Recent crede_rschbrfs items

Scaffold for School-Home Collaboration: Enhancing Reading and Language Development

Mon, 24 Feb 2003 00:00:00 +0000

School reform progresses too slowly to address effectively the unique needs of children and young adolescents who face academic challenges. The slow rate of change is compounded by a rapid increase in English language learners and an extreme shortage of teachers, particularly bicultural and bilingual special education teachers. In the CREDE project "Expanding the Knowledge Base on Teacher Learning and Collaboration: A Focus on Asian American English Language Learners," researchers explored ways to address these challenges through school-home collaboration. To engage parents, grandparents, siblings, and family friends more effectively learning and sharing ideas to sustain a student's learning, together researchers developed evening training sessions named "Family Literacy Nights."

Leading for Diversity: How School Leaders Achieve Racial and Ethnic Harmony

Mon, 24 Feb 2003 00:00:00 +0000

"People would like to see our race problem disappear. And the way they think it's going to disappear is by not talking about it. But the real way you make it disappear is by talking about it, learning about it, and understanding it, and then you'll see a change, not just by ignoring it." – a 12th grade student

The Leading for Diversity research project emerged from a Principals' Forum developed by ARC Associates in 1995. Participating principals expressed a need for successful strategies to implement in their schools: strategies to dispel racial tensions, class conflict, and violence (particularly violence related to race or ethnicity); to create a vision that includes students of diverse backgrounds; and to increase staff members' understanding of cultural differences. These principals were among a growing number of educators aware of a lack of attention to diversity issues in the preparation of school leaders. Administrative preparation programs have traditionally...

School/Community Partnerships to Support Language Minority Student Success

Mon, 24 Feb 2003 00:00:00 +0000

On their own, schools and families may not be able to support the academic success of every student (Kirst, 1991). In particular, language minority students, including immigrants and the U.S. born children of immigrants, may not receive appropriate educational services due to a mismatch between the languages and cultures of the schools and those of their communities. To enhance support for these students, many schools have partnered with community-based organizations (CBOs) groups committed to helping people obtain health, education, and other basic human services (Dryfoos, 1998). The programs they operate promise to assist students in ways that lie beyond the schools' traditional methods (Dryfoos, 1998; Heath & McLaughlin, 1991; Melaville, 1998). This research brief will provide some findings of a national study of school/CBO partnerships.

Researchers from the Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence (CREDE) collected descriptive data on partnerships...

A National Study of School Effectiveness for Language Minority Students' Long-Term Academic Achievement

Mon, 24 Feb 2003 00:00:00 +0000

From 1996-2001, CREDE researchers Wayne Thomas and Virginia Collier conducted the "National Study of School Effectiveness for Language Minority Students' Long-Term Academic Achievement." Built on 14 years of related research, this study documents the academic achievement of ELLs over the long-term (4–12 years) and across content areas. It offers a much-needed overview of programmatic successes in the education of ELLs for policy makers.

The study collected data from five school districts throughout the United States. They included an inner-city urban district in the northwest, a large urban district in south central U.S., a mid-sized urban district in the southeast, and two rural districts in the northeast. Researchers collected records of individual ELL students for a minimum of 4 years of their education and analyzed achievement trends of those students. Records examined included those of students who remained in longer-term language support programs (i.e., 5–6 years),...

Linking Home and School Through Children's Questions That Followed Family Science Workshops

Mon, 24 Feb 2003 00:00:00 +0000

This research brief describes some preliminary findings from the CREDE research project, "At-Risk Preschoolers' Questions and Explanations: Science in Action at Home and in the Classroom," conducted in collaboration with the Family Science project of Life Lab Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Life Lab Science also collaborates with another CREDE project called LASERS (Language Acquisition through Science Education for Rural Schools). Together, these three projects conducted a set of Family Science workshops that comprise the focus of this research brief.

Improving Classroom Instruction and Student Learning for Resilient and Non-resilient English Language Learners

Mon, 24 Feb 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Some English language learners (ELLs) do well in school despite coming from school and home environments that present many obstacles for learning. It is important to know why these students, who are at risk of academic failure, are resilient and successful in school while other ELLs from equally stressful environments are unsuccessful or non-resilient. This educational resiliency perspective is meaningful because it focuses on the predictors of academic success rather than on academic failure. It enables us to specifically identify those "alterable" factors that distinguish successful and less successful students. The thrust in this area of research is to extend previous studies that merely identified and categorized students at risk of failure and shift to studies that focus on identifying potential individual and school processes that lead to and foster success (Wang, Haertel, & Walberg, 1994; Winfield, 1991).

During the past 4 years of the CREDE project, "Improving...

Tracking Untracking: Evaluating the Effectiveness of an Educational Innovation

Mon, 24 Feb 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Tracking contributes significantly to the achievement gap between low-income, minority students and their more affluent peers. Ethnic and linguistic minority students from low-income backgrounds frequently remain in general and vocational education classes. As a result, they do not become eligible for college enrollment. Achievement Via Individual Determination (AVID), an educational reform program based in San Diego, "untracks" low-achieving ethnic and language minority students by placing both low- and high-achieving students in the same rigorous academic program. The program gives students explicit instruction in the hidden curriculum of the school–the implicit educational rules and expectations, such as knowledge about what courses to take for the college-bound, what teachers to take or avoid, the importance of tests, and how to study– and helps the students make the transition to college. The AVID program has successfully prepared under-represented students for college:...

Teaching Secondary Language Minority Students

Mon, 24 Feb 2003 00:00:00 +0000

CREDE's Five Standards for Effective Teaching and Learning express the principles of effective pedagogy for all students. For mainstream students, the Standards describe the ideal; for at-risk students, the Standards are vital (Dalton, 1998). While the work contributing to the standards articulated in CREDE's projects comes from several theoretical systems, CREDE's Standards are stated in the language of sociocultural theory.

I. Teacher and Students Producing Together (Joint Productive Activity)

II. Developing Language Across the Curriculum (Language Development)

III. Making Meaning: Connecting School to Students' Lives (Contextualization)

IV. Teaching Complex Thinking (Cognitive Challenge)

V. Teaching Through Interactive Discussions (Instructional Conversation)

In this research brief, we focus on language development as well as academic development for English language learners. Teachers are concerned about covering content and curriculum,...

Standards for Professional Development: A Sociocultural Perspective

Sun, 23 Feb 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Much research and theory has focused on improving the academic success of students at-risk for failure due to poverty, limited English proficiency, and/or background knowledge and experiences which do not map easily onto school expectations. Several studies have led to significant advances in understanding basic learning processes, including the social and cultural foundations of cognitive development. Rather than focusing on presumed student deficits, researchers have focused on ways that schools can scaffold learning, build on student characteristics as resources, and mitigate risk factors. The Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence (CREDE) has synthesized this work with five standards for effective teaching: joint productive activity, language and literacy development, contextualizing teaching and learning, complex thinking, and instructional conversation (Dalton, 1998).

These standards can also be applied to professional development activities....