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Current Projects
Teaching American History
Northampton Country Public Schools
Hampton High School Reform
GEAR UP
Norfolk Smaller Learning Communities
Tidewater ACCESS Study
FIRST Robotics
Virginia Arts Project
Student Assessment for Learning
CUTTER - Center for Teacher Training, Education, and Research
Educational Policy Institute
News & Events
PREPS Projects
PREPS has been most successful in helping districts tap external resources to fund their school improvement projects. PREPS connects faculty to the projects and helps write the proposals, e.g. grants awarded now exceded $12,000,000. When the grant is awarded, PREPS then assists the districts to carry out the projects. This approach is unique in that it develops formal agreements with districts to improve pupil achievement, school leadership, and teacher quality. PREPS work in the district provides dynamic feedback to the Darden College of Education Teacher Education Program.
Current Projects
Teaching American History
Northampton Country Public Schools
Hampton High School Reform
GEAR UP
Norfolk Smaller Learning Communities
Tidewater ACCESS Study
FIRST Robotics
Virginia Arts Project
Student Assessment for Learning
CUTTER - Center for Teacher Training, Education, and Research
Educational Policy Institute
Child Study Center Directior Evaluation
The U.S. Department of Education announced in May 2006 that Newport News and its partner PREPS were awarded a $994,000 Teaching American History grant. The grant is the third to be won by Newport News. This grant will enable the district to complete their development and implementation of a U.S. History vertical team. The first grant written by the PREPS director concentrated on elementary level. The second focused on the middle school level and the third, finishes the vertical team by including the high schools. PREPS is conducting the project evaluation.
Northampton Country Public Schools
Northampton County Public Schools program is a Virgnia Department of Education-sponsored research effort that will develop and test a teacher quality professional development intervention.
The project is funded by a $500,000 grant from the Virginia Department of Education. Dr. Steve Myran is the PI. He is leading a team of faculty to include Dr. Jack E. Robinson. They have enjoyed great success as Standard and Poors recently recognized their work by naming Occahonock Elementary School an “Academic Outperformer.” The school reported significantly higher percentages of students that scored proficient or above on state reading and math tests than other school districts with similar levels of student poverty in Virginia over two school years. Academic achievement levels were compared with the percentage of economically disadvantaged students because they are often correlated.
PREPS and Hampton City Schools signed a Memorandum of Understanding in 2004 to develop a high school reform model. PREPS facilitated the district’s high school design retreat and is currently an advisor to the district and its task force. The task force includes a broad cross-section of the community, including students, families, businesses, and district personnel. On April 5, 2006, the Hampton School Board approved a plan to reform its 4 high schools. PREPS led the writing team to develop and submit a proposal for $3,325,000 to the U.S. Department of Education to create smaller learning communities. This five-year grant will establish college, career, and trade communities in each of the four high schools. For example, in the college communities, students will be able to complete an associates degree while in high school.
PREPS and Newport News collaborated to develop a GEAR UP program that builds on the initial GEAR UP developed by the PREPS director when he was with Newport News Public Schools. The partners were very pleased to win this grant, the only one awarded in Virginia and back-to-back with the first $3.2 million grant. This grant, $3.6 million, will extend PREPS research into the secondary reform activities of the district by adding language development. PREPS will also provide the grant evaluation.
Norfolk Public Schools Smaller Learning Communities
PREPS and Norfolk collaborated to win a $4.9 million U.S. Department of Education Smaller Learning Community grant. PREPS will perform the project evaluation. The district invited PREPS to sit on its high school design team in 2004. The PREPS director had written, and been awarded, two back-to-back Smaller Learning Community grants for Newport News Public Schools. These experiences will enable PREPS to add value to the Norfolk high school reform initiative.
