is optional: Schools need to engage students to increase their lifetime opportunities. Retrieved from https://www.brookings.edu/research/going-to-school-is-optional-schools-need-to-engage-students-to-increase-their-lifetime-opportunities/?utm_campaign=Brookings+Brief&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=36627126%20-%20_edn1… Read the rest

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Educational Administration and Leadership Primary School Education Secondary School Education

Do students benefit from longer school days?

A study published in Economics of Education Review looks at the evidence from the extended school day (ESD) program in Florida to determine whether students benefit from longer school days.

In 2012, Florida introduced the ESD program, increasing the length of the school day by an hour in the lowest-performing elementary schools in order to provide additional reading lessons. The lessons had to be based on research, adapted for student ability, and include phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Schools were selected using school-level reading accountability measures. For this study, David Figlio and colleagues looked at reading scores for all students in Florida between grades 3 and 10 using school administrative data from 2005–06 and 2012–13, and employed a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effect of lengthening the school day, looking at the different performance of schools either side of the cut-off point.

Results indicated that:

  • The additional one hour of reading lessons had a positive effect on students’ reading achievement. ESD schools showed an improvement on reading test scores in the first year (ES = +0.05).
  • The annual cost of the ESD program was $300,000-$400,000 per school, or $800 per student.

In the conclusion, the authors suggested that the instructional benefit per dollar of additional reading time was in line with or superior to large-scale class size reduction.

Source: Figlio, D., Holden, K. L., & Ozek, U. (2018). Do students benefit from longer school days? Regression discontinuity evidence from Florida’s additional hour of literacy instruction. Economics of Education Review, 67, 171–183. … Read the rest

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Educational Administration and Leadership Primary School Education Secondary School Education

Examining the effects of assessment

In the RAND Corporation report “New Assessments, Better Instruction?Designing Assessment Systems to Promote Instructional Improvement.”,researchers conducted a series of literature reviews that focused on topics such as high-stakes testing, performance assessment, and formative evaluation.

Their findings suggest that there are a wide variety of effects that testing might have on teachers’ activities in the classroom, including

  • changes in curriculum content and emphasis (e.g., changes in the sequence of topics, reallocation of emphasis across and within topics);
  • changes in how teachers allocate time and resources across different pedagogical activities (e.g.,focusing on test preparation); and
  • changes in how teachers interact with individual students (e.g., using test results to individualize instruction).

The report also identifies a number of factors (e.g., student characteristics and district and school policies) that mediate the relationship between assessment and instructional practices.

The authors suggest that the role of tests would be enhanced by policies that ensure tests mirror high-quality instruction, are part of a larger, systemic change effort,and are accompanied by specific supports for teachers.

Source (Open Access )：Faxon-Mills, S., Hamilton, L. S., Rudnick, M., & Stecher, B. M. (2013). New assessments, better instruction? Designing assessment systems to promote instructional improvement. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation.… Read the rest

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Educational Administration and Leadership Primary School Education Secondary School Education

Test results don’t show how effective teachers are

A study has looked at the link between instructional alignment (how teaching is aligned with standards and assessments), value-added measures of teacher effectiveness, and composite measures of teacher effectiveness using multiple measures.

The study looked at 324 teachers of fourth and eighth grade math and English language arts in five states. They completed a Survey of Enacted Curriculum to measure their instructional alignment. This was then compared with value-added measures(taken from state assessments and two supplementary assessments) and teacher effectiveness (using Framework for Teaching scores).

The results showed

  • There was modest evidence of a relationship between instructional alignment and value-added measures,although this disappeared when controlling for pedagogical quality.
  • The association between instructional alignment and value-added measures is more positive when pedagogy is high quality.
  • There was no association between instructional alignment and measures of teacher effectiveness.

These results suggest that the tests used for calculating value-added measures are not able to detect differences in the content or quality of classroom teaching.  

Source: Polikoff,M. S., & Porter, A. C. (2014). Instructional Alignment as a Measure of Teaching Quality. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 36(4),399–416. … Read the rest