Literacy

EDC is developing and testing a middle-grades literacy curriculum that focuses on helping middle school students to develop and apply skills needed for research project. These skills focus on understanding, extracting, and synthesizing information—all key skills needed for carrying out a research project in middle school. The curriculum includes specific teacher-led activities that explicitly teach students these skills and meaningfully takes advantage of key features of the software program, SOLO.

At a time when young adolescents need to read complex texts in all content areas, many students continue to have difficulty with the reading process. Yet, although good models of elementary reading instruction are available, middle schools have few models or resources to meet the needs of their growing numbers of struggling readers.

TinC (Technology in Class) tests the effectiveness of a software tool, Draft:Builder (previously developed at EDC), when it is integrated into an innovative curriculum. The curriculum, The American History Idol, builds basic skills in finding the main idea, locating supporting details, organizing information, and writing a persuasive essay. It draws on biographies of historical figures, thus linking social studies and English language arts. The software tool helps students create outlines and draft text.

EEC’s YouthLearn Initiative has been awarded this sub-task of designing training materials for the IES-led dot-EDU—DRC—Improving Basic Education for Girls. This work has included revising existing training materials around student-centered learning and contributing to the design of a train-the-trainer professional development strategy.

CC&F/EDC is collaborating with Early Childhood Associates, Inc., and RISE Learning Solutions to develop a four-unit, multimedia training package for Head Start mentor-coaches. The Head Start mentor-coach instructional design will prepare mentor-coaches to guide teachers in adopting research-based practices that foster young children’s language and literacy development. The instructional design’s distributed learning model will include tutored video instruction and Web-based learning.

This two-year project, funded by the Japan Foundation’s Center for Global Partnership (CGP), will develop and pilot test curriculum materials that use picture books to expose lower primary (grades 1–3) Japanese school children to present-day American culture and all of its diversity. EDC, in partnership with Iwate University’s Faculty of Education, will create teaching materials based on American picture books and design hands-on, highly experiential activities to complement the books.

The National Center Supported e-Text in Electronic Environments, in collaboration with research teams across the country, is conducting a systematic program of research over five years to investigate the following four research questions: (1) What characteristics of supported electronic text (e-text) facilitate or impede access to and learning of academic content for students with a range of disabilities? (2) Does supported e-text improve learning of academic content in actual educational settings with typical resources and levels of teacher support?

EDC works with staff from the Jacob Burns Film Center (JBFC) to conduct evaluation planning for the See Hear Feel Film curriculum, which is designed to provide third grade students with an understanding of film and of themselves as creative beings, and is implemented in both in-school and out-of-school settings. EDC’s work focuses on clarifying student and teacher outcomes and determining indicators to measure change.

GSDL provides high-quality digital resources to: (1) help educators promote interest and engagement with STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education by learners of all ages, particularly females; (2) encourage learners to pursue science education and future careers in science; (3) provide an inter-disciplinary examination of the role of gender in the creation, teaching, and learning of science; and (4) build community among all interested users for the purposes of inquiry, information exchange, best practices development, and mentoring.

The Connecticut Pre-K Assessment Pilot is a grant-funded project from the Nellie Mae Education Foundation that will test the efficacy of a technology-based early childhood assessment platform. The pilot program will evaluate the usefulness of a handheld assessment device to generate data that is instructionally beneficial to pre-K teachers and can be aggregated for different stakeholders to examine the overall effectiveness of literacy based programmatic investments.