LD Links (LDNews March 2006)

U.S. Schools in Facts and Figures
The American School Board Journal presents state-by-state figures on student enrollment, teacher salaries, per-pupil expenditures, assessment scores, and other gauges of the health and well-being of our nation's schools. Other articles explore international comparisons of student performance, preschool education, high school graduation, student health, education law and finance, and the No Child Left Behind Act.

For more information, go to: http://www.asbj.com/evs/index.html

New Sourcebook for Program Administrators’ of Adult Education Programs
The National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy (NCSALL) has created a new "Program Administrators' Sourcebook: A Resource on NCSALL's Research for Adult Education Program Administrators."  The sourcebook is for those people who serve as administrators of adult basic, adult secondary, and/or adult English-for-speakers-of-other-languages (ESOL) programs, whether those programs are school-based, community-based, or community-college-based. This is one of the various tools developed through NCSALL's Connecting Practice, Policy, and Research initiative, which was initiated to help adult education practitioners access, understand, judge, and use research.

To find out more, go to: http://www.ncsall.net/?id=1035

To download the Sourcebook in PDF, go to: http://www.ncsall.net/fileadmin/resources/teach/PASourcebook.pdf

RAND's Resource on Early Intervention Programs
RAND Corporation analyzes data from several early childhood education and intervention programs to identify the most effective program features and practices in "Early Childhood Interventions: Proven Results, Future Promise."

For more information, go to: http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG341/

To download the booklet in PDF, go to: http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2005/RAND_MG341.pdf

Summer Camps for Kids with LD and ADD/HD
Schwab Learning recently posted an article that helps parents choose a summer camp for their children.  The article describes the process for assessing your child's needs and wants, and for getting the information you need from camp staff, in order to successfully match your child with a camp.  They also offer a database with links to specialized camps.

For more information, go to: http://www.schwablearning.org/articles.asp?r=285

Regional Centers Link Research and Resources for Better High Schools
The National High School Center is a central source of information and expertise on high school improvement issues. Their Regional Comprehensive Centers seek to build the capacity of states across the nation to effectively implement the goals of No Child Left Behind relating to high schools. They do so by identifying effective programs and tools, offering user-friendly products and providing high-quality technical assistance to support the use of research-based approaches within high school learning communities.

To learn more about the center in your region, go to: http://www.betterhighschools.org/tech/map.asp

The Help You Need to Understand Research Articles
When you read a research article, you're likely to run across descriptions of how the researchers analyzed the data they collected. There may be many terms about their statistical methods that leave you wondering, huh? In order to understand what the authors are trying to say, you need to understand their lingo. This Connections page can help you do just that. Below are links to resources that will help you understand more about the statistical tests and terms mentioned in research documents.

For more information, go to: http://www.nichcy.org/resources/statistics.asp

Call for Student Progress Monitoring Tools
The National Center on Student Progress Monitoring is soliciting information about existing practices and tools of student progress monitoring in academic content areas such as reading and mathematics; to identify a variety of scientifically-based progress monitoring tools; and subsequently, to provide technical assistance to participating states, districts, and schools for successful implementation of them.  Submissions may be evidence-based progress monitoring tools that use the approaches of General Outcomes measurement (GOM), Mastery Measurement (MM), or both to monitor  progress. The submission deadline is May 1, 2006.

For more information, go to: http://www.studentprogress.org/papers.asp

NASSP's Guidebook for Middle School Reform
A new report from NASSP --Breaking Ranks in the Middle: Strategies for Leading Middle Level Reform-- calls on middle level leaders to act boldly and immediately to change the educational outcomes of their students. A commission of middle level practitioners and experts had an active hand in developing the report, which includes a number of full-length profiles and vignettes of schools that put the report's recommendations in action as well as nine strategies and thirty recommendations.
 
For more information, go to: http://www.principals.org/s_nassp/sec.asp?CID=1&DID=52694