January 25th, 2012
Well-trained, supported new CTE teachers are more likely to remain in the field and build their skills over time, resulting in a better trained teaching force. In partnership with the NRCCTE, SREB is developing an induction model for new CTE teachers pursuing an alternative route to certification that will increase new teachers' competence, self-efficacy, and retention. The model builds the capacity of beginning CTE teachers to offer instruction that is intellectually demanding and standards-focused and thus more likely to improve CTE students' academic achievement.
SREB's Paula Egelson chatted with Catherine Imperatore about recent developments with this teacher induction model since our last podcast update with Principal Investigator Heather Sass. This year, the SREB team has evaluated the impact of the model on a cohort of new CTE teachers in Oklahoma, examining the impact of the program on teacher commitment to the profession and teacher self efficacy, specifically new teachers' confidence, instructional expertise, and ability to manage classrooms.
Paula Egelson: So what we have found is that overall... this first cohort of teachers that participated in the professional development, they improved their self-efficacy and instruction in classroom management and student engagement, based on pre- and post- measures.
Also we reported that, or the teachers reported that, the CTE professional development was intensive, time consuming, helpful and applicable instructionally. The other thing is the teacher commitment to the profession remained steady at 70% through the school year, based on pre- and post- measures.
Read the transcript of this conversation (PDF).
The NRCCTE's multimedia content- including podcasts, webcasts, full-length reports, Research Snapshots, and presentations- is always available from the NRCCTE website, www.nrccte.org. If you have a comment or question about our products or projects, please drop us a line at nrccte@louisville.edu. We welcome your feedback!
Category: Career · Education | 0 Comments |
December 16th, 2011
NRCCTE Director Jim Stone and Deputy Director Pradeep Kotamraju recently co-authored a report on the best educational pathways out of the current recession with colleagues at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW) and the National Association of State Directors of Career Technical Education Consortium (NASDCTEc). The report, Career Clusters: Forecasting High School through College Jobs, 2008-2018, was launched on November 14th at an event on Capitol Hill hosted by the American Youth Policy Forum.
The report states that the majority of good jobs of the future will require postsecondary education and training. Of those high school-level jobs that remain, only one third will pay a living wage-and most are in male-dominated fields. The report, which builds on an earlier CEW report, Help Wanted: Projecting Jobs and Education Requirements Through 2018, analyzes how labor market needs relate to the 16 career clusters and discusses implications for career and technical education.
Dr. Kotamraju sat down with Catherine Imperatore of ACTE for a brief chat about the Career Clusters report and what its research findings can offer states and districts looking to make decisions about the career and technical secondary and postsecondary programs they offer in these challenging economic times.
CI: So what is the importance to the field of this new report?
PK: What this new report does is firstly, the field in CTE tends to use the 16 career clusters in their programs, particularly many states have used them as their framework for developing programs of study. And one of the requirements of the programs of study is that they have to look at labor market information and choose those occupations and clusters which provide high-wage, high-skill, high-demand jobs. This would be a way for the field to actually use that information to decide where they could concentrate on putting their scarce CTE dollars into programming. Also, I think the fact that programs of study is going to be central to Perkins and CTE in the future, this would provide a framework about how well to connect secondary and postsecondary.
The other use of this data is, which was also done in the previous report, but there's also a state-by-state analysis. So each state has information by the 16 career clusters, and the same conclusions that we talked about at the national level are also derived at the state level. So we can see the variations and differences across states, and states may then target certain occupations using state-level data rather than national data.
Download the transcript [PDF document] of this podcast and learn more about the Career Clusters report at the NRCCTE website, www.nrccte.org.
In addition to the full national report, Career Clusters contains an executive summary and a state-level analysis of jobs by career cluster. All three documents are available online at http://cew.georgetown.edu/Clusters.
Read the press release about this report (PDF document). Read a feature story about the report in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The NRCCTE's multimedia content- including podcasts, webcasts, full-length reports, Research Snapshots, and presentations- is always available from the NRCCTE website, http://www.nrccte.org/. If you have a comment or question about our products or projects, please drop us a line at nrccte@louisville.edu. We welcome your feedback!
Category: Career · Education | 0 Comments |
November 26th, 2011
Site Visit Update: Rigorous Tests of Student Outcomes in POS - A Podcast with Marisa Castellano and Kirsten Sundell
Marisa Castellano and Kirsten Sundell, co-principal investigators of the Rigorous Tests of Student Outcomes in CTE Programs of Study project, are wrapping up the fourth and final year of data collection for their study of the effects of POS on student academic and technical achievement. They recently conducted week-long site visits in "West" and "East" districts, where they observed classes and interviewed students at study and comparison schools. Study students are now 12th graders and will be graduating in May 2012.
Marisa and Kirsten talked to Catherine Imperatore at ACTE about some of the things they saw during this visit, which included the implementation of a NAF academy, how technology is being integrated in different POS schools and programs, and the study's next steps. Here's an excerpt from their conversation.
CI: What else did you accomplish on these final site visits?
KS: Well, as you know, Programs of Study align and connect secondary education with postsecondary education. Our students are seniors, they're going to be graduating next May, but unfortunately, our study funding is going to be running out pretty much right after that happens. So we're trying to collect as much data as we can before that. We've reached out to the local community colleges in our participating districts, so that, if we do find funding to continue our work, we're going to be able to follow these students into the postsecondary part of Programs of Study. And we're so pleased at the interest and excitement the colleges are showing in seeing this work continue.
We'd like to continue following our student cohort into their first two years of college to see if they earn those degrees and credentials that their Programs of Study are preparing them to earn. We'd also like to collect data to see if Program of Study students require less remediation in college than non-Program of Study students, whether or not they earn more credits.
Download the transcript [PDF document] and learn more about the Rigorous Tests of Student Outcomes in CTE Programs of Study project at the NRCCTE website, www.nrccte.org.
The NRCCTE's multimedia content- including podcasts, webcasts, full-length reports, Research Snapshots, and presentations- is always available from the NRCCTE website, http://www.nrccte.org/. If you have a comment or question about our products or projects, please drop us a line at nrccte@louisville.edu. We welcome your feedback!
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October 14th, 2011
Travis Park (pictured at left), Principal Investigator of the Authentic Literacy-in-CTE research project and director of the NRCCTE's Literacy-in-CTE curriculum integration technical assistance and professional development model, recently spoke with Crystal Persi, an Early Childhood Education teacher at Willamette High School in Eugene, Oregon, and Kristin Gunson, the CTE regional coordinator for Lane Education Service District, Oregon, about their experiences with Literacy-in-CTE, which will be available as a Jump-Start pre-session (November 16) at the upcoming ACTE convention in St. Louis.