Dr. Shana Pribesh recently delivered her study that measured the effectiveness of the scholarship program. She designed a data collection system that solicited opinions from students and parents in local high schools. In addition, she and her research team ‘shadowed’ four ACCESS advisors so that we could determine what students and parents want from the ACCESS Program and how those services might be most efficiently delivered. Overall, respondents appeared to be very aware of the services that the ACCESS College Foundation offers to students and their families. They also indicated a high level of satisfaction with the service delivery by ACCESS Advisors. Mean responses to the statements always ranged in the Agree to Strongly Agree range. Even with such positive responses, there were areas to note. Students and parents were somewhat ambivalent about whether others know about or participate in the ACCESS Program. Likewise, a large proportion of respondents appeared to be unaware that ACCESS will complete the FAFSA form.
The State Council on Higher Education (SCHEV) invited PREPS to sit on the newly created Education Partnership Team to develop FIRST and its integration into high school programs across the Commonwealth. The PREPS director facilitated the FIRST retreat and development of new teams in Tidewater to include Northampton and Norfolk (Norview and Booker T. Washington High Schools). PREPS recommended to ODU President Runte that ODU create a FIRST Scholars program for aspiring engineers. The program will provide engineering scholarships to exceptional FIRST students. This effort is a collaboration between Darden College of Education and the College of Engineering and Technology. SCHEV has commissioned PREPS to conduct training for Virginia high school guidance counselors that will ensure that high schools are aware of the various reform models that support the smooth transition between high school and college.
On May 16 and 17, 2006, PREPS conducted a workshop for guidance counselors from the 30 National Governors Association honors high schools. The two-day event included assembly of VEX Kits and presentations by FIRST Robotics judges, team members, and sponsors.
PREPS assisted in the development of Virginia’s high school reform proposal to the National Governors Association. Virginia was one of only ten states to be awarded a $2 million grant for high school reform. PREPS signed an agreement with the State Council for Higher Education in Virginia (SCHEV) and Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) to conduct a series of workshops for the National Governors Association Honors High Schools.
Northampton Historic District Development
As part of its contract with Northampton County Public Schools, PREPS is facilitating the historic development of the district’s original high school, circa 1904. The 5 acre site is being developed to include an academic village that will include student-teacher dorms , a community technology site, an early childhood site, and an artists community. The district invited a broad cross-section of the County’s stakeholders to serve on the historic development committee. The district invited Congresswoman Thelma Drake and the Norfolk Foundation to support the effort. Recently, Congresswoman Drake presented a $450,000 check to the mayor of Cheriton to use for affordable housing. The Norfolk Foundation has offered a grant for the project. Eastville City Council representatives, members of the County Board of Supervisors, business owners, developers, and average citizens serve on the Committee. This project was designed to mobilize the community around the district, preserve the old high school, and to stabilize the teacher workforce. The district is geographically isolated and lacks affordable housing for teachers. The Virginia Department of Education was so impressed with the scope of the effort, it awarded a $416,000 Teacher Quality grant to PREPS to develop a teacher quality model.
Student Assessment for Learning
Getting assessment “right” is more important than ever for African-American children as we near 2014 when all children must meet NCLB requirements and when by 2040 there will be no majority. The black-white achievement gap continues to grow, e.g., in 2005, when the SAT added a test of writing, the gap between African American and white students increased from 92 points in 1997 to 99 points. In fact, the SAT II: Writing Test has the second largest black-white test score gap of the 12 most popular SAT II tests. These gaps will likely carry over to the “new” SAT-I, given that it will be nearly identical in form and content. Between 1992 and 2006, there was no significant change in the percentage of fourth-graders performing at or above Basic on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) reading test. In Virginia, the 2002 black-white 4th grade NAEP writing test score gap is 20 points at the proficient level.
