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| December 3, 2010 | ||
Read the latest news about SERP’s work: |
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| Second Generation SERP Field Site in the Works The S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation has awarded SERP a planning grant to explore the feasibility of establishing another field site in the Bay Area. |
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| Catalyzing Comprehension Through Discussion and Debate: Project Takes Off The first year of a grant to study reading comprehension, funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, finds SERP partners deep in the development phase. |
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The Boston SERP team now includes a project director, Matthijs Koopmans, who has returned to Cambridge where he earned an Ed.D at Harvard twenty years ago. In the interim, Koopmans conducted major evaluations in school districts in New York City, Cleveland, and Alabama. Jennifer Winsor, a Boston Public Schools (BPS) social studies teacher for the past 11 years, joins the team as the assistant director, bringing familiarity with life inside Boston classrooms and the demands and concerns of teachers, to the team. She will also play a lead role in the development of social studies materials for the project. Harvard Ed School faculty members Kurt Fischer, James Kim, Stephanie Jones, Robert Selman, Catherine Snow, Jennifer Thomson, and Paola Uccelli are leading different components of the work, supported by doctoral and master's students working out of space in Harvard's Larsen Hall reconfigured for the project. The familiar Word Generation program will be expanded and redesigned for use in the project. Claire White, Word Generation director, is leading the development of a 4th-grade version of the program, in collaboration with Boston teacher co-developers Mike O'Halloran and Liz Berges. She is joined by Susannah Gordon-Messer, a post-doctoral fellow who is heading up the development of science curricular materials, in collaboration with Wheelock professor Jeff Winokur and teacher co-developers Elise Morgan and Bruce Kamerer. Teacher co-developers Josh Landwehr and Jessica Tang are working on social studies topics, under the guidance of Winsor and Selman. Lowry Hemphill of Wheelock College is directing the Strategic Adolescent Reading Initiative (SARI: an intervention for 8th graders reading three to four years below grade level) with the collaboration of Thomson and Meenakshi Khanna, a newly appointed senior literacy coach who graduated from the Harvard Language and Literacy master's program in 1994. Theo Dawson, the director of the Developmental Testing Service, is leading the design and development of assessments focused on reflective judgment and perspective taking. She is working with Harvard doctoral students Zak Stein and Katie Heikkinen. Pam Pelletier, the senior program director of the BPS Science Department, and Robbie Chisholm, the senior program director of BPS History/Social Studies Department, have become more engaged in the work as the focus on these two content areas has deepened, while Angela Sangeorge, the executive director of BPS Curriculum Development and Literacy, and Almi Abeyta, the assistant academic superintendent for BPS Middle and K-8 Schools, continue to work closely with the team to integrate district needs and priorities into the research and development work. The entire team has held five full-day meetings between July and November. Over 400 children in Boston, Brockton, and Belmont schools are currently being interviewed, in order to develop assessments of reflective judgment and perspective-taking. Pilot curriculum units are being written with anticipated field-testing in the spring. The intervention and evaluation phase will be launched in the fall of 2011. Read more about SERP staff and partners. |
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| Math Students: What Are They Thinking? Researchers and teachers in the SERP-San Francisco field site are trying to crack the code on students' mathematical thinking. |
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| Word Generation Online Version Unrolled The SERP Institute is partnering with a middle school in Phoenix, Arizona to pilot a computerized version of the academic language program. |
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| Use of SERP-ETS Reading Assessment on the Rise With SERP operations spreading into new locales, districts continue to express interest in an instrument known for its diagnostic capabilities and convenience of use. |
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 The Reading Inventory and Scholastic Evaluation (RISE) developed for classroom use through a SERP-ETS collaboration begun with the Boston Public Schools, is now being used by other districts that enter into data sharing agreements allowing for further development and research on the instrument. Districts eager for more efficient ways to gather diagnostic information are signing on to participate in advanced pilot-testing, while taking advantage of the customized reports about their students. Previously piloted in schools in three Massachusetts districts on PCs, in 2010 the SERP-ETS partnership, with support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, developed an online version of the RISE that can be used with any Internet-ready computer or netbook. "What the RISE assessment has provided us with is a quick but more comprehensive diagnostic overview of a student's reading skills that can be used to design targeted intervention based on the specific area of weakness," said Elizabeth McGonagle, assistant superintendent / director of curriculum and instruction for Falmouth Public Schools. The Baltimore City School System is now promoting RISE use for grades 6 through 9, with administration at scale to begin in January. Researcher John Sabatini of ETS has played the lead role in developing the RISE, with colleague Kelly Bruce, a senior research associate in the Center for Global Assessment at ETS headquarters in Princeton, New Jersey. "We value the model that SERP promotes of partnerships with school districts to tackle the problems that are important to them," said Bruce. |
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| Going Global in Taiwan A contingent of SERP partners visited Taiwan to exchange knowledge about student literacy. |
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| Lessons From San Francisco Shared in Shanghai A middle school teacher from the SERP-San Francisco field site addressed an audience of science teachers in Shanghai, the largest city in China. |
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| Educating Leaders About Vocabulary Instruction An article published in the October issue of Educational Leadership explains the research behind the program Word Generation. |
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| SERP Partners Speak to National and State Audiences Members of the SERP science leadership team are active in addressing educators at national and state conferences. |
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| SERP Collaborator Kenji Hakuta Gives AERA Brown Lecture A SERP partner is selected by the American Educational Research Association to deliver the prestigious Brown lecture. |
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 Kenji Hakuta (Stanford) a scholar and SERP partner whose work focuses on improving education for language minority students, was invited to give the lecture that commemorates the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. A large crowd gathered in the Ronald Reagan Building on October 28th to hear Hakuta present, “Educating Language Minority Students and Affirming Their Equal Rights: Research and Practical Perspectives.” Hakuta’s current work with the SERP-San Francisco field site focuses on helping improve student literacy in science. He led the development ofWordSift, a practical tool for teachers that identifies key vocabulary in a text.
