In 2017, the Barr Foundation launched Engage New England (ENE), a signature initiative that provides a unique opportunity for local education agencies and nonprofits to plan for and develop innovative schools designed to serve students off track to high school graduation.
SRI Education, the research partner for the ENE initiative, captured the learnings from the planning process through interviews, classroom observations, and student focus groups conducted during March and April 2018. This brief focuses on lessons learned during the initial Understand and Design phases of work. The findings in this brief are based on the reflections of the school and design leaders and staff members involved in the design process as well as Springpoint staff members who supported the design process.
This brief is designed to benefit all three cohorts of ENE grantees as they plan and build their schools and to highlight key elements of planning for innovative school models.
Journal Article
Seeing is believing: Peer video coaching as professional development done with me and for me
As part of their graduate education, in-service teachers identified an area of instructional focus, video recorded their classroom instruction at two intervals in a semester-long course, formed peer groups, and shared their videos for the purpose of obtaining feedback for professional growth. After the conclusion of the course, participants were contacted and presented with a summary of four benefits of the peer video review process, as identified in a recent professional article. Through online survey, participants were asked to share their perceptions of the peer video review experiences in the course and address any evidence related to the benefits raised in the professional article. Qualitative analysis revealed evidence of individual and collective benefits at personal and professional levels and consensus around the value of the experience, despite common apprehension about the vulnerability involved in sharing. Additionally, participants identified strengths of the video medium and provided suggestions for practical applications of peer video review in the field.
A longitudinal study of the impact of attending an inclusive STEM high school: The case for using two comparison groups
Policymakers argue that only by enlarging the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) pipeline in a way that attracts, supports, and sustains the participation of students from all kinds of backgrounds can the United States meet its needs for science and technology innovation, economic prosperity, and social well-being (National Academies, 2005). To meet this need, inclusive STEM high schools (ISHSs) combine rich STEM course offerings and experiences with an explicit mission to serve students from under-represented groups accepted on the basis of interest rather than competitive examination. One of the distinctive features of the present ISHS study is that it provides a comprehensive picture of the impact of ISHSs by using two sets of comparison groups: schools in the same districts as the ISHSs to control for local context; and comparable schools in districts with no access to STEM schools to alleviate potential bias caused by student self-selection into ISHSs. The two comparisons validate each other in providing solid evidence regarding the impact of ISHSs. This study addresses the following research questions: (1) Do students attending ISHSs differ from students in other same-district high schools in terms of demographic characteristics and middle school achievement? and (2) Is there evidence of an impact of ISHS attendance on students’ persistence to 12th grade, high school graduation, and college readiness and aspirations? The data indicates that North Carolina ISHSs served a diverse set of students. Compared with students in the same districts, ISHS students had slightly lower incoming academic achievement and were more likely to be African American and to come from low-income households. Within- and out-of-district comparisons provide consistent findings on the impact of ISHS attendance. ISHS attendance appears to have a positive impact on students’ persistence to 12th grade, high school graduation, and college readiness and aspirations. [SREE documents are structured abstracts of SREE conference symposium, panel, and paper or poster submissions.]
Increasing science literacy in early childhood: The connection between home and school. American Educator. American Federation of Teachers.
Turning everyday activities such as baking into scientific activities is more than just fun: it is important for our children’s futures
The evidence based curriculum design framework: Leveraging diverse perspectives in the design process
The ubiquity of touchscreen, mobile tablet technology has resulted in a plethora of “apps for learning” yet few leverage the learning sciences as a design driver. This paper describes our approach to integrating the learning sciences with best practices in app design: a design framework that involves researchers and developers in a co-development process to create apps based on research and evidence. Our framework centers around a learning blueprint which is intended to serve as a “boundary object.” This boundary object facilitates a design process that allows the design team to focus on both children’s engagement and learning. Here we describe the challenges that our project team encountered and our approaches to overcome those challenges on the Next Generation Preschool Math (NGPM) project, a development and research effort devoted to creating a supplemental preschool math curriculum supplement with integrated digital apps.
The impact of career and technical education on students with disabilities
Evidence suggests that participating in career and technical education (CTE) in high school, on average, positively affects general education students when transitioning from education to the workforce. Yet, almost no large-scale causal research has explored whether academic benefits also accrue to students with disabilities in CTE. This omission is glaring given that students with disabilities participate in high school CTE programs at high rates. We use multiple years of administrative data from Massachusetts to estimate the effect of participating in CTE on the academic outcomes of students with disabilities. Compared with peers with similar disabilities who do not participate in CTE, students with disabilities in CTE programs perform comparably on standardized measures of student achievement but have higher probabilities of graduating from high school on time or earning industry-recognized certificates. Implications for policy and practice, particularly with regard to scaling access to similar programs, are discussed.
