School Content Areas Research Articles

Computational thinking infusion as transformative teaching: investigating content area teacher perspectives and practices

ABSTRACT Background and Context Using a transformative learning framework, this qualitative study examines the perspectives and practices of 70 middle and high school content area teachers who attended two or more summer professional development workshops. Objective This study describes how teachers’ disciplinary perspectives and backgrounds influence their understanding of CT infusion and their implementation of CT-infused lessons. Method Data sources for this qualitative comparative case study analysis included: retrospective video reflections, implementation surveys, post-PD surveys, and instructional materials. Findings Analysis revealed differences in terms of disorienting dilemmas teachers faced, shifts in their frames of reference, the form of classroom CT infusion, and their integration of specific CT concepts. Implications This study contributes a comparative analysis of how teachers from different content areas come to understand CT infusion and implement CT-infused pedagogical practices to support their disciplinary teaching. Findings indicate the importance of including all teachers, STEM and non-STEM, in CT infusion efforts.

Building a Virtual Community of Practice: Teacher Learning for Computational Thinking Infusion.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to an urgent need for professional development (PD) experiences to support teacher learning across hybrid and digital contexts. This study investigates teachers’ experiences in a Virtual Pivot, a PD workshop designed to support computational thinking integration into disciplinary teaching. Participants were 151 middle and high school content area teachers, including 49 teachers who participated in previous face-to-face workshops. Virtual Pivot employed research-based design principles for virtual teacher PD, including asynchronous and synchronous engagement, explicit instruction in technological tools and scaffolds for teacher collaboration. Data sources included pre-PD surveys (n = 151), post-PD surveys (n = 119), interviews (n = 57) and six-month follow-up surveys (n = 105). Findings describe elements of Virtual Pivot which supported teacher learning and engagement (virtual community of practice, PD structure, during-PD support, pre-PD support and badges). We conclude by discussing this study’s theoretical, methodological and practical contributions for designing and investigating virtual computational thinking PD experiences.

Teachers’ text use in middle school content-area classrooms

Teachers’ text use in middle school content-area classrooms

Incorporating Evidence-Based Literacy Practices into Middle School Content Areas

Incorporating Evidence-Based Literacy Practices into Middle School Content Areas

Preparing to Implement Evidence-Based Literacy Practices in the Co-taught Classroom

It is essential that middle school content-area and special education co-teachers adopt evidence-based literacy practices that they can integrate into their content-area instruction to address the needs of all of the students in their classes. This article provides co-teachers with four planning tips to improve implementation of the practices they adopt. The planning tips are organized using the acronym FIRST: (a) monitor Fidelity of implementation of the adopted practices, (b) Integrate the practices into daily content-area instruction and across the year, (c) determine the Roles of each co-teacher when planning for and implementing instruction in the adopted practices, and (d) consider specific guidelines to Select Texts for each literacy-focused lesson. The planning tips are illustrated using examples related to the content-area literacy instruction (CALI) instructional framework, which is a set of evidence-based literacy practices and procedures designed to improve the literacy instruction middle school coteachers implement in their content-area classes.

Individualizing Literacy Instruction in Co-Taught Classrooms Through a Station Teaching Model

The Project CALI (Content Area Literacy Instruction) instructional framework is designed to enhance reading comprehension for all students, those with disabilities as well as their typically developing peers, in inclusive co-taught middle school content-area classrooms. For students with and at-risk for disabilities, even well-designed, research-based, and whole-class instruction often leads to inadequate improvement in reading comprehension and thus learning of content material. In CALI, teachers use student data to determine which students need more support and targeted, individualized instruction, and by contrast, which students may benefit from opportunities to extend their learning with more challenging texts and student-managed work. This article provides guidance for designing and implementing customizable lessons using station-teaching to individualize instruction. The Project CALI student support model is the final instructional piece of the CALI instructional framework.

