American Educational Research Journal

Supporting teacher learning for normative change in classroom learning environments creates significant demands on principal leadership. We offer an analytic framework that aims to understand principal practice for instructional transformation. The framework examines how the principal’s conception of teacher learning shapes practice in relation to particular contexts and support systems. We illustrate the explanatory power of this framework by using it to make sense of one elementary principal’s practice in leading her school for instructional transformation in mathematics. Our analysis contributes to how leadership efforts to transform instruction might be studied and ultimately supported.

One overarching goal for rural place-based education is to influence adolescents’ aspirations to stay in the community to help sustain and revitalize the local economy. The authors explore the relationship of place-based workforce development in science and mathematics classes with motivation (i.e., expectancy beliefs and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics [STEM] career interest) and rural community aspirations in a large sample of secondary students. The results confirmed that the more place-based workforce development adolescents reported, the higher their expectancy beliefs, STEM career interest, and rural community aspirations. Moreover, motivation positively predicted rural community aspirations. Our findings suggest that teachers should attend not only to content but also to the inclusion of local STEM-related assets and needs, thereby cultivating STEM career trajectories in rural communities.

We used multivariate generalizability theory to examine the reliability of hand-scoring and automated essay scoring (AES) and to identify how these scoring methods could be used in conjunction to optimize writing assessment. Students (n = 113) included subsamples of struggling writers and non-struggling writers in Grades 3–5 drawn from a larger study. Students wrote six essays across three genres. All essays were hand-scored by four raters and an AES system called Project Essay Grade (PEG). Both scoring methods were highly reliable, but PEG was more reliable for non-struggling students, while hand-scoring was more reliable for struggling students. We provide recommendations regarding ways of optimizing writing assessment and blending hand-scoring with AES.

The Every Student Succeeds Act builds on prior efforts to bridge the gap between research and practice through the imposition of evidence requirements. This article presents findings from a small-scale micro-process study of three districts in one state during their first year of implementing those requirements. Informed by past conceptualizations of the research-practice gap and sociocultural theory, I look closely at how these practitioners made use of the state’s highly elaborated implementation tools for research-based decision-making. I argue that these micro-processes point to possible new dimensions of the research-practice gap—namely, practitioners’ understandings of the purposes of evidence, the degree of confidence evidence should provide, and the commensurability of different forms of evidence

Informational text—resources whose purpose is to inform—is essential to daily life and fundamental to literacy. Unfortunately, young children typically have limited exposure to informational text. Two 9-week randomized controlled trials with 263 first-grade children from low-income communities examined whether free educational videos and digital games supported children’s ability to use informational text to answer real-world questions. Participants received Internet-enabled tablets and were randomly assigned to condition. Study 1 found significant positive intervention impacts on child outcomes; Study 2 replicated these findings. Combined analyses demonstrated primary impact on children’s ability to identify and use structural and graphical features of informational text. Results are discussed in the context of the scalability of educational media to support informational text learning.

This article contributes to our understanding of American education politics by exploring when and why states redistribute K–12 education dollars to poorer schools. It does so by examining three explanations for intrastate changes in progressivity: court-ordered finance reforms, political trends, and demographic changes. Using state-level data from 1995 to 2016, we find mixed evidence that progressivity increased following a court-ordered school-finance overhaul. Rather, we show that changes in progressivity were most consistently tied to changes in student demography: As students became poorer, or more racially diverse, lawmakers created less progressive finance systems. The article concludes by discussing what these findings mean for advocates seeking to protect and advance gains in education-spending progressivity.