This rubric was developed for the analysis of intervention programs against the criteria of implementing the four recommendations and accompanying action steps presented in the IES Practice Guide "Providing Reading Interventions for Students in Grades 4-9" for the Adolescent Literacy Intervention Selection Tool (A-LIST). Each item in…

Year 4 continued the Adolescent Literacy Intervention Selection Tool (A-LIST) development work from Year 3 and focused on reviewing the degree to which selected adolescent interventions support evidence-based recommendations. To inform that review, Region 1 Comprehensive Center (R1CC) and the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary…

In this brief article, Christina Kuriacose provides four sample performance assessments. Spanning grade levels, these assessments are strong examples of teacher-developed performance assessments from schools within the Center for Collaborative Education's Quality Performance Assessment network. These performance tasks demonstrate the pedagogical…

"Commitment and Common Sense" tells the inside story of how Massachusetts became a national model for education. Twelve years after the passage of the state's comprehensive education reform law in 1993, Bay State student scores rose to the top of "the nation's report card" (the National Assessment of Educational Progress) in…

Outdoor education programs have been shown to have a positive effect on the educational, physical and emotional development of youth. They are increasingly being used to foster a sense of community in schools and to provide students with learning opportunities related to the environment. This article describes an integrated outdoor education…

This investigation-based lesson is geared toward third through fifth grade students. The lesson presented in this article was the first of three lessons designed and taught by us for our first preservice teaching course. UTeach is a teacher preparation program for undergraduate STEM majors, which originated at the University of Austin, Texas. The…

This Framework builds upon the foundation of the 2010 Massachusetts Curriculum Framework for Mathematics as well as versions of the Massachusetts Mathematics Framework published since 1995. The current Framework incorporates improvements suggested by Massachusetts educators after six years of experience in implementing the 2010 standards in their…

By coincidence or not, Massachusetts, Illinois and Virginia created civic education task forces not long after national test results showed a dismal understanding of the subject matter across all grade levels. Results of the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed just 25 percent of all testtakers in grades 4, 8 and 12 demonstrated…

This Framework is built upon the foundation of the 2003 and 1997 "Massachusetts History and Social Science Curriculum Frameworks." Based in research on effective practice, it represents the contributions of members of the History and Social Science Curriculum Framework Review Panel, scholars who served as Content Advisors, and the more…

In this article, the authors focus on an Engineering is Elementary unit that emphasizes students' understanding and application of properties of materials in the context of an engineering design challenge. Students build understanding through a series of hands-on activities, then apply their knowledge to solve a materials engineering problem:…

Due in part to testing pressures, for years the science subject has taken a back seat to reading and math. And though topics like volcanos and time travel have the potential to get kids' attention, science's status as a curricular stepchild typically translates into dull textbooks and little budget for experiments or supplies. The tide is…

NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) results in mathematics and reading are based on representative samples of 1,100 to 2,300 public school students at grade 4 and 900 to 2,100 public school students at grade 8 in each participating urban district in 2013. Twenty-one urban districts participated in the 2013 assessments. The assessments…

Problem solving, introduced in every grade and practiced throughout elementary school, is an essential foundation on which students build their understanding of mathematical ideas, operations, and relationships. This article discusses 1-2-3 Time, an instructional mode that promotes multimodal math learning in ways that engage and sustain students'…

This article illustrates the effects of embedding a common language derived from research, conducted through Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, into teachers' documentations of classroom experiences. It suggests that documentation can be enhanced by using shared professional vocabularies that describe categories important in…

How are independent schools to be useful to the wider world? Beyond their common commitment to educate their students for meaningful lives in service of the greater good, can they educate a broader constituency and, thus, share their resources and skills more broadly? Their answers to this question will be shaped by their independence. Any…