Job searching, job duration, and job loss among young adults with autism spectrum disorder
BACKGROUND : With evidence pointing to particularly poor employment outcomes for young adults with ASD, it is important to understand their employment experiences in order to develop effective interventions that address their needs.
OBJECTIVE : We compared the job search experience, job duration, and j ob loss of young adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and their peers with four other types of disabilities.
METHODS : The study analyzed wave 5 data collected in 2009 from youth or their parents who were included in the National Longitudinal Transition Study-2 (NLTS2), a nationally representative sample of youth who received special education services in high school.
RESULTS : Among 21 to 25 year olds with ASD, fewer than 30% were looking for a paid job at the time of the interview and approximately 22% found a job on their own, the lowest rates among the five disability groups included in the analyses. It took them an average of 14 months to find a job, longer than the other disability groups. Young adults with ASD held a job for an average of 24 months, longer than youth in two of the other disability categories. The main reason young adults with ASD became unemployed is because their temporary job ended. Those who were older, were from higher-income households, had better conversational or functional skills, or attended postsecondary schools had more positive employment experiences.
CONCLUSIONS : Young adults with ASD experienced considerable difficulty obtaining long-term employment, and more research is needed to determine strategies for improving their employment outcomes.
Enhancing Formative Assessment Practice and Encouraging Middle School Mathematics Engagement and Persistence
In the transition to middle school, and during the middle school years, students’ motivation for mathematics tends to decline from what it was during elementary school. Formative assessment strategies in mathematics can help support motivation by building confidence for challenging tasks. In this study, the authors developed and piloted a professional development program, Learning to Use Formative Assessment in Mathematics with the Assessment Work Sample Method (AWSM) to build middle school math teachers’ understanding of the characteristics of high‐quality formative assessment processes and increases their ability to use them in their classrooms. AWSM proved to be feasible to implement in the middle school setting. It improved teachers’ practice of formative assessment, especially in their feedback practices, regardless of their pedagogical content knowledge at entry. Results from focus groups suggested that teachers were better able to implement ungraded practice and student self‐ and peer‐assessment after AWSM, and that students were more willing to engage in complex problem solving.
Differential response to contact-based stigma reduction programs: Perceived quality and personal experience matter
The aim of this study was to examine two under-studied factors integral to the theoretical underpinnings of contact-based mental illness stigma reduction programs: the quality of the contact and prior personal experience with persons with mental health problems. This study utilized pre- and post-survey data collected from 4122 individuals participating in a diverse set of contact-based educational programs implemented as part of California’s statewide initiative to reduce mental illness stigma. Multi-level mixed regression models were used to determine whether pre-post changes in a variety of stigma-related measures varied depending on perceived quality of contact and prior personal experience with mental illness. Significant pre-post reductions in stigma were observed, but individual perceptions of contact quality strongly moderated program effects. Mean contact quality across all attendees at a presentation was rarely a moderator. Though effective for all participants, on average, contact-based educational programs were more effective for those without prior personal or family experience of mental illness. Program organizers may wish to target recruitment efforts to reach more individuals without such experience, given the greater effectiveness of contact among these individuals. More research should explore the factors underlying individual variation in perceived quality of contact-based stigma reduction programs.
The MetaCyc database of metabolic pathways and enzymes
MetaCyc ( https://MetaCyc.org) is a comprehensive reference database of metabolic pathways and enzymes from all domains of life. It contains more than 2570 pathways derived from >54 000 publications, making it the largest curated collection of metabolic pathways. The data in MetaCyc is strictly evidence-based and richly curated, resulting in an encyclopedic reference tool for metabolism. MetaCyc is also used as a knowledge base for generating thousands of organism-specific Pathway/Genome Databases (PGDBs), which are available in the BioCyc ( https://BioCyc.org) and other PGDB collections. This article provides an update on the developments in MetaCyc during the past two years, including the expansion of data and addition of new features.
Evaluation of reaction gap-filling accuracy by randomization
Completion of genome-scale flux-balance models using computational reaction gap-filling is a widely used approach, but its accuracy is not well known.
We report on computational experiments of reaction gap filling in which we generated degraded versions of the EcoCyc-20.0-GEM model by randomly removing flux-carrying reactions from a growing model. We gap-filled the degraded models and compared the resulting gap-filled models with the original model. Gap-filling was performed by the Pathway Tools MetaFlux software using its General Development Mode (GenDev) and its Fast Development Mode (FastDev). We explored 12 GenDev variants including two linear solvers (SCIP and CPLEX) for solving the Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problems for gap filling; three different sets of linear constraints were applied; and two MILP methods were implemented. We compared these 13 variants according to accuracy, speed, and amount of information returned to the user.