Crystal and Kristin both shared how Literacy-in-CTE impacts teaching and student learning. Here's an excerpt of the conversation.
TP: How has the professional development impacted your teaching so far?
CP: This has had a tremendous impact on what I'm doing with my students. It's really hard for me to separate out. Is it the skills and the strategies that I'm using that are that much more engaging for my students? Or is it me and my confidence and my attitude in what I'm teaching? There's just this renewed energy in my teaching, but it's also that the students are loving the activities because it's them guiding them. It's them taking ownership, rather than me saying, "Here, read this" and then basically I re-teach it the very next day. They know that they're going to be held accountable. They know that they're going to be expected to digest and share out what they've learned through the reading. My classroom and my students are just way more engaged than they've ever been.
TP: Mentioning feedback, with your 65 schools and quite a few teachers involved in this project, what feedback have you gathered? We're only four or five weeks into school. What have you heard?
KG: This is what makes it rewarding for me, to know that we really are on the right track. They've gone back and they've implemented some of these in the classroom and they get such positive feedback from the students: "This is great. I finally understand it. This is something that I've never understood, but this is something that I can use even in a different class."
They've gotten that kind of feedback. I have one teacher who is relatively new and has come through our alternative ... their credentialing. This has given that person a structure to actually use in his classroom and to know that it's research based, that he's not wondering if it's his lesson that's the problem or if he's the problem. But now, he has a solid template that he can use and has really gotten positive feedback from his students as well.
To learn more about Literacy-in-CTE, listen to the podcast, visit our Curriculum Integration and Literacy-in-CTE pages, and download a transcript of their conversation (PDF document).
To sign up to participate or learn more about the Literacy-in-CTE Jump-Start at ACTE 2011, visit our Jump-Start registration page.
As always, to learn more about the work of the NRCCTE, visit our website at http://www.nrccte.org. Have questions? Send us an email at nrccte@louisville.edu. We value your comments and feedback.
Category: Career · Education | 0 Comments |
September 29th, 2011
John Foster, President and CEO of NOCTI, and Debra Andrews, CTE Consultant in Technical Skills Standards and Assessment for the Maine Department of Education, chatted with Catherine Imperatore of ACTE about the NRCCTE’s CTEDDI (Career and Technical Educators using Data-Driven Improvement) model, which will be available as a Jump-Start pre-session (November 16) at the upcoming ACTE convention in St. Louis.
Ms. Andrews, who works with CTE centers throughout Maine as they implement industry-related standards and assessments, participated in a CTEDDI Jump-Start at the Career Clusters Institute in May 2011. Her experiences at the CTEDDI Jump-Start convinced her that Maine would benefit from implementing the model.
DA: [The experience] was very personalized. There were not too many participants at that first one. As I understand it, it's the first year past the pilot phase. The instructors or the trainers in the CTEDDI were just experts in their field, and made sure to personalize what they were introducing us to, and gave us time to share and reflect and think of ways that we might be able to more flexibly fit the model into what we're doing in our respective states.
I think another piece that impressed me during the Jump-Start experience was it struck me how teacher friendly the model itself is. I'm a teacher by profession, by passion. I know that educators these days are given so many add-on professional development opportunities that are impossible to implement in their classroom instruction. I don't think that's the case with the CTEDDI model.
It's simple but it's very, very substantive. Simple in that it's only five steps to the model but the training behind those five steps really helps instructors find ways that they can use data to improve their instruction in the classroom.
To learn more about CTEDDI, listen to the podcast, visit our CTEDDI page, and download a transcript of their conversation (PDF document).
To sign up to participate or learn more about the CTEDDI Jump-Start at ACTE 2011, visit our Jump-Start registration page.
As always, to learn more about the work of the NRCCTE, visit our website at http://www.nrccte.org. Have questions? Send us an email at nrccte@louisville.edu. We value your comments and feedback.
Category: Career · Education | 0 Comments |
August 31st, 2011
The Center recently published a podcast with Morgan Lewis in which he talked about the Center's latest Joint Technical Report on Programs of Study (POS). Several of the study sites described in that joint report were also part of a new Center project related to POS.
This new project, A Cross-Study Examination of Programs of Study, was designed to examine selected programs and sites from each of the Center's three field-based, longitudinal studies of POS that had the most mature, well-established programs relative to other study sites as a means of identifying common elements or attributes that led to the successful implementation of POS. A team of researchers led by Sam Stringfield of the University of Louisville, Rob Shumer of the University of Minnesota, and Natalie Stipanovic of the University of Louisville conducted visits to three sites over the course of the 2010-2011 school year. During these visits, the study team reviewed each site's strengths, identified the contributing factors to their development of POS, and examined their implementation of the 10 supporting elements of POS identified by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Vocational and Adult Education.
Sam Stringfield and Rob Shumer recently joined Catherine Imperatore of ACTE to talk about the study's design, process, and outcomes. Their conversation dwelt particularly on the six major themes that emerged from the team's rich pool of transcript data, as well as the study team's recommendations regarding the future of POS.
Dr. Stringfield noted that:
Our work highlights and serves as a bridge between-and not just ours, the whole Programs of Study focus-as a bridge between the historical trends in the U.S. in vocational education and what's going on around the world in vocational education.
And to the extent that we want to be competitive in a world educational market, I think Programs of Study are a big piece of our bridge from our history to the future, of looking at what Germany has done, what other European countries have done, what Asian countries are doing.
I think Programs of Study ... I came away from this compelled that this is a step exactly in the right direction, and that we should be highlighting it more than we are. And Rob is aware of this, we're working on a couple of special issues of journals, the International Journal of Educational Reform being one of them, to highlight the work of Programs of Study.
And I think that it's very important that we do that and help Congress and help the U.S. Department of Education situate this work in both a history of vocational education in the United States as a context, and what's going on around the world context.
Read the transcript (PDF document) of this conversation.
The full report on the Cross-Study project will be available soon. In the meantime, to learn more about the NRCCTE's projects related to Programs of Study, visit our website at www.nrccte.org.
The NRCCTE's multimedia content- including podcasts, webcasts, full-length reports, Research Snapshots, and presentations- is always available from the NRCCTE website, http://www.nrccte.org/. If you have a comment or question about our products or projects, please drop us a line at nrccte@louisville.edu. We welcome your feedback!