Promoting equity and access for California’s Long Term English Language Learners

ABSTRACTThis article presents a literature review regarding the identification and pedagogical practices for educating English language learners and the newly designated student classification of Long Term English Language Learners (LTELs) in California. Challenges encountered by middle and high school content area teachers are highlighted as well as instructional supports that can be implemented to enhance and increase English Learner student success. Educating English Learners is a multifaceted endeavor that includes an active response from teachers and site and district administrators. The article presents a practical response for promoting equity, access and academic success for English Learner students

Attending to Precision: Vocabulary Support in Middle School Mathematics Classrooms

ABSTRACTMastery of language is critical to the mastery of content in middle school content area classrooms. In order to comprehend the disciplinary-specific texts that they encounter in their social studies, language arts, science, and mathematics classrooms, students must be literate in the content area vocabulary that is specific to those disciplines. Otherwise, specialized content area language may pose a barrier to student comprehension of content. Therefore, middle school teachers hold the dual responsibility of not only teaching their content but thoughtfully engaging their students with content area language during instruction. In this descriptive observational study, we explore the language support and focus in 1 middle school’s mathematics classrooms. We observed a total of 4 teachers and classrooms over a month-and-a-half time period.

Academic Language as a Predictor of Reading Comprehension in Monolingual Spanish‐Speaking Readers: Evidence From Chilean Early Adolescents

AbstractAlthough literacy achievement has improved in Chile, adolescents’ underperformance in reading comprehension is still a serious concern. In English, core academic‐language skills (CALS) have been found to significantly predict reading comprehension, even controlling for academic vocabulary knowledge.CALSare high‐utility language skills that support reading comprehension across school content areas. Guided by an operational definition of SpanishCALS(S‐CALS), three goals drove this study: to develop two psychometrically reliable tests, the S‐CALSInstrument and the Spanish Academic Vocabulary (S‐AVoc) Test; to explore the dimensionality of core academic‐language proficiencies, as measured by these two tests; and to examine the contribution of core academic‐language proficiencies to reading comprehension. A cross‐sectional sample of 810 Chilean students (grades 4–8) participated in four assessments that measured standardized reading comprehension, word‐reading fluency, Spanish academic vocabulary, and S‐CALS. Using classical test theory and item response theory analyses, results yielded robust reliability evidence for both instruments. Consistent with prior research, S‐CALSand academic vocabulary scores displayed upward trends in higher grades yet considerable within‐grade variability. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed that S‐CALSand S‐AVoc were best conceptualized as part of a higher order construct, the Spanish core academic‐language and vocabulary skills (S‐CALVS). The aggregated S‐CALVSscores predicted reading comprehension, beyond the contribution of grade, school factors, and word‐reading fluency. This study advances our scientific understanding ofCALSas relevant for adolescent literacy beyond the English language. The high‐utility school‐relevant language and vocabulary skills offer promising tools to inform and evaluate innovative reading comprehension interventions for Spanish‐speaking adolescents.

Patterns in Teachers' Instructional Design When Integrating Apps in Middle School Content-Area Teaching

The purpose of this study was to examine patterns evident in the ways middle school teachers, who value technology integration, design instruction that leverages educational applications (app) affordances. Using the pedagogy of multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015) and app affordances of multimodality, collaboration, and interactivity as guides, 17 instructional chains designed by nine teachers were analyzed for patterns. Findings revealed teachers launched iPad-integrated instruction by using content apps to engage students in experiencing information at the beginning of each lesson or by using a flipped classroom model. Additionally, all instruction incorporated multiple apps and multiple knowledge processes, although some sequences were all-digital and others combined digital and nondigital activities.

