Research and Best Practices
The Handbook is designed to guide state, district, and school Title I personnel in providing high-quality, research-based family and community engagement programs and experiences. Thirty-six experts on a range of topics contributed to the Handbook. Each chapter provides grounding in research and practical action principles for the field. A concluding chapter lists specific recommended practices for the state, district, and school. The.....
High School Resources
Improving Adolescent Literacy in Rural Schools: A Schoolwide Approach
This is the second in a series of webinars especially designed to assist rural school staff with implementation of their School Improvement Grants (SIGs).
The intended audience for this webinar includes all educators engaged in or interested in improving literacy instruction for adolescents—grades 6–12. The presenters were Dr. Debby Houston Miller and Vicki LaRock from the Center on Instruction's Literacy Team. During this one hour webinar, presenters focused on the following guiding questions:
What are the major goals of adolescent.....
New! ----High School Knowledge Database
The National High School Center has announced a free new online resource located on the website: High School Knowledge Database. The Database houses vetted resources on a variety of high school improvement topics that can be sorted and filtered, and replaces the static Topics Web pages that previously housed these resources. The new Database includes three search options: 1) a Keyword text search; 2) a High School Topic Area(s) search; and 3) an option to Search by the Eight Elements of High School Improvement. This last search allows you to.....
New Updates to the National High School Center's Early Warning System (EWS) Tool v2.0 and Technical Manual
The National High School Center recently released an updated version of the tool and technical manual to better support users as they strive to identify and address issues that lead to students dropping out of school. The updated tool includes a new Export Data feature, and the updated Technical Manual includes several additional instructions, hints, and cautions to help you use the tool. More details on the new tool and Technical Manual are below, along with instructions on how you can easlily transfer your existing data into the new tool......
Eight Elements of High School Improvement: A Mapping Framework
from National High School Center at the American Institutes for Research betterhighschools.org
This document offers descriptions of the eight elements of high school improvement:
• Rigorous Curriculum and Instruction
• Teacher Effectiveness and Professional Growth
• Stakeholder Engagement
• Organization and Structure
• Assessment and Accountability
• Student and Family Involvement
• Effective Leadership
• Sustainability
Pre-Algebra and Algebra Instruction and Assessments (COI)
This PowerPoint presentation from the Center on Instruction’s November 2006 Math Summit: Providing Evidence-based Practices and Implications of NCTM Focal Points describes assessments that can be used to determine students who are struggling with pre-algebra or algebra and monitor their progress towards acquiring knowledge in these areas.
Assessments to Guide Adolescent Literacy Instruction (COI)
This guide from the Center on Instruction is a companion volume to two other COI publications: Academic Literacy Instruction for Adolescents and Improving Literacy Instruction in Middle and High Schools: A Guide for Principals. It provides information about the key elements of a comprehensive assessment plan to improve literacy instruction for adolescents and provides examples of assessments and assessment systems currently in use or under development to improve literacy instruction for students in grades 4-12.
Applying an On Track Indicator for High School Graduation: Adapting the Consortium on Chicago School Research Indicator for Five Texas Districts
This study uses a measure of the on-track or off-track status of students at the end of grade 9 as an indicator of whether students in five Texas districts would graduate from high school in four years. In all five districts, on-time graduation rates were higher for students who were on track at the end of grade 9 than for students who were off track, both for students overall and for all racial/ethnic groups.
Effective Instruction for Adolescent Struggling Readers, 2nd edition
This suite of resources developed by the Center on Instruction has two purposes. First, it is designed to guide the delivery of instruction for adolescent struggling readers, particularly secondary interventions in the general education context. Second, it seeks to deepen technical assistance providers’ knowledge of reading-related issues for adolescents with reading difficulties and learning disabilities and enrich providers’ work with SEAs and LEAs.
Uncharted Territory: Using Tiered Intervention to Improve High School Performance
A new report from the High School Tiered Interventions Initiative (HSTII), a collaboration among the National High School Center, the Center on Instruction, and the National Center on Response to Intervention, summarizes what HSTII has learned thus far about effective implementation of RTI in high schools.