Category: Career · Education | 0 Comments |
August 4th, 2011
Many of those working in the field of career and technical education (CTE) have continuously grappled with the need for a uniformly global set of information-a national-level database or, at minimum, a common, standardized set of definitions and measures-to meet CTE's multiple needs, including accountability and evaluation, career guidance, and program improvement.
NRCCTE Deputy Director Pradeep Kotamraju and a workgroup consisting of researchers, data experts, and policymakers have been regularly meeting to work on the NRCCTE's Perkins Crosswalk Validation Project, an evolving multi-state, multi-institutional collaborative effort seeking (1) greater consistency and clarity in Perkins secondary and postsecondary data collection and reporting, (2) a common data crosswalk that links occupations to educational programs, career clusters, and career pathways, and (3) a foundation for more standardized accountability requirements in later iterations of the Perkins legislation.
As part of this project, Dr. Kotamraju and others in the workgroup met in July 2011 to further discuss how to establish linkages between educational programs and occupations in such a way as to make it easier for states, districts, and local education agencies to better meet Perkins accountability requirements.
After the meeting, Dr. Kotamraju sat down to talk about the current state of the project with his colleagues Sharon Enright (Ohio Department of Education), Kathy Wilkins (Montana University System), Melvin D'Souza (Delaware Department of Education), and Glenna Zollinger-Russell (Michigan).
Here's an excerpt of their conversation:
Pradeep: This project is a larger part of a whole effort on the part of the Center to look at accountability and evaluation and provide technical assistance to states and local eligible agencies, in terms of adding value to their data systems. We aren't here to create new systems. These crosswalks were created for the states and all the Center is doing is taking that information that was created by the folks at the state level and bringing that back in some sense and providing some sort of documentation and, if you want to use the word rationality, behind some of the rules that were made in developing these crosswalks.
So what I'd like, and we'll start with you, Sharon, is once this work is completed, how would you see this helping your states? And that's a question I have for each one of you.
Sharon: At the secondary level, I need to develop a crosswalk between our CTE pathways programs with the SIP [School Improvement Plan] codes. And then this whole crosswalk will make my work much easier because all of these business rules have already been determined with the input of a lot of states, and I won't have to figure all this stuff out on my own and make my own business rules that might not coordinate with other states. I will also be working with our postsecondary folks, who do our postsecondary data, and make sure that they are using the same crosswalks, so that we use the same language and the same information to do our calculations.
Read the transcript of their discussion (PDF file).
To learn more about the Crosswalk Validation Project and the NRCCTE's other projects related to CTE Accountability and Evaluation, visit our website at http://www.nrccte.org/.
The NRCCTE's multimedia content- including podcasts, webcasts, full-length reports, Research Snapshots, and presentations- is always available from the NRCCTE website, http://www.nrccte.org/. If you have a comment or question about our products or projects, please drop us a line at nrccte@louisville.edu. We welcome your feedback!
Category: Career · Education | 0 Comments |
July 5th, 2011
The NRCCTE is preparing to launch a new joint report containing the most recent results from its four field-based studies of Programs of Study (POS). Morgan Lewis, co-author of the Center's 2008 literature review on POS, lent his expertise to this report by synthesizing findings from each of these studies.
To provide some background for this podcast and the report, POS were the most significant new requirement in the 2006 reauthorization of Perkins IV, which established as one of its priorities the development of information on the operation and effectiveness of these programs. In response, the NRCCTE undertook four research projects intended to examine POS from different perspectives. Three on-going projects are longitudinal studies that use some common data collection methods and some that are specific to their research questions. The fourth project, now concluded, used case study methods to describe how six states were implementing POS during the first half of 2010, four years after POS became part of the federal legislation.
Dr. Lewis talked to ACTE's Catherine Imperatore about each study and some of the findings they shared in common.
CI: Having written the Center's first report on this issue, and now having observed all of this research and the progress of implementation, what are your thoughts now on Programs of Study?
ML: I think our overall conclusion is that Perkins definitely has increased the emphasis on having articulated non-duplicative programs, and the attention being given to it. For the most part, this is not a brand new something that the Fed said you must do. It is really a continuation of trends which started back in the 80s with the Tech Prep and pathways and the development of career clusters. So, it's a natural evolution of what has been occurring in the field. But Perkins IV certainly put a spotlight on it, and concentrated effort to make sure that they had gone beyond just paper agreements, and were actually laying the structural foundation, which is necessary for a smooth transition from secondary to postsecondary.
Having said that, we raised in our initial paper, which was based on a review of previous initiatives and career development theory, the problem of the career development stage of students at the high school level. In almost all theories of career development, high school students are in the exploratory stage of their career development. They are trying to find out what is the match between their abilities and the demand for different types of occupations. And they're using their CTE courses to do that exploration.
Read the transcript of this discussion (PDF) or learn more about the NRCCTE's POS research projects, which we've featured in previous podcasts, on their project pages:
A Longitudinal Study of the South Carolina Personal Pathways to Success Initiative
Mature Programs of Study: A Postsecondary Perspective
Rigorous Tests of Student Outcomes in CTE Programs of Study
As always, our multimedia content- including podcasts, webcasts, full-length reports, Research Snapshots, and presentations- is always available from the NRCCTE website, http://www.nrccte.org/. If you have a comment or question about our products or projects, please drop us a line at nrccte@louisville.edu. We welcome your feedback!
Category: Career · Education | 0 Comments |
May 27th, 2011
The NRCCTE's Relative Impact study is examining what interventions help community college students stay in college and complete their programs-- especially students in occupational programs. At the beginning of thestudy, the Relative Impact team partnered with four community colleges that were recommended as places that had both good programs and good data systems. The study team has since conducted a series of site visits during which they have examined the range of interventions being offered in these colleges that help students to stay in college and complete their programs. This study is important not only because of the current national pressure to improve the number of students who complete a postsecondary credential of some kind, but also because the national data suggest that a student who attends postsecondary but doesn't complete any kind of credential does not receive much or any benefit in the workplace in terms of the wages they receive; such students often leave school with a great deal of debt, as well.
Recently, members of the study team--Christine ("Chris") Bremer, Bruce Center, Amy Hirschy, and Marisa Castellano--sat down with Catherine Imperatore of ACTE to talk about their latest findings and observations. Here's an excerpt of their conversation:
Bruce: I think it's important to remember this is a real-world study. And none of these interventions that we mention occur in a vacuum. They all work together. And an important aspect of this study is going to be to determine exactly what works for whom. And not all students are the same. This is not a one-size-fits-all operation.