School Processes that Can Drive Scaling-Up of an Innovation, or Contribute to Its Abandonment

This paper reports findings from a multi-year study of the scale-up of Reading Apprenticeship (RA), an approach to improve academic literacy by helping teachers provide the support students need to be successful readers in the content areas. WestEd’s Strategic Literacy Initiative (SLI), began developing the program in 1995 and has since reached over 100,000 teachers in schools across the country, at the middle school, high school and college levels. In 2010, WestEd received a “Validation” grant from the Department of Education’s Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) competition to scale-up and study the Reading Apprenticeship Improving Secondary Education (RAISE) project. For this five-year project, SLI focused on three secondary school content areas: English Language Arts, History, and Biology. From the grant, SLI not only funded an independent randomized control trial, but also a parallel effort to study the schools outside of the RCT that were to receive the same professional development and other supports in implementing RA. This scale-up study was intended to provide formative feedback to the SLI developers to help them achieve their goal to build local education agency capacity to disseminate, support, and sustain academic literacy improvement in high school subject areas within their regions. Whereas, the i3 and similar funding can “prime the pump,” the project must build the capacity to disseminate, support, and sustain the innovation. Ultimately, adoption at the state-level, driven by local adoption and evidence of success, will keep it going.This formative evaluation of RAISE implementation collected and analyzed data on the number of trainings, the reach of the program, and the program elements that were taken up or not by participants. In this study, we followed 239 schools in four states (Utah, Michigan, Indiana, and Pennsylvania) as they participated in the expansion of the program. Schools and teachers were added to the project each year. We surveyed the teachers and principals and participated in many of the project meetings and training events. We tracked participation in the scale-up through sign-in sheets at each of the training events and maintained a spreadsheet of all the schools and teachers recording new additions each year and, less systematically, as teachers left the school or stopped participating in the program. Approximately 1720 teachers received training in the scale-up study side of the overall i3 project.To support inquiry into the scale-up process, we developed an unconventional spiraling logic model (Zacamy, Newman, Lin, & Jaciw, 2015) described below, which was inspired by the effort of putting the SLI approach to scaling up nationally together with Coburn’s (2003) insights in the processes of buy-in and commitment that make an innovation self-sustaining. The logic model pointed to activities that potentially mediated between the RAISE program and changes in educator attitudes.Our first set of studies, reviewed below (and reported in Zacamy, Jaciw, Lin, & Newman, 2014; Zacamy & Newman, 2014; Zacamy et al., 2015), examined survey responses to gauge adoption of RA, buy in by teachers and school administrators along with measures of participation in program activities. These analyses provided useful insights and suggestions about malleable factors that could be focus of future improvements. The surveys, however, did not directly address the actual scaling-up of RA, that is, the numerical increase in number of teachers and schools using RA. This is an issue addressed in our logic model, which hypothesized that “as capacity and support builds, we expect districts and schools to increase the numbers of teachers implementing RA; that is, schools will send more teachers to RAISE training and spread the RA ideas to other districts and schools.” We were also sympathetic to the idea that scale-up can be measured in terms of the increasing numbers of participants over time (Slavin, 2002). With these considerations in mind, we harvested the data from the participant tracker and created a dataset of schools and teachers with which we could measure the growth and loss of RAISE participation within states, districts, and schools. These increases or decreases in number of participants becomes an outcome that can be considered the goal of the investments in professional development that are hypothesized to promote intermediate outcomes such as local level ownership and commitment.The current paper reports our analysis linking growth in numbers of participants to contextual variables, e.g., school size, percent free and reduced price lunch (FRPL), to program events, e.g., monthly meetings, and to teacher and principal level of commitment.

