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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
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
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.
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