Chris: That's right. So with the analysis we're doing, we can look at how combinations of interventions might affect students. In some cases, we're able to look at participation. In other cases, we're able to look at intensity of participation. So it's not just that you're a member. If we know that you're a member of the basketball team that would be participation. But if we know that you visit with your coach five times a year to talk about your courses or whatever, or you visit with your advisor three times a year, that's more of an intensity measure. Or if we know you're participating in learning communities, we know how many of those you participate in, and we know the number of hours that those are going on. We have different kinds of data about different kinds of interactions.
Read the transcript of this discussion (PDF document) or read more about the Relative Impact Study at the NRCCTE website.
The NRCCTE’s multimedia content- including podcasts, webcasts, full-length reports, Research Snapshots, and presentations- is always available from the NRCCTE website, http://www.nrccte.org/. If you have a comment or question about our products or projects, please drop us a line at nrccte@louisville.edu. We welcome your feedback!
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April 18th, 2011
In our continuing series on green-focused Programs of Study, Catherine Imperatore talked to John Pritchett, Middle School Curriculum Coordinator for Career, Technical and Agricultural Education for the Georgia Department of Education, about the state's development and implementation of green-focused Programs of Study as part of its participation in the NRCCTE's Technical Assistance Academy, led by the Academy for Educational Development (AED), and the challenges faced and lessons learned throughout the process.
Pritchett described how partners came together to build Georgia's green POS:
JP: One way, we started from the very beginning, simple question: "Do you want to be a part of the process to help our schools--middle schools, high schools, technical colleges and universities--better prepare and train our students for the careers in the future?" And, in asking that type of question, we were able to amass a team of more than 40 members. Industries, state agencies, research institutions, research facilities, business and industry partners and, actually, one partner represented 200 different Georgia corporations. That they were able to come together and put a strong support behind this, saying that, "Yes, we need this to be able to happen."
So, Georgia Power was a key component in helping make sure that that happened because of their network and connections with many of the related career areas and opportunities. So that was really helpful, by having Georgia Power at the table from the very beginning.
It was a win-win all around when we said that we want to be able to do this to help improve our students' qualifications when they graduate from either high school or from postsecondary. "Do you want to be a part of the team?" It was an immediate, "Yes, and how can I help?"
Download the transcript [PDF document] and learn more about Georgia's work on Programs of Study and the Green-Focused POS Technical Assistance Academy at the NRCCTE website, www.nrccte.org. You can also watch a recent NRCCTE video on green-focused POS at Los Angeles Trade-Tech College.
The NRCCTE's multimedia content- including podcasts, webcasts, full-length reports, Research Snapshots, and presentations- is always available from the NRCCTE website, http://www.nrccte.org/. If you have a comment or question about our products or projects, please drop us a line at nrccte@louisville.edu. We welcome your feedback!
Category: Career · Education | 0 Comments |
March 11th, 2011
CTE teachers who are well trained and supported in entering the teaching profession are more likely to remain in the field and build their teaching skills over time, resulting in a better trained teaching force. In partnership with the NRCCTE, the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) is developing an induction model for new CTE teachers pursuing an alternative route to certification that will increase their competence, self-efficacy, and retention. The model builds the capacity of beginning CTE teachers to offer instruction that is intellectually demanding and standards-focused and thus more likely to improve CTE students' academic achievement. The model also builds CTE teachers' capacity to design instruction that is actively engaging using strategies such as project-based learning and cooperative learning. Students who are actively engaged intellectually and emotionally in their high school courses are more likely to stay in school, acquire high school diplomas in four years, and enter postsecondary institutions without the need for remediation.
This year, the field test of the full induction model began with a summer institute in which 10 days of teacher training were delivered in Oklahoma to a group of 10 CTE teachers. The training combined content from the model's four modules: instructional planning, instructional strategies, assessment, and classroom management. Training is also being provided to the administrators and mentor teachers of the teacher-participants. Over the remainder of this year, the field test will continue with three, 2-day professional development sessions during the school year, a second summer institute in June 2011, coaching from the professional development instructor, support from the administrators and mentors at the school site, monthly webinars, and an interactive program website.
Heather Sass of SREB spoke to Catherine Imperatore of ACTE about how the field test is progressing. Among other topics, she described some of their early observations:
HS: We have some preliminary findings. We won't have all the data in until the end of June. But a few things are coming out really clearly from the work that we've been doing looking at the interviews and the surveys. One thing that's really clear to us is the professional development that these teachers get is really important. The two-week summer institute, while it was pretty intense and a very challenging learning experience because of its length and the number of new things that the teachers are learning, was actually very valuable to them.
When we got into October and November, and we continued to interview and survey the teachers, they said they had used a lot of what they learned in the summer institute, and the administrators on site told us that the teachers who had that summer institute were actually far better prepared to start this school year than their beginning teachers who were not in our field test group.
So, that's been really exciting. I think typically brand-new teachers like these have a sense of being overwhelmed with a lot of things-paperwork, school expectations, procedures, just the amount of the whole transition to this brand-new field that they're entering.
Learn more about the Alternative Licensure CTE Teacher Induction Model or read the transcript of this interview (PDF document).
The NRCCTE's multimedia content- including podcasts, webcasts, full-length reports, Research Snapshots, and presentations- is always available from the NRCCTE website, www.nrccte.org. If you have a comment or question about our products or projects, please drop us a line at nrccte@louisville.edu. We welcome your feedback!
Category: Career · Education | 0 Comments |
February 26th, 2011
In a recent interview, Catherine Imperatore conversed with John Foster of NOCTI, principal investigator for the Career and Technical Educators using Data Driven Improvement (CTEDDI) models project, as well as Frances Beauman, one of the project’s national facilitators, and several representatives from Chicago Public Schools: Johnnie Turner, manager of CTE Program Administration; Willie Chatman, culinary teacher at North-Grand High School; and Aarti Dhupelia, Chicago Public Schools CTE Director. They discussed the value of the model from their different vantage points.
During the interview, Chatman talked about his students' reactions to the assessments:
WC: For the students, initially the students had some anxiety about the assessments which was based on unknowns. However, after the first day, the student's anxiety decreased. My juniors, who took the pre test, reported that there were questions on the assessment that they had not covered, but would be helpful in focusing their studies when they covered the material in the classroom in the future.