Tiered Interventions in High Schools: Using Preliminary ‘Lessons Learned’ to Guide Ongoing Discussion, provides a brief description of the RTI framework and the essential components of RTI, illustrates how the essential components of.....
Reinventing the American High School (Association for Career and Tech Ed)
In this paper, the Association for Career and Technical Education review the challenges and current efforts in high school redesign, and offer a number of recommendations about what elements should be included in our mutual efforts to reinvent the American high school for the 21st century.
Research base of individual learning plans at the high school level and its impact on student outcomes
The information provided addresses the origins and effectiveness of Individual Learning Plans (ILP) for all high school students. Although the use of ILPs may build upon the well established Individual Education Plan (IEP) for students with learning disabilities, it is not explicitly linked to that practice in the resources reviewed. (From the National High School Center)
Turnaround Strategies and Models for High Schools
(From the National High School Center) This resource is a synthesis of the literature on high school improvement organized by key elements of the turnaround/transformation models, as defined by the federal Title I School Improvement Grant regulations. The synthesis has been organized into the following three sections:
* Improving High Schools Overview/Background
o The High School Context
o Supporting Low Performing Schools: Lessons Learned
o Implications of the Lessons for High School Turnaround
*.....
Individual Learning Plans For High School Students
The information provided addresses the origins and effectiveness of Individual Learning Plans (ILP) for all high school students. Although the use of ILPs may build upon the well established Individual Education Plan (IEP) for students with learning disabilities, it is not explicitly linked to that practice in the resources reviewed.
The use of Individual Learning Plans for all high school students appears to be based on the move towards creating more student-centered, personalized learning environments with one key goal to foster student.....
CTE and Possible Links to Dropping Out (National Research Center for Career and Tech Ed)
If participation in career and technical education has some relationship to dropping out of high school, we need to understand the nature of this relationship better. Research in this area can have implications for our conceptual understanding of what helps students find attachment to high school. Additionally, research in this area could have policy or practical implications for secondary education, as decisions are made about where dollars should be invested and how curriculum should be organized.
After considering simple descriptive.....
NRCCTE Report on the Efficacy of Dual Enrollment
Dual enrollment programs enable high school students to enroll in college courses and earn college credit. Once limited to high-achieving students, such programs are increasingly seen as a means to support the postsecondary preparation of average-achieving students. Moreover, though dual enrollment programs typically have been reserved for academically-focused students, increasing numbers of career and technical education (CTE) programs are providing such opportunities to their students.
Despite the popularity and growth of dual.....
"The Idea Center" for CTE
The National Research Center for Career and Technical Education (NRCCTE) and the Association for Career and Technical Education (ACTE) are searching for ideas and practices that are positively impacting student achievement in career and technical education classrooms, buildings and districts. The Idea Center is collecting this information and making it easy for teachers, administrators, guidance counselors and others to share, comment on and experiment to make career and technical education an even better education for our nation's students,.....
Systematic Reviews of Research: Postsecondary Transitions - Identifying Effective Models and Practices
This systematic review of the literature on transition programs for youth to postsecondary education sought to identify models or programs of transition, establish a definition of successful transition, discover how models or programs are evaluated, and examine the impact of such transition programs, specifically those that aim to facilitate transition from an educational system to another educational system, to program completion, or to specific career-related employment for disadvantaged youth.
Web-Based Resources for Science, Technology, and Engineering: Tools and Activities for Teaching and Learning
The entries compiled here are grouped by type (general or subject-specific), and include information about the appropriate grade level(s) for the online activities and sample lessons. Following these entries is an annotated bibliography of online articles and books.
Both the links and the resources presented here were selected by CAST in fall 2005 according to two criteria: 1) they shed light on the kinds of effective research, classroom practices, and policies that support standards-based learning, and 2) they can be accessed free of.....