We observed large variation among the performance of the 13 gap-filling variants. Although no variant was best in all dimensions, we found one variant that was fast, accurate, and returned more information to the user. Some gap-filling variants were inaccurate, producing solutions that were non-minimum or invalid (did not enable model growth). The best GenDev variant showed a best average precision of 87% and a best average recall of 61%. FastDev showed an average precision of 71% and an average recall of 59%. Thus, using the most accurate variant, approximately 13% of the gap-filled reactions were incorrect (were not the reactions removed from the model), and 39% of gap-filled reactions were not found, suggesting that curation is still an important aspect of metabolic-model development.
How accurate is automated gap filling of metabolic models?
Reaction gap filling is a computational technique for proposing the addition of reactions to genome-scale metabolic models to permit those models to run correctly. Gap filling completes what are otherwise incomplete models that lack fully connected metabolic networks. The models are incomplete because they are derived from annotated genomes in which not all enzymes have been identified. Here we compare the results of applying an automated likelihood-based gap filler within the Pathway Tools software with the results of manually gap filling the same metabolic model. Both gap-filling exercises were applied to the same genome-derived qualitative metabolic reconstruction for Bifidobacterium longum subsp. longum JCM 1217, and to the same modeling conditions — anaerobic growth under four nutrients producing 53 biomass metabolites.
The solution computed by the gap-filling program GenDev contained 12 reactions, but closer examination showed that solution was not minimal; two of the twelve reactions can be removed to yield a set of ten reactions that enable model growth. The manually curated solution contained 13 reactions, eight of which were shared with the 12-reaction computed solution. Thus, GenDev achieved recall of 61.5% and precision of 66.6%. These results suggest that although computational gap fillers are populating metabolic models with significant numbers of correct reactions, automatically gap-filled metabolic models also contain significant numbers of incorrect reactions.
Our conclusion is that manual curation of gap-filler results is needed to obtain high-accuracy models. Many of the differences between the manual and automatic solutions resulted from using expert biological knowledge to direct the choice of reactions within the curated solution, such as reactions specific to the anaerobic lifestyle of B. longum.
Traumatic Experiences and Associated Symptomatology in Asian American Middle School Students.
This study examines the prevalence of trauma experiences and traumatic stress in a diverse group of Asian American middle school students from a large urban school district. Descriptive statistics document the mean number of self-reported trauma experiences and posttraumatic stress subscale scores and how these rates differ by students’ gender and Asian ethnic subgroups (including Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Samoan, Southeast Asian, and Other). Furthermore, we assess the degree to which 1 or more traumatic events is associated with students’ self-reported symptoms of severe traumatic stress and the types of traumatic events that are the most powerful predictors of elevated stress. These in-depth findings underscore the need for routine, school-based screening to identify and bring culturally competent, trauma-informed support and interventions to Asian American middle school students experiencing traumatic stress. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)
The Omics Dashboard for interactive exploration of gene-expression data
The Omics Dashboard is a software tool for interactive exploration and analysis of gene-expression datasets. The Omics Dashboard is organized as a hierarchy of cellular systems. At the highest level of the hierarchy the Dashboard contains graphical panels depicting systems such as biosynthesis, energy metabolism, regulation and central dogma. Each of those panels contains a series of X–Y plots depicting expression levels of subsystems of that panel, e.g. subsystems within the central dogma panel include transcription, translation and protein maturation and folding. The Dashboard presents a visual read-out of the expression status of cellular systems to facilitate a rapid top-down user survey of how all cellular systems are responding to a given stimulus, and to enable the user to quickly view the responses of genes within specific systems of interest. Although the Dashboard is complementary to traditional statistical methods for analysis of gene-expression data, we show how it can detect changes in gene expression that statistical techniques may overlook. We present the capabilities of the Dashboard using two case studies: the analysis of lipid production for the marine alga Thalassiosira pseudonana, and an investigation of a shift from anaerobic to aerobic growth for the bacterium Escherichia coli.
Making english learner reclassification to fluent english proficient attainable or elusive: When meeting criteria is and is not enough
Employing longitudinal, multisite comparative mixed-methods, we describe patterns of reclassifying and not reclassifying eligible English learner (EL) students to fluent English proficient, and we identify factors impeding and facilitating reclassification. Analyses of administrative data for 7 cohorts of students over 3 years in one district and 2 years in another revealed a considerable number of students meeting all criteria, and a nonoverlapping group meeting at least standardized-test criteria, were not reclassified, implicating this practice in the production of long-term EL status. However, the rate of not reclassifying was more than 2 to 5 times higher in one district than the other. Analyses of policy documents, reclassification decision forms, staff interviews, and surveys revealed that undergirding these differences were distinct reclassification policies and practices. We discuss policy, practice, and research implications, including issues of opportunity to learn, equity, and the need for a common definition of ELs involving a common set of specific criteria and standardized processes for reclassification statewide.