For my seniors who took the post-test, they stated the questions on the assessment gave them a sense of importance to retaining the material over time because the assessment gave them reason to remember, besides, "The teacher said so."
Each group was enthusiastic about the challenge the assessment presented outside of the snapshot our classroom assessments provided. And each group reported that assessments helped them identify gaps in what had been covered in class and retained, and the expectations of the industry and postsecondary requirements.
Download the transcript [PDF document] and learn more about the CTEDDI project at the NRCCTE website, www.nrccte.org.
The NRCCTE's multimedia content- including podcasts, webcasts, full-length reports, Research Snapshots, and presentations- is always available from the NRCCTE website, www.nrccte.org. If you have a comment or question about our products or projects, please drop us a line at nrccte@louisville.edu. We welcome your feedback!
Category: Career · Education | 2 Comments » |
January 26th, 2011
In our continuing series on green-focused Programs of Study, Catherine Imperatore talked to Brian Durham, Senior Director for Academic Affairs and CTE in the division of Academic Affairs and Workforce Development of the Illinois Community College Board, about the state's development and implementation of green-focused Programs of Study as as part of its participation in the NRCCTE's Technical Assistance Academy, led by the Academy for Educational Development (AED), and the challenges faced and lessons learned throughout the process.
During the interview, Durham talked about how the state's approach to Programs of Study has changed over time:
BD: The approach we've taken in Illinois ... We started out, I think the way that a lot of the states did it, that Programs of Study is a terminal process that you start them, you finish them and you're done. And we did that when we initially implemented or began implementation of Perkins IV. And we found that it wasn't very effective and that it really caused a lot of skittishness from the field. And frankly, it's not really the way the programs are developed anyway.
So, what we did then is we recalibrated our efforts. We've worked closely with the University of Illinois to build a continuous improvement process, and we've approached Program of Study implementation with the understanding that these programs are already out there. They're already built. We all know through Tech Prep and through other partnerships that secondary/postsecondary relationships already exist. So, we're not starting from scratch.
So, we approached it that building Programs of Study is a continuous improvement process. They're already there. We're already working or always working through improvement, and that helped a lot just in general. I think that's one of the big lessons we were learning at the same time we were involved in the Technical Assistance Academy. We've just made that shift, so we approach the Programs of Study in these areas that way.
Download the transcript [PDF document] and learn more about Illinois' work on Programs of Study and the Green-Focused POS Technical Assistance Academy at the NRCCTE website, www.nrccte.org. You can also watch a recent NRCCTE video on green-focused POS at Los Angeles Trade-Tech College.
The NRCCTE's multimedia content- including podcasts, webcasts, full-length reports, Research Snapshots, and presentations- is always available from the NRCCTE website, http://www.nrccte.org/. If you have a comment or question about our products or projects, please drop us a line at nrccte@louisville.edu. We welcome your feedback!
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January 6th, 2011
R. Brent Young, an Assistant Professor of Agricultural & Extension Education at North Dakota State University, recently spoke to Catherine Imperatore of ACTE about the Center's Science-in-CTE research study. Dr. Young is the Lead Project Director for this study in North Dakota, the site of the research. Science-in-CTE is testing a model of curriculum integration that enhances the science that naturally occurs in CTE curricula. Using a group-randomized approach, the study is replicating the Math-in-CTE study in the fields of chemistry and biology as applied to agriculture and health.
Donna Pearson, principal investigator of Science-in-CTE, introduced the project in a podcast released earlier this past year.
Here’s an excerpt from their conversation:
BY: We conducted a debriefing session with the experimental agriculture teachers and their science teacher partners in June, and conducted some focus group and individual interviews, as well as collecting some survey data. That's really been the qualitative part of the research study; obviously, the test scores were the quantitative.
And we found some very interesting information. In general, the teachers were quite impressed with the lessons that were developed. They felt that their students did very well in terms of going through those lessons, and that the lessons did have a positive impact on their science academic ability.
We also had a very favorable report from the science teacher partners that they felt, again, that the lessons were quite valuable and very robust, as far as the science content was concerned. And many of them indicated that they had actually picked up on some very good practical examples of the use of science in agriculture that they would plan to use in their own science classes in the future.
Read more about Science-in-CTE at the NRCCTE website. Read the transcript of this podcast here, and a one-page project overview is also available.
Have a comment or question about our products or projects? Please drop us a line at nrccte@louisville.edu. The NRCCTE’s multimedia content- including podcasts, videos, full-length reports, Research Snapshots, and presentations- is always available from the NRCCTE website, http://www.nrccte.org/. We welcome your feedback!
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December 21st, 2010
Continuing our series on green-focused Programs of Study, Catherine Imperatore talked to Ike Kershaw, assistant director of the Office of Career-Technical Education in the Ohio Department of Education, about the state's development and implementation of green-focused Programs of Study as as part of its participation in the NRCCTE's Technical Assistance Academy, led by the Academy for Educational Development (AED), and the challenges faced and lessons learned throughout the process.
During the interview, Kershaw talked about how Ohio got started on this path:
IK: The whole green trend was sweeping the country, both economically and education's response to it, was being explored in any number of different ways. Ohio's economy was not well; unemployment was a significant factor. Economic development, manufacturing was moving overseas. And so there were a lot of people looking to this green industry potential for possibly helping to turn some things around. At the same time, we had a lot of secondary programs, and I can speak for secondary programs because the Department of Ed focuses on secondary, were really expressing a need for some state leadership, where are we going with green and what does it mean to our programs. So we thought the Green POS initiative was timely, and thought we would throw our hat in. It would have been two years ago.
Download the transcript [PDF document] and learn more about Ohio's work on Programs of Study and the Green-Focused POS Technical Assistance Academy at the NRCCTE website, www.nrccte.org. You can also watch a recent NRCCTE video on green-focused POS at Los Angeles Trade-Tech College.
The NRCCTE’s multimedia content- including podcasts, webcasts, full-length reports, Research Snapshots, and presentations- is always available from the NRCCTE website, http://www.nrccte.org/. If you have a comment or question about our products or projects, please drop us a line at nrccte@louisville.edu. We welcome your feedback!
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November 29th, 2010
Marisa Castellano and Kirsten Sundell, co-principal investigators of the Rigorous Tests of Student Outcomes in CTE Programs of Study project, recently spent several days in "District 2," a large urban school district in the Southeastern United States, where they visited their study school, "Blue Academy," and the four comparison schools that are part of the quasi-experimental strand of their four-year longitudinal study. The study is now in its third year, and cohort students are 11th graders.