Beyond Vocabulary: Exploring Cross-Disciplinary Academic-Language Proficiency and Its Association With Reading Comprehension

Despite a longstanding awareness of academic language as a pedagogically relevant research area, the construct of academic language proficiency, understood as a more comprehensive set of skills than just academic vocabulary, has remained vaguely specified. In this study, we explore a more inclusive operationalization of an academic language proficiency construct, Core Academic Language Skills (CALS). CALS refers to a constellation of high-utility language skills hypothesized to support reading comprehension across school content areas. Using the CALS-I, a theoretically grounded and psychometrically robust innovative instrument, we first examined the variability in students' CALS by grade, English proficiency designation, and socioeconomic status (SES). Then, we examined the contribution of CALS to reading comprehension using academic vocabulary knowledge, word reading fluency, and socio- demographic factors as covariates. A linguistically and socioeconomically diverse cross- sectional sample of 218 students (grades 4-6) participated in four assessments: the CALS-I, a standardized reading comprehension assessment (GMRT), an academic vocabulary test (VAT), and a word reading fluency test (TOSWRF). GLM analysis of variance revealed that CALS differed significantly by grade, English proficiency designation, and SES, with students in higher grades, English proficient students, and those from higher SES backgrounds displaying higher scores, on average. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses identified CALS as an independent predictor of reading comprehension, even after controlling for academic vocabulary knowledge, word reading fluency, and socio-demographic factors. By specifying a set of language skills associated with reading comprehension, this study advances our understanding of school- relevant language skills, making them more visible for researchers and educators. ACADEMIC LANGUAGE & READING COMPREHENSION 3 Beyond vocabulary: Exploring cross-disciplinary academic language proficiency and its association with reading comprehension

Language and Literacy Demands of Content Area Courses in the Era of the Common Core State Standards: Teachers' Perspectives and the Role of the SLP

In this article, we explore secondary school content area teachers' views on the language and literacy demands of their courses and the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) as well as the role of sch...

The effects of teacher read-alouds and student silent reading on predominantly bilingual high school seniors’ learning and retention of social studies content

Teacher read-alouds (TRA) are common in middle and high school content area classes. Because the practice of reading the textbook out loud to students is often used out of concern about students' ability to understand and learn from text when reading silently (SR), this randomized controlled trial was designed to experimentally manipulate text reading while blocking on all other instructional elements to determine the relative effects on learning content. Predominantly Spanish-English bilingual twelfth-graders (n = 123) were randomly assigned to either a TRA or SR condition and provided 1 week of high quality instruction in US history. Daily lessons included teaching key terms in the passage, previewing text headings, and conducting comprehension checks. Results of immediate, 1-week delayed, and 1-month delayed assessments of content learning revealed no significant differences between the two groups. Students were also asked to rate the method of reading they believed best helped them understand and remember information. Students in the SR condition more consistently agreed that reading silently was beneficial. Findings suggest low performing adolescents of different linguistic backgrounds can learn content as well when reading appropriately challenging text silently as when the teacher reads the text aloud to them.

From Start to Finish: Developing a ReFresh-ing Curriculum for 4th and 5th Grades

Objective:To develop and pilot a nutrition education curriculum for 4th and 5th graders that reinforces concepts from several elementary school content areas and is aligned with Maryland Common Core Standards. Target audience: 4th and 5th grade students, teachers and school community. Theory, Prior Research, Rationale: Theory of Planned Behavior. Description: ReFresh curriculum focuses on encouraging students to consume more fruits, vegetables and whole grains and become more physically active through interactive experiences, food demonstrations and tastings. Each of the 8 monthly units include(s) lessons that link to common 4th and 5th grade curriculum themes, and seasons throughout the year.Units include anoverviewwith teacher tips to link to the Common Core, pre-teaching activities, an introductory lesson with food tasting and associated handouts, materials list, reinforcement lessons, student journal, morning announcements, parent newsletter and optional activities to reinforce the nutrition education messages. Send-home materials are translated into Spanish. Pilot curriculum was developed and adopted in 14 schools throughout the state during the 2011 school year. Evaluation: Standardized evaluation formwas developed and used during telephone interviews providing feedback from instructors. Curriculum revisions included input on application for classroom use by elementary school teachers and incorporation of evaluation comments. Conclusions and Implications: Revised curriculum includes change in graphic design and format for ease of use by FSNE educators and classroom teachers. During 2012-2013 school-year the program has expanded to after-school programs. Program re-evaluation will occur Summer 2013. Funding: Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education.

