This evaluation examines school climate in Champaign schools to learn the extent to which each school in the District offers a learning environment that supports all students and provides maximum opportunities for success. The project has four goals: (1) to conduct a climate survey that is tailored to the experiences of school teachers, students and parents and that is informed by other constituencies in the school community; (2) to assist teachers, who will administer the survey; (3) to assess the meanings and action interpretations of the questionnaire data; and (4) to analyze data and prepare reports.

This research evaluates intellectually-stimulating, personally-engaging, conceptually-rich instruction that could boost the conceptual understanding, thinking skills, language, and motivation of African American and Latina/o nonmainstream children. Fifth graders work in small collaborative groups and engage in open, free-flowing, peer-managed discussions that call for critical and reflective thinking. The central instructional unit entails issues in environmental science and public policy and integrates language arts, science, and social science. This quasi-experiment includes thirty-six fifth grade classrooms (700-800 children). Microgenetic analysis aims to locate the critical events that enabled children to acquire and transfer subject-matter concepts and reasoning strategies and led to heightened engagement.

Fourteen-hundred fourth and fifth grade students, along with thirty-two teachers, are participating in this research. Students come from a variety of economic, ethnic, and English proficiency backgrounds. The research goal is to determine the generalizability and sustainability of an educational program, Collaborative Reasoning (CR), for elementary classrooms. The teachers will attend an institute on CR and a series of follow up workshops at the University of Illinois. They facilitate the students' CR discussions in their classrooms. In addition, teachers work with other teachers on curriculum development and implementation through a Web forum and at follow up workshops.

This project examines the process and product of interpretation, with special attention to how different sources of information are integrated into a unified interpretation, and how attention is allocated to various information sources. The methodology combines online measures of eye-tracking in reading and visual world tasks, self-paced reading, syntactic priming, lesion studies, and offline interpretation probe tasks. Project goals include: (1) fostering student research; (2) informing classroom teaching; (3) developing a graduate seminar centered on good-enough language processing and its connection to cognition and learning; and (4) informing the design and evaluation of language and literacy testing materials.

The Advanced Reading Development Demonstration Project is a collaboration between Chicago Public Schools, Chicago Universities, and Chicago Community Trust. Phase II aims to build on the capacity of higher performing partner schools, integrate and coordinate resources, develop literacy assessment and instructional tools and strategies for dissemination to university partners, expand the number of teachers with credentials in reading, and sustain continuous literacy instructional growth. The evaluation assesses the extent to which the project meets specified Phase II goals and responds to emerging issues. The design uses both qualitative and quantitative methods, multiple measures, and provides both formative and summative data.

The objective of Charting a Course to Literacy Early Reading First (CCL-ERF) is to create centers of early literacy excellence for preschoolers to learn cognitive and literacy skills that prepare them for continued success. The external evaluation assesses the program along five criteria; (1) Project design; (2) Quality of project personnel; (3) Adequacy of resources; (4) Quality of management plan; and, (5) Quality of project evaluation. The goals of the external evaluation include monitoring progress toward student achievement and professional development objectives, documenting project impact on teaching, learning, and family involvement, and building evaluation capacity and data-based decision making skills.

This evaluation examines three university-based CLIP partnerships to produce general findings that assist in understanding the nature and impact of the initiative as a whole within a large, complex, urban school district. At a second level, a multiple case study design is applied to look deeply into each university-based partnership for the purpose of producing information about the unique models employed and also to identify particular components and strategies of each that are effective in achieving core program goals. Information generated will be used formatively to assist individual CLIP partnerships to improve model specifications, implementation, and impact in schools.

The external evaluation of the National Collaborative Center on Standards and Assessment Development (NCCSAD) focuses on program quality regarding (1) the integrity of the work plan; (2) product review; (3) participant satisfaction; and (4) impact of the Center. The external evaluation employs multiple methods and multiple data sources to provide summative information on the extent to which NCCSAD is making progress toward its stated goals and is having impact at local, state and federal levels. Methods include review of internal data and independent data collection including review of state standards, surveys and interviews with key stakeholders.

