We study the effectiveness of teachers certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) in Washington State, which has one of the largest populations of National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs) in the nation. Based on value-added models in math and reading, we find that NBPTS certified teachers are about 0.01-0.05 student standard deviations more effective than non-N...

This paper presents a conversational, multimedia, virtual science tutor for elementary school students. It is built using state of the art speech recognition and spoken language understanding technology. This virtual science tutor is unique in that it elicits self-explanations from students for various science phenomena by engaging them in spoken dialogs and guided by illustrations, animations ...

For adult readers, an automated system can produce oral reading fluency (ORF) scores (e.g., words read correctly per minute) that are consistent with scores provided by human evaluators (Balogh et al., 2005, and in press). Balogh’s work on NAAL materials used passage-specific data to optimize statistical language models and scoring performance. The current study investigates whether or not an a...

The thesis is made up by four studies, on the comprehensive theme of integrated and subjectspecific science education in Swedish compulsory school. A literature study on the matter is followed by an expert survey, then a case study and ending with two analyses of students’ science results from PISA 2003 and PISA 2006. The first two studies explore similarities and differences between integrated...

The influence of constructivism and the spread of information and communication technologies (ICT) in classrooms are both expected to change the role of the teacher in the classroom from the expert dispensing knowledge, to the facilitator of student learning (Dwyer, Ringstaff and Sandholtz 1991, Hadley and Sheingold 1993, Ravitz, Becker and Wong 2000). In such a studentcentred classroom the tea...

Research suggests the importance of professional development for teachers of at-risk children, and while educational technologies can be harnessed to help support teaching practice in innovative ways, such programs are often limited in scale. My Teaching Partner (MTP) was designed to deliver a targeted program of professional development for teaching quality, integrated with early childhood cur...

In this work we present an application developed in Derive 6 to compose counterpoints for a given melody (“cantus firmus”). The result is non deterministic, so different counterpoints can be generated for a fixed melody, all of them obeying classical rules of counterpoint. It is also possible that the counterpoint could not be generated, in this case, backtracking techniques have been implement...

Over the last two decades, early childhood education (ECE) has come to top of political agenda in New Zealand and internationally. The interest governments policy-makers ECE b...