In Praise of Amateurism: A Friendly Critique of Moje's “Call for Change” in Secondary Literacy

In an October 2008JAALCommentary, Moje took issue with the teaching of generic reading strategies in the middle and high school content areas. She argued for teachers to provide “disciplinary literacy” instruction, focusing on the specific kinds of reading and writing that go on in content areas. The present article concurs with that argument to a point. However, the author questions Moje's use of the termdisciplinaryto describe the kinds of instruction that content area teachers provide—or should provide—at the secondary level. Middle and high school students are better served, the author concludes, by learning to read, write, and argue using relatively nonspecialized language.[Notes. Find the original commentary by Elizabeth Moje, along with a link to an explanatory podcast, athttp:dx.doi.org10.1598JAAL.52.2.1. See also Moje's response to Heller in this issue athttp:dx.doi.org10.1598JAAL.54.4.5, and continuing discussion on Heller's blog athttp:literacyforamateurs.blogspot.com.]

A Synthesis of Professional Development on the Implementation of Literacy Strategies for Middle School Content Area Teachers

This paper synthesized studies of professional development for middle school content area teachers and the teachers’ subsequent implementation of literacy strategies. Four studies were identified as having a majority of participants teaching English/reading, mathematics, science, and social studies in grades 6 through 8. Articles meeting the criteria included two qualitative studies of the impact of professional development on implementation of literacy strategies, one ethnographic study of the characteristics of content area teachers with strong implementation of literacy strategies, and one quasiexperimental study of the impact of professional development on student reading performance. Findings indicate that ongoing schoolwide initiatives that are responsive to teachers’ perceived needs hold promise for increasing literacy instruction across the curriculum and improving some student reading skills.

Meeting the challenge of adolescent literacy: research we have, research we need

Rasinski,Fawcett, Fluency for Adolescent Readers: The Research We Have, the Research We Need. Hinchman, Intervening When Older Youths Struggle with Reading: Teach Me What I Need to Know Next. Tatum, The Literacy Development of African American Male Adolescents: The Influence of Contexts and Texts. Moje, Responsive Literacy Teaching in Secondary School Content Areas. Conley, Freidhoff, Gritter, Van Duinen, Strategies That Improve Adolescents' Performance with Content-Area Texts. Star, Strickland, Hawkins, What Is Mathematical Literacy?: Exploring the Relationship between Content-Area Literacy and Content Learning in Middle and High School Mathematics. Tuckey, Anderson, Literacy in Science: Using Agency in the Material World to Expand the Conversation. Roller, Literacy Coaching. Conley, Concluding Reflections.