With a growing knowledge of how people learn (Bradsford, Brown, and Cocking, 1999), it is critical to develop assessments that help teachers diagnose students’ comprehension more precisely and accurately and to link good formative assessments to high stakes state tests. As the era of accountability approaches maturity, many have paused to ask if our use of summative data provides our K12 educators what they need to create learning cultures that enable students to achieve at advanced levels of proficiency. As the Governor of Virginia, Tim Kaine points out, “While the Standards of Learning (SOL) have raised the academic floor and enabled many students to reach higher, the SOLs have always been intended as minimum standards for competency.” The call for assessment literacy has been answered, and yet achieving goals beyond state accountability standards, that are the habits of powerful literacy and life long learning, eliminating performance gaps and dropouts, remains elusive to many schools. First generation accountability regimes continue to routinize regular classrooms and inadvertently purge inventive young teachers from moribund schools.
PREPS has developed a teacher professional development intervention in collaboration with Northampton County and Norfolk Public Schools. The intervention has shown promise and is consistent with a meta-analysis conducted by Black and Wiliam, 1998. For research purposes, learning gains of this type are measured by comparing the average improvements in the test scores of pupils involved in an innovation with the range of scores that are found for typical groups of pupils on these same tests. The ratio of the former divided by the latter is known as the effect size. Typical effect sizes of the formative assessment experiments were between 0.4 and 0.7. These effect sizes are larger than most of those found for educational interventions. The following examples illustrate some practical consequences of such large gains.
• An effect size of 0.4 would mean that the average pupil involved in an innovation would record the same achievement as a pupil in the top 35% of those not so involved.
• An effect size gain of 0.7 in the recent international comparative studies in mathematics would have raised the score of a nation in the middle of the pack of 41 countries (e.g., the U.S.) to one of the top five.
Many of these studies arrive at another important conclusion: that improved formative assessment helps low achievers more than other students and so reduces the range of achievement while raising achievement overall. A notable recent example is a study devoted entirely to low-achieving students and students with learning disabilities, which shows that frequent assessment feedback helps both groups enhance their learning. Any gains for such pupils could be particularly important. Furthermore, pupils who come to see themselves as unable to learn usually cease to take school seriously. Many become disruptive; others resort to truancy. Such young people are likely to be alienated from society and to become the sources and the victims of serious social problems.
Norfolk and PREPS are now scaling the intervention to 5 additional schools.
CUTTER – Center for Teacher Training, Education, and Research
Introduction
Old Dominion University (ODU) will establish the Center for Urban Teacher Training, Education, and Research (CUTTER) on the An Achievable Dream (AAD) grade 6-12 campus in Newport News Virginia. The Center will serve as a national model for urban teacher professional development, education, and research. The Center will initially focus on preparing AAD teachers to staff the new 6-12 campus. Later, the Center will open its doors to teachers from districts within the region and beyond. The Center builds on relationships established between the university and the Newport News Public Schools. Unique to the model is a corporate-university-school-local government partnership that has raised some $13 million to establish a new AAD campus for grades 6-12. Currently, AAD is a K-8 school serving some 1000 inner city African-American children. The new Dream 6-12 campus will house ODU’s Center. We believe that there is a permanent role for philanthropy, both business and foundation, not just to put money into schools, but to put money into institutional capacities like ‘incubators’ such as CUTTER. The partners will develop a set of activities supported and overseen by the community to educate its children. ODU has committed $1 million in scholarship funds to ensure first generation African-American students are ready for and complete college.
National Significance
At a time when children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds represent the fastest growing school-age population in the U.S., too many of these children are failing. This has direct consequences for their sense of themselves as learners and thinkers, for their possible career trajectories, and for their well-being and resilience of our nation’s social, economic and political life. CUTTER represents a community commitment to develop more complete strategies in urban districts, to increase teacher workforce stability, and to sustain verified strategies that work. Boston, the 2006-2007 Broad Prize winner and Norfolk, the 2005-2006 Broad Prize winner, represent such a community-wide economic development strategy. Unique to our model is the ‘unleashing’ of teacher and principal talent to launch research-based instructional and assessment approaches to the work before us and to ‘hard-wire’ the innovation.
