Morgridge College of Education

Within Response-to-Intervention models, schools create layers of instructional tiers to match levels of support to students’ needs. However, there are seemingly contradictory descriptions of Tier 2 and Tier 3 within the literature, and there is a reported need for further clarification on how to intensify instruction within RTI. To provide that clarity, the exact differences between Tier 2 and Tier 3 supplemental support are presented. The differences are described across (a) organizational factors, including time and group size, and (b) assessment factors, including the level of problem analysis and frequency of progress monitoring. Scheduling of instructional time and differences between elementary and secondary settings are also discussed. A list of instructional factors is also included. Distinguishing Between Tier 2 and Tier 3 Instruction in Order to Support Implementation of Academic RTI In recent years, schools have begun to implement schoolwide prevention models in an effort...

Sound education policy and practice may require decisions based on new information collected on attitudes, perceptions, or facts in a school or community. This guide offers a five-step process to design effective questionnaires that follow researchbased guidelines and can be used to survey students, teachers, or parents. It also lists resources on sample selection, questionnaire administration, and data collection, analysis, and presentation.

Body Background / Context (Description of prior research and its intellectual context): Prior reviews of evidence for the impact of formative assessment on student achievement suggest widely different estimates of formative assessment's effectiveness, ranging from 0.40 and 0.70 standard deviations in one review (Black & Wiliam, 1998a; 1998b) to 0.20 in a meta-analysis (Kingston & Nash, 2011; 2015). One reason for the widely different estimates may be the way in which formative assessment was defined. Authors of the first review defined formative assessment as the process of "frequent feedback that students receive about their learning" (Black & Wiliam, 1998a, p. 7). Authors of the meta-analysis acknowledged that formative assessment is an umbrella term referring to many forms of strategies, such as "student-reflection activities, detailed student feedback, assessment conversations, and curriculum embedded assessment" (Kingston & Nash, 2011, p. 29). To be inclusive, authors of the meta-analysis decided to let authors of the synthesized reports define formative assessment. The topic relevance/intervention inclusion criterion for the meta-analysis was as follows: authors "explicitly use the word formative or the phrase assessment for learning to describe the process or assessments used" in the intervention being studied (Kingston & Nash, 2011, p. 30). One criticism of this definition, however, is that it narrows "the domain of the formative assessment 'construct' to the presence of a specific word or phrase" (Briggs, Ruiz-Primo, Furtak, Shepard, & Yin, 2012, p. 14). Disagreement or confusion about defining formative assessment is not limited to researchers. Some or many practitioners misunderstand what formative assessment means or do not know how to use formative assessment effectively. Members of the REL Central Formative Assessment Research Alliance (FARA), including elementary school principals, high school teachers, and district administrators have observed that teachers "check for learning at the end of learning rather than during learning," and report they do not have enough time to analyze data and provide student feedback during instruction.

"(Presented to the 2010 Conference of the American Educational Research Association)
This paper examines an approach to interview research that was developed for an award-winning investigation of the Columbine shootings. Exploring theoretical and practical implications for design, it considers the challenges faced when investigating complex ecologies of people’s lives and demonstrates processes for building antecedent knowledge, conducting in-depth interviews, and presenting data in ways that preserve voice and meaning. This narrator-centered model, the gateway approach, provides entry into metaphorical “communities” of experience. The approach is useful for discerning psychological, cognitive, and emotional consequences of life-changing events yet has been employed in investigations of more routine matters as well. Providing a way of knowing that offers a way of helping, this approach can contribute to theory-building while improving practice."

holds a research appointment and is a dissertation adviser and adjunct faculty member at the University of Denver. She serves on the advisory board of the trauma-certification program at the university's graduate school of social work. She is the author of Reclaiming School in the Aftermath of Trauma: Advice Based on Experience (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Her dissertation, "Experiences of Columbine Parents: Finding a Way to Tomorrow," was recognized as the American Educational Research Association's outstanding qualitative dissertation of the year for 2005. She worked previously as an education consultant and education program coordinator.

Teacher education programs around the nation continue to be challenged to prepare prospective teachers to use technology “meaningfully” in their instruction. This implies that university faculty in teacher education programs must become proficient at technology use and must come to understand content-specific, pedagogical uses of technology for their own instruction. In this article, the authors present a model for technological change driven by the notion of situated practice and communities of discourse in their school of education. They also describe a critical framework for facilitating discourse among teacher education faculty from which understandings of why, when, and how to use technology emerged. Several cases of situated practice are discussed with particular attention to how an understanding of meaningful technology use was negotiated through interactions between faculty and graduate students. Implicit in this model for technological change is a strategy for sustainabilit...