Pedagogy Meets Neuroscience

Having acknowledged the social and economic value of education, modern societies are increasingly making concerted efforts to improve schooling at all age levels. Today, policy-makers and practitioners responsible for educational reform and improving classroom practice seek to base their decisions on empirical evidence rather than on opinions, fashions, and ideologies, as was too often the case in the past. This desire for “evidence-based” education has coincided with a period of tremendous progress in the field of neuroscience and enormous public interest in its findings, leading to an ongoing debate about the potential of neuroscience to inform education reform. Although the value of neuroscience research on this front is seemingly promising, collaboration with educators is doomed to failure if the public is not correctly informed and if the research is not considered in an interdisciplinary context. It has become dangerously fashionable to label general—even trivial—pedagogical advice that is not grounded in scientific fact as “brain-based learning.” For instance, findings about rapid synaptic proliferation in young children's brains have nurtured hopes that cognitive capabilities can be increased by teaching infants vocabularies and basic facts with audiovisual material. But proponents of these early education programs have conveniently overlooked the lack of direct empirical evidence linking neurological and learning processes. It is far from clear whether children who are encouraged to memorize isolated facts early in life show better long-term retention than their peers. ![Figure][1] CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES As a scientist specializing in school-related learning, I am open to the educational implications of neuroscience. However, we need to scale down unrealistic expectations. Otherwise, there is a danger that new efforts to incorporate research in this area into education could be stymied by falsely raising the hopes of the public and policy-makers. There is the further danger that people will ignore the importance of empirical research in the fields of educational and instructional science, psychology, and information technology—work that can continue to teach us about good schooling. Thanks to these more traditional areas of research, we understand a great deal about what has gone wrong in learning environments when otherwise competent students fail to learn. Research on learning and instruction has provided precise and applicable knowledge about how to design powerful learning environments in many content areas. What we now know about the conditions under which pictorial representations aid in teaching advanced concepts goes far beyond the recommendations of so-called brain-based learning. Nevertheless, certain groups of learners do not benefit sufficiently from educational environments developed in accordance with state-of-the-art research on learning and instruction, and here is where collaboration among traditional research disciplines and neuroscience may be promising. Looking into the brain during problem solving might help to clarify what impedes learning. For instance, there is an ongoing debate on whether male students outperform female students in mathematics and science because of their greater ability to use visual-spatial representations as reasoning tools. As yet, however, the implications of achievement data and behavioral observations remain ambiguous in this respect. Neuroimaging techniques have elucidated areas of the brain that are especially involved in visual-spatial processing, so we may be able to find out whether differences in achievement can be traced back to the use of visual-spatial representations in reasoning. Similarly, neuroimaging may help to clarify whether visual or phonological processing is impaired in people with dyslexia. Neuroscience may also be able to show how prior experiences can improve learning, going beyond psychological explanations. Although many studies have found evidence for the overwhelming impact of prior knowledge of skills, procedures, or concepts on learning, there may be other ways of improving learning besides such knowledge transfer. Cognitive activities can stimulate certain neuronal processes by triggering electrical impulses and the release of neurotransmitters in particular brain areas. Concurrently, other cognitive activities that are processed in similar brain areas may be enhanced, even if the two cognitive activities involve completely different knowledge structures. Neuroscience alone cannot provide the specific knowledge required to design powerful learning environments in particular school content areas. But by providing insights into the abilities and constraints of the learning brain, neuroscience can help to explain why some learning environments work while others fail. As part of interdisciplinary collaborations, neuroscience is poised to help structure the future classroom. This would be “evidence-based” reform worth supporting. [1]: pending:yes

Students making sense of informational text: Relations between processing and representation

Much of our understanding of children's reading has been based on research with narratives, where children can rely on relatively rich prior knowledge to make sense of the text. Far less work has been conducted on children's meaning construction processes for nonnarrative, informational texts about unfamiliar topics, such as those often encountered in school content areas. This research examines children's strategies for processing informational text to understand and remember new information. In Experiment 1, 4th‐ and 6th‐grade students thought aloud as they read an easier and a harder passage. They dictated a recall report after each passage. The think‐aloud protocols were analyzed for processing activities, including paraphrasing, elaborating, explaining, monitoring, and identifying and resolving problems. In general, processing tended to focus on the local, sentence level. Self‐explanations were prevalent throughout the protocols; however, they were differentially effective in promoting understanding. Content analyses of 5 cases illustrate complex relations between processing activities and the completeness and coherence of participants’ recall reports. In Experiment 2, new samples of 4th‐ and 6th‐grade students read the same passages silently. The think‐aloud procedure in Experiment 1 encouraged readers to process each sentence successively and more elaborately, with little overt looking back. In contrast, silent readers (Experiment 2) engaged in more physical backtracking to previously read sentences. Comparisons of recall performance across experiments indicated that the think‐aloud procedure facilitated the 6th graders’ performance but hindered that of the 4th‐grade students. A multidimensional framework reflecting prior knowledge use and the quality of the textbase is proposed as a general heuristic for conceptualizing learners’ processing and representation construction.