The ODU Center will invite K12 teachers and administrators and higher education faculty from communities across the globe to join us in improving teaching and learning. One of the fundamental flaws in the initiatives to transform urban schools in the past 25 years has been their tendency to focus on a specific--often structural—solution (Elmore, 2006). In order to improve teaching and learning at scale, universities and schools must join forces with the community to strengthen its instructional core by increasing teachers’ skills and knowledge in combining instruction and assessment (Stiggins, 2006), enable students to be active agents for their own learning (Black and Wiliam, 1998), enabling teachers and higher education faculty to serve as ‘coresarchers’ (Erwee and Conway, 2006), and ensuring that the curriculum challenges the students academically (Shaffer, 2004).
Need
Getting assessment “right” is more important than ever for African-American children as we near 2014 when all children must meet NCLB requirements and when by 2040 there will be no majority. The black-white achievement gap continues to grow, e.g., in 2005, when the SAT added a test of writing, the gap between African American and white students increased from 92 points in 1997 to 99 points. In fact, the SAT II: Writing Test has the second largest black-white test score gap of the 12 most popular SAT II tests. These gaps will likely carry over to the “new” SAT-I, given that it will be nearly identical in form and content. Between 1992 and 2006, there was no significant change in the percentage of fourth-graders performing at or above Basic on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) reading test. In Virginia, the 2002 black-white 4th grade NAEP writing test score gap is 20 points at the proficient level.
With a growing knowledge of how people learn (Bradsford, Brown, and Cocking, 1999), it is critical to develop assessments that help teachers diagnose students’ comprehension more precisely and accurately and to link good formative assessments to high stakes state tests. As the era of accountability approaches maturity, many have paused to ask if our use of summative data provides our K12 educators what they need to create learning cultures that enable students to achieve at advanced levels of proficiency. As the Governor of Virginia, Tim Kaine points out, “While the Standards of Learning (SOL) have raised the academic floor and enabled many students to reach higher, the SOLs have always been intended as minimum standards for competency.” The call for assessment literacy has been answered, and yet achieving goals beyond state accountability standards, that are the habits of powerful literacy and life long learning, eliminating performance gaps and dropouts, remains elusive to many schools. First generation accountability regimes continue to routinize regular classrooms and inadvertently purge inventive young teachers from moribund schools.
Design
The ODU Center design moves school improvement to the university and teacher development to the classroom (Fullan, 2001). The model draws heavily from research conducted by Feiman-Nemser and Bailey, 2001, which calls for a collaborative inquiry stance in which the teacher educator, teacher, mentor, and staff developers work side-by-side in the context of teaching and learning to teach; in the classroom. ODU’s Program for Research and Evaluation in Public Schools (PREPS) researchers and Darden College of Education faculty have over the course of the past three years developed and tested a teacher professional development intervention in Northampton County Public Schools (NCPS) and in Norfolk Public Schools (NPS). NCPS teachers trained by ODU faculty were able narrow the gaps in student achievement between black and white children by 10.2 percent between 2003-2004 and 2004-2005. Standard and Poors selected Northampton County as 1 of 12 Virginia school districts as academic “outperformers.” NPS teachers were able to raise student achievement by 20 percent for regular students and 35 percent for special education students. ODU and its two district partners have documented that by working side-by-side, the teacher educator from the university was able to create practice-centered conversations among the 3 parties that moved back and forth between specific and general issues and aspects of daily teaching and learning to teach. The teacher educator, instead of merely pushing a particular course of action, instilled an inquiry stance in the conversations that allowed each party to discover and contribute to the knowledge of teaching and mentoring by reframing problems and probing purposes and meaning. Through this process, the teacher educator helped to deepen the mentors understanding of problems, concerns, beliefs, attitudes, and practices.
The design also dramatically increases rigor in secondary schools. Using the Bard College developed early college model, Dream students will take college courses to meet the ODU general education requirements while in high school. Thomas Nelson Community College (TNCC) will provide faculty to deliver the first two years of college material. TNCC will heavily discount tuition to $5 per course. Unique to the community economic development model will be courses delivered by TNCC faculty to parents and family members on the Dream Campus. The ODU Center will offer field-based graduate courses to Dream teachers that will enable them to serve as ODU adjunct faculty. They will team teach with TNCC faculty.
