'magnifying glass' photo (c) 2005, Tall Chris - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

I often write about research studies from various fields and how they can be applied to the classroom. I write individual posts about ones that I think are especially significant, and will continue to do so. However, so many studies are published that it’s hard to keep up. So I’ve started writing a “round-up” of some of them each week or every other week as a regular feature.

By the way, you might also be interested in MY BEST POSTS ON NEW RESEARCH STUDIES IN 2021 – PART TWO.

You can see all my “Best” lists related to education research here.

Here are some new useful studies (and related resources):

I’m adding this tweet to The Best Resources On Grading Practices:

MAKING “LEARNING OBJECTIVES” EXPLICIT: A SKEPTIC CONVERTED? [REPOSTED] is from Doug Lemov.

Positive teacher-student relationships may lead to better teaching is an interesting paper. It’s behind a paywall, but you read a version here read summaries here and here. I’m adding it to The Best Resources On The Importance Of Building Positive Relationships With Students.

 

This is an interesting paper:

This paper estimates teachers’ impacts on their students’ future criminal justice contact (CJC). Using a unique data set linking the universe of North Carolina public school data to administrative arrest records, we find a standard deviation of teacher effects on students’ future arrests of 2.7 percentage points (11% of the sample mean). Teachers’ effects on CJC are orthogonal to their effects on academic achievement, implying assignment to a high test score value-added teacher does not reduce future CJC. However, teachers who reduce suspensions and improve attendance substantially reduce future arrests. Similar patterns emerge when allowing teacher impacts to vary by student sex, race, socio-economic status, and school. The results suggest that the development of non-cognitive skills is central to the returns to education for crime and highlight an important dimension of teachers’ social value missed by test score-based quality metrics.

These findings reinforce previous findings of how VAM doesn’t give the whole picture of teacher quality.  You might be interested in A Look Back: Study Suggests That A Teacher’s Impact On Student Behavior More Important Than Test Scores and A Look Back: More Studies Finding That If Educators Are Good At Raising Test Scores, They Might Be Missing The Boat With Other Skills.

 

And here’s another interesting new paper on tracking, which finds that it doesn’t help student achievement and, instead, contributes to school inequality:

This meta-analysis examines the effects of sorting secondary students into different tracks (“between-school” tracking) or classrooms (“within-school” tracking) on the efficiency and inequality levels of an educational system. Efficiency is related to the overall learning achievement of students, whereas inequality can refer to “inequality of achievement” (i.e., the dispersion of outcomes) or “inequality of opportunity” (i.e., the strength of the influence of family background on student achievement). The selected publications are 53 analyses performed in the period from 2000 to 2021, yielding 213 estimates on efficiency and 230 estimates on inequality. The results show that the mean effect size (Hedge’s G) of tracking on efficiency is not statistically significant (G = −.063), whereas it is significantly positive (G = .117) on inequality.

I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning About Ability Grouping & Tracking — Help Me Find More.