District 2 has multiple magnet programs across all grade spans. At the high school level, a number of schools (or programs within schools) offer a range of magnets that are available to students through a lottery process. Applicants must demonstrate successful completion of core competency standards (in reading, math, and computers). Blue Academy is a state-of-the-art high school featuring three integrated technology academies combining rigorous academics with strong, well-articulated POS in engineering, medical sciences and biotechnology, and information technology. Blue is located in a state with secondary/postsecondary statewide articulation agreements, providing students with a seamless transition to college and the opportunity to earn credits that can be applied to an associate degree or postsecondary certificate program. There are also local articulation agreements between the district and the local college.
Marisa and Kirsten talked to Catherine Imperatore of ACTE about some of the things they saw during this visit, which included the effects of the economic downturn on the state, district, schools, and CTE programs; technology use; curriculum integration; and overall changes occuring in this district.
MC: During the visit, we also saw that professional development in a POS school is not about "how to implement a Program of Study." Since here, these programs preceded the Perkins legislation, so professional development here is assisting teachers schoolwide-not just academic teachers, not just CTE teachers, but all teachers in topics like technical-level literacy. The students are reading at grade level, but they have to read beyond grade level to succeed in these programs and be able to read what they have to read in their field.
We also noticed, again, the most pressing issue right now is the budget. CTE is hardly every front and center in a district's concerns and Programs of Study are certainly not front and center now. Academy chairs are doing more with less. They've lost the extra planning time as chairs, to network with industry and postsecondary partners, and to write grants.
Download the transcript [PDF document] and learn more about the Rigorous Tests of Student Outcomes in CTE Programs of Study project at the NRCCTE website, www.nrccte.org.
The NRCCTE's multimedia content- including podcasts, webcasts, full-length reports, Research Snapshots, and presentations- is always available from the NRCCTE website, http://www.nrccte.org/. If you have a comment or question about our products or projects, please drop us a line at nrccte@louisville.edu. We welcome your feedback!
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November 21st, 2010
Marie Barry, director of New Jersey's Office of Career and Technical Education, spoke to Catherine Imperatore of ACTE about the work done by the state and its partners--including its "green-collar advisory committee"--to develop green programs of study (POS) as part of its participation in the NRCCTE's Technical Assistance Academy, led by the Academy for Educational Development (AED).
During the interview, Barry talked about how New Jersey, a very locally controlled state, labored to develop model programs at the state level that could then be adopted at the local level. The state's focus of sustainable design, construction, and energy was arrived at through the input of its business and industry advisory partners, state employment and training commission, and secondary and postsecondary partners. Beyond the sheer amount of time needed to develop POS, a core challenge was getting all of the partners speaking the same language:
MB: In working with business and industry, they needed to understand this Program of Study language. What did this mean? Our secondary and postsecondary folks also needed to understand each other's language. In ways, we're both education groups, but there are different dialects, if you will. It was not until I had my second or third meeting with academic advisers from all of our community colleges that they finally said, "Aha. I get that."
The only reason they got it was I wasn't talking to them anymore. I found someone that was on our advisory group, and he was an academic dean from one of our community colleges. It took him a while sitting in our advisory group to understand us. He came with me to this other meeting and he translated. So he was the translator, then they finally understood what we were trying to do. Now, it seems like we are in the same place with folks. Really a lot more time in trying to build meaningful relationships and understand the common goal that we were all working towards.
Download the transcript [PDF document] and learn more about New Jersey's work on Programs of Study and the Green-Focused POS Technical Assistance Academy at the NRCCTE website, www.nrccte.org. You can also watch a recent NRCCTE video on green-focused POS at Los Angeles Trade-Tech College.
The NRCCTE’s multimedia content- including podcasts, webcasts, full-length reports, Research Snapshots, and presentations- is always available from the NRCCTE website, http://www.nrccte.org/. If you have a comment or question about our products or projects, please drop us a line at nrccte@louisville.edu. We welcome your feedback!
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October 31st, 2010
Between April and October 2010, a subgroup of the Next Steps Working Group was formed to discuss Program of Study (POS) measurement, accountability and evaluation. The broad question the subgroup set out to answer was the following: How will a state know that its POS implementation strategy is working?
As a result of their conversations, the subgroup has drafted a report with four recommendations. The recommendations will be formally released in November, but you can hear a preview here.
The subgroup, and this podcast, is led by Pradeep Kotamraju, Deputy Director of the National Research Center for CTE. Other participants include:
- Randy Dean, Technical College System of Georgia
- Rick Mangini, Ohio Department of Education
- John Townsend, Tennessee Board of Regents
During the podcast, John Townsend raised the issue of two perspectives on CTE programs at the secondary level that differ among the states:
JT: I've been in recent discussions in various states, as well as at OVAE, and it appears that there are two, shall we say, focuses of CTE programs in the secondary. One idea is for the secondary CTE programs to be very general in preparatory, in general preparation of the student to go into postsecondary. The other states are very prescriptive. In other words, they set out very specific courses that are linked to moving students into particular postsecondary areas of study. So I think the states, I don't know what the split is, but there appears to be some split at the secondary level, whether a Program of Study tries to "save" CTE at the secondary level. Again, that's more of a state initiative. But I think we have both rubrics out there in the sense of emphases.
Download the transcript [PDF document] and learn more about CTE Accountability and Evaluation on the NRCCTE website, www.nrccte.org.
The NRCCTE’s multimedia content- including podcasts, webcasts, full-length reports, Research Snapshots, and presentations- is always available from the NRCCTE website, http://www.nrccte.org/. If you have a comment or question about our products or projects, please drop us a line at nrccte@louisville.edu. We welcome your feedback!
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September 28th, 2010
Recently Catherine Imperatore of ACTE spoke with the principal investigators of the Online Occupational Education in Community Colleges project: Rod Githens, University of Louisville; Fashaad Crawford, Kent State University; and Kristin B. Wilson, University of Louisville. The study examined the current state of online occupational programs in community colleges and explored issues related to institutional, economic, and social indicators that influence (a) the offering of online programs and (b) the programmatic connection to workforce development needs.