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Much more news! SERP-Boston Update:
SERP-MSAN Update:
SERP-San Francisco Update:
National Office Update:
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Comments and letters to the editor may be sent to Carole Bausell, by clicking on the link below: Strategic Education Research Partnership |
SERP is the recipient of a grant from the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation to develop plans for establishing a field site in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). For the next six months, a SERP team will work with senior leaders in OUSD to determine priorities and establish a program of work initially targeting mathematics and/or science. Oakland would be the beneficiary of SERP's considerable experience in its existing three field sites, and would have access to the knowledge and tools already under development. It would also profit from the close proximity of a sister site in San Francisco, thereby allowing for experimentation with the notion of a "second-generation" site that deliberately builds on existing SERP work. Bechtel is now in its fifth year of supporting the SERP-San Francisco field site. The foundation's sustained support has been critical to the ability of the site to produce high quality work in math and science education.
The SERP-Boston field site has substantially expanded the scope of its work as a result of the major five-year "Reading for Understanding" grant from the Institute of Education Sciences (see 
A SERP team in the San Francisco Unified School District is developing diagnostic lessons as a teaching tool to reveal the knowledge, understanding, and misconceptions that impact students when they study math. SERP collaborator Alan Schoenfeld of the University of California, Berkeley, and field site director Phil Daro, are leading a co-development team comprised of 6th - 8th grade math teachers, district administrators, doctoral students, and SERP staff to create and pilot the lessons. Cathy Kessel, who developed materials for the Mathematics Common Core State Standards team, will refine the lessons. Teachers will open a unit of study with a diagnostic lesson that allows them to see how students grapple with the underlying math concepts. They can then determine where they need to focus instruction. Teaching supports will clarify the mathematics the unit is intended to teach and its relationship to the Common Core standards. The work is being supported by the Stephen Bechtel Fund. 
An 
Lisa Ernst, a 6th grade social studies and science teacher drew on her collaboration with researchers Mark Wilson and Linda Morell (University of California, Berkeley), Jonathan Osborne (Stanford) and others when she traveled to Shanghai for her presentation on inquiry and pedagogy in science. Ernst, who hails from the Alice Fong Yu K-8 Alternative School, was one of 50 U.S. science delegates to share strategies and pedagogies with Chinese science teachers as part of a US-Sino Forum co-sponsored by the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), and the China Association of Children's Science Instructors (CASCI) in November.
"The Words Students Need," by SERP partners Joshua Lawrence and Catherine Snow (Harvard), and SERP staff Claire White, was published in a special issue of the journal Educational Leadership entitled, "Interventions that Work." The authors discuss the research base upon which Word Generation was constructed and share results from a quasi-experimental study of the program.
Jonathan Osborne (Stanford) will deliver the NSTA/ASE Honors Exchange Lecture at the upcoming National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) 2011 national conference in San Francisco in March. The lecture is entitled, "The Common Core Standards: A Rationale for Practices: Why engaging in the practice of criticism is essential to building an understanding of science." ASE or the Association for Science Education is the largest group of science educators in the United Kingdom. Helen Quinn (Stanford) will present, "The Next Generation of Science Education Standards." Quinn is chair of the National Academies Board on Science Education (BOSE). Kenji Hakuta (Stanford) will give a talk entitled, "Practical Tools to Support English Language Learners Reading Science Texts." Linda Morell (University of California, Berkeley), Lisa Ernst (Alice Fong Yu School), Jonathan Osborne (Stanford), and Mark Wilson (UC Berkeley) will present, "Linking Ideas to Teaching: Ideas and Evidence." In October 2010 at the California Science Teachers Association (CSTA) in Sacramento, Michael Fox, a teacher at Denman Middle School, and Linda Morrell, a professor at University of California, Berkeley, co-presented "Uncovering Student Misconceptions: The case of states of matter." Diego Roman and Karen Thompson, graduate students working with Kenji Hakuta at Stanford University, presented, "WordSift: An Interactive Web-Based Vocabulary Tool Designed to Enhance Academic Literacy."