The third design component will develop a modeling and simulation campus theme. The ODU Virginia Modeling, Analysis and Simulation Center (VMASC) researchers and faculty will help teachers to develop a simulation and modeling curriculum aligned with state standards. Our nation faces a critical challenge: we must grow the ranks of scientists and engineers to remain at the international forefront of research and development. Successful transformation of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education requires us to integrate systems, tools, and instructional practices to create a new educational experience. One of the early initiatives under development is serious gaming.
ODU instructional design, engineering, game-based learning faculty are developing and testing a prototype algebra game for use on the Dream campus. We believe serious gaming supports agency. "Games let us create representations of how things work in a medium that's built to do exactly that," says Ian Bogost, an assistant professor of digital media at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. "If you want to explain how a nuclear power plant works in a textbook, you have to demonstrate it with a logical written argument. But with games, the player can literally interact with the model of how a system works."
The serious games moniker provides a catchall for simulations that transcend traditional video and computer game fodder (gunplay, slick cars, and sports) and delve into heftier issues (responding to genocide, promoting democracy, and training first responders). Already neatly segmented, serious games exist for science, defense, health, conflict resolution, and social change. Their sophistication, target audience, and message vary. For example, the Federation of American Scientists developed Immune Attack to allow high school students to experience the challenge of defending the human body against invading antigens; PeaceMaker, a game created by students at Carnegie Mellon University, lets Palestinians and Israelis switch roles to better understand each other's plight; and the U.N. World Food Program's Food Force teaches kids about the difficulties of delivering aid to the developing world.
Using themes such as Moon, Mars and Beyond, Deep Ocean Quest, Human Machine, and Amazon Rainforest, Dream student-teacher research teams will ‘become’ astrophysicists, biomedical engineers, nanotechnologists, etc. In essence, the ‘professions’ become models for education (Shaffer, 2004). At the ODU Center, “Authentic Professionalism” underpins all student-teacher research activities (Gee, 2006). Ultimately, it is our goal to create a new breed of teacher, scientist and engineer for the nation.
Finally, the ODU Center will provide opportunities for teachers to conduct action research as ‘coresearchers.’ (Erwee and Conway, 2006). Teachers and ODU faculty will learn to appreciate the different lenses that other researchers have and the level of conceptual synthesis that is possible. School-based research team members will have an opportunity to realize that roles can become blurred as they gain insight into the research framework. External researchers will gain deeper insight into the dynamics of cocreation of knowledge. These coresearchers will move to new levels of professional capability that will enhance the teaching profession. This research initiative will contribute to teacher professionalism by enabling teachers to build a portfolio that can be used to support National Board Certification.
The ODU Center is a significant University commitment to opening an authentic dialogue between K12 and higher education that will support Virginia’s P16 Education Council. It will also support Virginia’s Higher Education Restructuring Act 2005 that mandates higher education-K12 partnerships to improve K12 pupil achievement, teacher quality, and school leadership. This is noteworthy as the federal government moves to implement the recommendations of the Higher Education Future Commission’s report. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has recommended that K12 and higher education open a dialogue to, “throw open the doors to higher education. She called on colleges and universities to lead the transformation of higher education from a system primarily based on reputation to one based on performance.” ODU has a three-year head start on building authentic relationships with K12, a relationship called for in the 2005-2009 university strategic plan. The plan is an attempt to recognize the potential greatness of humankind, of our students, and our region. It is an attempt to further our university mission of changing lives.
Educational Policy Institute (EPI)
PREPS is hosting a Retention ListServ for EPI at http://list.odu.edu/mailman/listinfo/retention
The Program for Research and Evaluation in Public Schools (PREPS)
Education Building Room 135
Old Dominion University, Hampton Blvd,
Norfolk, VA 23529 Tel 757.683.5449 Fax 757.683.5716