Kristin Wilson shared some of the takeaways on programming:
KW: The interesting part of that is, oftentimes, when you think of programming at a community college, you think of supporting your existing local workforce. So what you're thinking about is how you can do contract training or for credit programming that supports businesses that are already there and helps them grow. But, because of the current economy, businesses are leaving, particularly in rural areas. And so the challenge for community college administrators needs to be to think about how you can create a workforce that will grow an economy in a local area, based on whatever their attributes are, whatever their economic niches are. That's a real challenge for community college practitioners that they haven't had before.
Download the transcript [PDF document] and learn more about the Online Occupational Education in Community Colleges project on the NRCCTE website, www.nrccte.org.
The NRCCTE’s multimedia content- including podcasts, webcasts, full-length reports, Research Snapshots, and presentations- is always available from the NRCCTE website, http://www.nrccte.org/. If you have a comment or question about our products or projects, please drop us a line at nrccte@louisville.edu. We welcome your feedback!
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August 31st, 2010
Catherine Imperatore of ACTE recently spoke with Tom Thompson of the Office of Educational Improvement and Innovation in the Oregon Department of Education about green-focused Programs of Study. Oregon was one of five states that participated in the Academy for Educational Development’s Technical Assistance Academy for green-focused Programs of Study.
During the interview, Thompson describes how the state's green-focused Programs of Study was developed with business and industry cooperation:
TT: … They were at the table from the beginning, and actually as the development evolved, what we constantly went back to was, is this what's necessary? Let's figure out whether the things that we're proposing make sense from an industry perspective. And what role would industry take in the continuation of this? Because this is not a project that begins one point during the year and ends on later on in that year. It's something that will continue on for quite some time as we continue to refine pieces.
Industry folks have stepped up and offered the fact that they should be part of, and actually maybe central to a statewide industry advisory group that would continue to advise the sustainable building Program of Study. They also stepped up in terms of professional development and said we would like to be more involved in helping provide the professional development for teachers that are interested in building sustainable practices into their programs.
Download the transcript [PDF document] and learn more about Programs of Study (POS) and the Green-Focused POS Technical Assistance Academy at the NRCCTE website, www.nrccte.org. You can also watch a recent NRCCTE video on green-focused POS at Los Angeles Trade-Tech College.
The NRCCTE’s multimedia content- including podcasts, webcasts, full-length reports, Research Snapshots, and presentations- is always available from the NRCCTE website, http://www.nrccte.org/. If you have a comment or question about our products or projects, please drop us a line at nrccte@louisville.edu. We welcome your feedback!
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July 29th, 2010
Catherine Imperatore recently spoke with Ray Hasart, the CTE Regional Coordinator for Oregon's High Desert Education Service District, on the recommendation of the NRCCTE's partners at NOCTI. Although Oregon was not one of the 5 states participating in NOCTI's NRCCTE-funded study of professional development for CTE educators on the use of assessment data, the NOCTI team consulted with the state in order to arrive at a baseline understanding of how the nation's CTE programs have been using data for professional development. Experts in Oregon were also interviewed as part of the joint publication produced by the NRCCTE's professional development workgroup - you may download that report from the NRCCTE website (PDF document).
In this podcast, Ray talks about how his district is using data to improve teaching and learning in CTE classrooms.
CI: Is there professional development that helps the teachers learn how to use the
assessment data?
RH: Yes, we have data trainings twice a year in what we call their Program of Study
maintenance meetings. They get there data there and then we have a specialist who is an
ex-teacher that works for us now that actually talks to those teachers: "Here is the data and
here are some ideas." So for example in agriculture—that's one of my background
specialties—we found that teachers were low in the use of GPSs and GISs. So we were able
to identify that with their assessment. We brought all the teachers in, they all agreed, even
at the college level. Then we used Perkins dollars to buy the training and the equipment and
then had a specialist come and train them on that.
Download the transcript [PDF document] or read more about the Professional Development for Teachers and Administrators on the Use of Assessment Data study at the NRCCTE website.
The NRCCTE's multimedia content- including podcasts, webcasts, full-length reports, Research Snapshots, and presentations- is always available from the NRCCTE website, http://www.nrccte.org/. If you have a comment or question about our products or projects, please drop us a line at nrccte@louisville.edu. We welcome your feedback!
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July 1st, 2010
Catherine Imperatore of ACTE recently spoke with Liz van der Mandele, who works with Travis Park, principal investigator of Authentic Literacy Applications in CTE: Helping All Students Learn. This study seeks to determine the impact of disciplinary literacy strategies on the reading comprehension and motivation to read for students enrolled in CTE courses by comparing the effects of literacy strategy instruction under two models of content area reading interventions and a control condition.
Travis, Liz, and the rest of the Authentic Literacy team have been collecting data and conducting interviews with teachers and students and are now analyzing those data in order to arrive at some early findings and observations.
Liz shared a few of those findings:
... a lot of teachers found that when they used the strategies, they were doing less teaching and really changing the classroom from the lecture style to student centered. We found with that, the students really enjoyed that, and they really liked being able to have more choice. A lot of the teachers asked students for feedback about the strategies, and asked them, "Which ones did you prefer? Which ones do you want to use?" They went off that feedback, and the students really felt more like adult learners. They really enjoyed having that sense of agency in the classroom. So, those were the big ones.
In terms of the strategies used in classrooms, it really just mattered so much with the teacher. It mattered so much the different classes that there really weren't certain strategies that worked super well in every single classroom. There were a couple, but it really depended on the teacher, depended on the content, and depended on the students.
We also found that students were a lot more engaged with the text. Teachers were doing a lot less reviewing at the end of the session, which was really nice for them.
They did stray away from some of the strategies that required a little more prep work. But, we had some teachers, especially teachers who were in the pilot and are now in this past year's study, that found that it might have been a lot of prep work in the beginning, but that the second year, they already had it done. So really it made it a lot easier, and it got a lot easier towards the second year.
Read the transcript (PDF document) and learn more about Authentic Literacy Applications in CTE: Helping All Students Learn at the NRCCTE website.
The NRCCTE's multimedia content- including podcasts, webcasts, full-length reports, Research Snapshots, and presentations- is always available from the NRCCTE website, www.nrccte.org/. If you have a comment or question about our products or projects, please drop us a line at nrccte@louisville.edu. We welcome your feedback!
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June 11th, 2010
Marisa Castellano and Kirsten Sundell, co-principal investigators of the Rigorous Tests of Student Outcomes in CTE Programs of Study (POS) project, recently completed a round of site visits in for their study, most recently in District 1, one of the randomized controlled trial sites in their three-state/district study. This district employs a lottery to place students in its choice programs. District 1 study students attend three choice schools that structure their POS in different ways. The PIs visited all three schools plus several control schools out of a much larger control pool. They also conducted interviews with faculty and administrators at the well-regarded community college that serves this large district.
