Philip Sirinides

How Principals and Peers Influence Teaching and Learning.

This paper examines the effects of principal leadership and peer teacher influence on teachers’ instructional practice and student learning. Using teacher survey and student achievement data from a mid-sized urban southeastern school district in the United States in 2006-2007, the study employs multilevel structural equation modeling to examine the structural relationships between student learning and theorized dimensions of principal leadership, teacher peer influence, and change in teachers’ instructional practice.The findings confirm previous empirical work and provide new contributions to research on the chain of hypothesized relationships between leadership practice and student learning. Both principal leadership and teacher peer influence were significantly associated with teachers’ instructional practices and English language arts (ELA) student learning. A major contribution of this research is the strong and significant indirect relationships which mediate education leadership and student learning. The results indicate the importance of principals work for student learning because of their indirect influence on teachers’ practices through the fostering of collaboration and communication around instruction.

Year One Results From the Multisite Randomized Evaluation of the i3 Scale-Up of Reading Recovery

Reading Recovery (RR) is a short-term, one-to-one intervention designed to help the lowest achieving readers in first grade. This article presents first-year results from the multisite randomized controlled trial (RCT) and implementation study under the

Conceptualizing Teachers’ Capacity for Learning Trajectory-Oriented Formative Assessment in Mathematics

55 million Investing in Innovation (i3) Scale-Up Project. For the 2011–2012 school year, the estimated standardized effect of RR on students’ Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) Total Reading Scores was .69 standard deviations relative to the population of struggling readers eligible for RR under the i3 scale-up and .47 standard deviations relative to the nationwide population of all first graders. School-level implementation of RR was, in most respects, faithful to the RR Standards and Guidelines, and the intensive training provided to new RR teachers was viewed as critical to successful implementation.

The Impacts of Reading Recovery at Scale: Results From the 4-Year i3 External Evaluation:

TASK (Teachers’ Assessment of Student Knowledge) is an online assessment designed to measure teacher’s capacity for learning trajectory-oriented formative assessment in mathematics, specifically through their ability to analyze student work and make instructional decisions based on that work. In this chapter, we begin by articulating the conceptual framework behind learning trajectory-oriented formative assessment and describing the instrument, scoring rubrics, and ongoing development of TASK. We then present the results of a large-scale field test of TASK, both in terms of the overall results and additional studies of the properties of the instrument. Evidence suggests that this new instrument yields reliable and valid scores of teachers’ formative assessment capacity in mathematics, is feasible for widespread use in a variety of settings, provides useful reporting of results, and can be used to better understand specific aspects of teacher knowledge. We draw on the results of this field test to investigate the relationships between various dimensions of teachers’ ability to analyze student work in mathematics and their instructional decision making.

The Linking Study: An Experiment to Strengthen Teachers’ Engagement with Data on Teaching and Learning

Reading Recovery is an example of a widely used early literacy intervention for struggling first-grade readers, with a research base demonstrating evidence of impact. With funding from the U.S. Department of Education’s i3 program, researchers conducted a 4-year evaluation of the national scale-up of Reading Recovery. The evaluation included an implementation study and a multisite randomized controlled trial with 6,888 participating students in 1,222 schools. The goal of this study was to understand whether the impacts identified in prior rigorous studies of Reading Recovery could be replicated in the context of a national scale-up. The findings of this study reaffirm prior evidence of Reading Recovery’s immediate impacts on student literacy and support the feasibility of successfully scaling up an effective intervention.

Behavioral policy interventions to address education inequality

In a randomized controlled trial of a teacher data-use intervention, the Linking Study tested the impacts of a cyclical and collaborative process that linked teachers’ data on instructional practice with data on their students’ learning. This article describes the theory of the intervention and its roots in the literature as a backdrop for an intervention with 64 teachers in 27 professional learning communities and their students. The researchers found moderate and significant effects on external judgments of the quality of instruction caused by the intervention and small and marginally significant impacts on student performance on end-of-unit tests. There were no effects on teachers’ perceptions of the importance of data or their self-reported proficiency using data. The article concludes with a discussion of the ways that data-use interventions might be strengthened to support instructional improvement and student learning.

Evaluation of the i3 Scale-up of Reading Recovery

Children from low-income families arrive at kindergarten already behind academically, do not overcome these gaps during the school years, and are much less likely to attend and graduate from college. Many programs aim to help these children before they enter formal schooling, as well as during their kindergarten through 12th grade years and on the road to and through college; too often, though, the services go underutilized. In recent years, behavioral scientists have designed interventions meant to increase participation in such programs. Rigorous experiments have shown that a number of these approaches work well, enabling students to perform better academically and reach higher levels of education. Here, we propose four more interventions that federal agencies should test.