This project seeks to evaluate the Transitional Bilingual Learning Community (TBLC) program at the Truman College of Education. This evaluation will assess the TBLC program over a period of three years. In the initial year, the project will establish baseline criteria by using documented goals established by TBLC faculty team and through interviews of students. In subsequent years, progress will be documented using surveys and interviews of students. In the final year, the project will conduct content analysis of the work and projects produced by students to measure the improvement of writing and critical thinking skills.

This study uses a social ecological framework to explore the unique and shared risk and protective factors of bullying and sexual violence perpetuation/victimization among middle school students. Factors are assessed across several nested contextual systems, including family, peers, and school environments. Approximately 1,200 middle school students in two Illinois school districts completed 2 days of self- and peer-report surveys across two periods during the spring of 2008. These students will be assessed for the next two years to document the course of bullying and sexual violence perpetuation/victimization across the middle school years. This study will inform policy related to bullying and sexual violence prevention planning.

This project is a large-scale, randomized longitudinal evaluation of a newly revised middle school intervention that draws from the risk/protective factors model and social-cognitive theories of aggression. Intervention lessons focus on the outcomes of bullying, relational aggression, sexual harassment, dating relationships, and substance use. This project simultaneously addresses the nation-wide push to prevent bullying and test the program impact on the prevalence of sexual violence and coercion in the context of dating relationships. The study includes a three-year nested cohort design in which 32 to 36 middle schools are randomly assigned either to the Second Step program or control condition.

This project continues the development of an educative, values-engaged approach to evaluating science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education programs. The approach emphasizes the critical contributions of evaluation to STEM knowledge generation and learning and to the political requirements for equal access, opportunity, and representation in STEM educational policies, programs, and practices, especially for learners from underrepresented groups. Conceptual development of this approach is currently supported by an EREC grant. The present proposal is funded to field test, critically refine, and disseminate this STEM education evaluation approach.

This project uses regression discontinuity to approximate a randomized control trial to study the effects of assessing mathematics in English vs. Spanish. A unique feature in the assessment design of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K) allows for rigorous, quasi-experimental tests of the effects of native-language assessment accommodations in mathematics in kindergarten and first grade. The rich set of variables in ECLS-K permits differential effects analyses, which can inform research and instructional practice regarding how context interacts with language-of-assessment effects. This research aims to improve understanding of how to fairly and validly assess English learners' mathematical knowledge.

This project is a collaboration with the Pennsylvania State University to conduct research on peer relations, new methods from social network analysis, and educational research on classroom management. The research includes development measures of classroom peer ecologies that predict youth outcomes, and measures of teaching practices associated with those aspects of the peer ecology.

This project evaluates key components of the current Illinois assessment and accountability system using a mixed-methods evaluation design. Two aspects of the Enhanced Illinois Standards Assessment Test, the Illinois No Child Left Behind accountability assessment for Grades 3-8 in Reading and Mathematics, are studied: (a) the intended and unintended assessment consequences and (b) Enhanced ISAT test equating and linking. The results will provide the foundation for a long term Illinois assessment and accountability program that will be designed to improve learning for all students in Illinois.

This Center investigates how humans acquire and use language, and develop literacy, when audition is not an available learning mode, including how deaf individuals learn to read, and the extension of visually based learning strategies to general educational practice. The Center’s Developmental and Sociocultural Processes of Visual Learning initiative examines learning environments for visual learners in natural settings, with three collaborations. Visual Language Acquisition charts individual developmental courses for acquiring visual language as a first language; Literacy Development explicates how profoundly deaf individuals may achieve excellence in reading; while Inter-Language and Inter-Modal Language Mapping documents visual linguistic and knowledge domains.

This project continues an examination of adult age differences in resource allocation during reading and the impact of these differences on subsequent comprehension and memory performance. This research is based on a theoretical framework in which self-regulation in reading is conceptualized as arising from a set of negative feedback loops functioning in the context of goals and knowledge of the individual reader. This research specifically explores how self-regulation in reading is affected by: (1) Challenges created by illegible orthography, complex syntax, and informational density; (2) The availability of background knowledge; and, (3) Social and affective goals.