Drs. Castellano and Sundell talked to Lacey Reeves at ACTE about what they saw and found on this site visit. An excerpt of their conversation is below:
LR: Can you tell me what are you learning from the community colleges about POS?
MC: Community colleges are a lot closer to the heartbeat of the local economy than K-12 school districts can be. Colleges know when jobs are available because their enrollment drops. They are also closely connected to area employers, who look to them for trained people to hire. They increase educational access and equity by offering a broad range of educational and training options. We are fortunate to have stellar community colleges in our study.
But despite this, our site visits uncovered some snags in the process of implementing POS. One of our colleges spent a lot of their resources-funds and personnel hours and changing the schedule-to create programs with the district that would prepare students for advanced entry into their programs. But these preparatory opportunities made participating students very attractive to other schools, and the college has found itself left on the sidelines as these students are offered and have accepted full four-year scholarships at prestigious universities. The return on the college's investment has not been good, and this has become an issue for them as they consider the future of their involvement with the district.
The second big problem we saw relates to the budget crises that seem to be happening in every state. Devastating program cuts, personnel cuts and other cuts are happening in both of our districts due to budget cutbacks. One of the community colleges in this study had to eliminate its dual enrollment program for high school students taking general education courses because the state could no longer reimburse the college for those credits taken.
Download the transcript [PDF document] or read more about the Rigorous Tests of Student Outcomes in CTE Programs of Study project at the NRCCTE website.
The NRCCTE’s multimedia content- including podcasts, webcasts, full-length reports, Research Snapshots, and presentations- is always available from the NRCCTE website, http://www.nrccte.org/. If you have a comment or question about our products or projects, please drop us a line at nrccte@louisville.edu. We welcome your feedback!
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May 7th, 2010
Heather Boggs Sass of the Southern Regional Education Board is a principal investigator of the Alternative Licensure Career/Technical Teacher Induction Model. Dr. Sass joined Catherine Imperatore of ACTE to talk about the field tests she and her colleagues have been conducting of an induction model for new career and technical education (CTE) teachers pursuing an alternative route to certification that will increase their competence, self-efficacy and retention. These tests have taken place in Oklahoma and South Carolina.
This induction model features a series of professional development sessions that emphasize four areas of knowledge and skill teachers need to improve student achievement and preparedness for further learning and the workplace: planning standards-based instruction, using research-based instructional strategies, assessing students to promote learning, and effectively managing classrooms. Support elements include mentoring from an educator in the teacher's school, coaching from the professional development instructor, the guidance of a school principal, and the support of electronic communities of practice with cohort peers.
Here's an excerpt from their conversation:
HS: One of the things that we're really experiencing is that these beginning teachers who come through an alternative route together have some things that are similar. They've had workplace experience that's extremely valuable. They tend to know their content pretty well and be pretty confident in the skills that they're going to teach.
But other than that, they are very diverse. They can be different ages. They have very different levels of educational preparation. Some will have high school diplomas with professional training, others may even have graduate degrees.
So we need to be able to differentiate the professional development that they're going to be experiencing, and that's a big challenge, as, interestingly enough, it will be a challenge for them as they turn to their own classrooms and differentiate with their own students who have different learning needs.
The beginning teachers also bring a very different level of math and literacy skills themselves because they've used math and reading very differently in their different career contexts, so that's something to think about.
I think a big challenge is to get that sequence and pace of the learning in the professional development just right so that we are really, in working with the beginning teachers, teaching for learning and not just covering things that they need to know as beginning teachers.
So, the final challenge we see is the building the capacity of our state partners, who will turn and implement this model hopefully themselves, and really helping them understand what we're learning, how it's impacting the induction model, and then how it will impact ultimately the training of the very partners they'll be working with in their own state.
Read more about the Alternative Licensure Career/Technical Teacher Induction Model at the NRCCTE website. Read the transcript here.
The NRCCTE's multimedia content- including podcasts, webcasts, full-length reports, Research Snapshots, and presentations- is always available from the NRCCTE website, http://www.nrccte.org/. If you have a comment or question about our products or projects, please drop us a line at nrccte@louisville.edu. We welcome your feedback!
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April 29th, 2010
NOCTI is leading a study focused on the development of interventions that combine the professional development of teachers and administrators in schools with how they can use the data and information obtained from administering technical assessments in the secondary-level CTE classroom to make decisions about how to improve student achievement. In 2009, the NOCTI team conducted a descriptive survey that investigated how secondary CTE educators, both administrators and teachers, use technical assessment data to improve program curriculum and identify individual and group instructional needs. In order to gain additional perspectives on schools' adoption of data use for program improvement, the team also conducted case studies in six sites. Overall, educators indicated that their opinion of testing had improved as a result of professional development on the use of assessment data, and several commented that the main reason for the change was a better understanding of tests and the use of assessment data.
As part of this project, Catherine Imperatore of ACTE spoke to Dr. Aldo Jackson of Erie County Technical School about his school's involvement in the NOCTI project.
Here's an excerpt from their conversation:
CI: How do you ensure that your educators and administrators are using assessment data-effectively using assessment data to make decisions in the classroom?
AJ: There are three things that kind of drive whether or not we're making sure that the teachers and other administrators in our school use that assessment data. Probably one of the most important things is that we place a very high value on data-based decision making. We're a Tech Centers That Work school. SREB [Southern Regional Education Board] conducts a faculty survey every year. And in last year's survey, 67 percent of our teachers noted that the school uses data to continuously evaluate the center's effectiveness. So, we're pretty comfortable that our staff appreciates the fact that the decision making process is based on the data.
In terms of making sure that that value is there, you have to ask questions when the decision making process is going on. What's the proof? Where is the data that supports the need for this change or that change? And oftentimes, we kind of have to rein in the decision-making process, saying, "There's no data to support the direction you're going." So, that's one thing we do to make sure that we all use data for that program improvement.
Download the transcript [PDF document] or read more about the Professional Development for Teachers and Administrators on the Use of Assessment Data study at the NRCCTE website.
The NRCCTE's multimedia content- including podcasts, webcasts, full-length reports, Research Snapshots, and presentations- is always available from the NRCCTE website, http://www.nrccte.org/. If you have a comment or question about our products or projects, please drop us a line at nrccte@louisville.edu. We welcome your feedback!
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