UC Davis School of Education Associate Professor Heather Rose has
written an article mapping out the principals for a rational
school finance system in California. In the article, she
describes how Governor Jerry Brown’s Local Control Funding
Formula meet many of the principals outlined and juxtaposes the
new proposal against California’s current system. The article
appears in the May/June 2013 issue of Leadership, a
magazine published by the Association of California School
Administrators.
Access the magazine online here. Rose’s article appears on
pp. 12-15.
The School of Education publishes a Research News Brief three
times a year.
Download a print version of the April 2013 edition. This
issue highlights research presented by our faculty, researchers,
and students at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American
Educational Research Association, April 27–May 2.
In April, the American Educational Research Association (AERA)
releases the 2013 volume of Review of Research in
Education (RRE), co-edited by UC Davis School of Education
professors Christian Faltis and Jamal Abedi. The volume, entitled
“Extraordinary Pedagogies for Working Within School Settings
Serving Nondominant Students,” includes ten informative chapters
covering a broad array of sociocultural issues.
Most educators agree that writing is an essential skill for
student success in school and in the pursuit of college and
career. So the stakes are high for writing teachers.
Unfortunately, often a lack of preparation and suffocatingly
narrow policies of what and how to teach writing hamstring
English teachers’ ability to prepare their students to master
this critical skill, according to Juliet Wahleithner, a PhD
student in the School of Education.
Like most immigrant parents, Latino parents’ top priority is to
provide their children with the opportunity for a better life,
including the chance to attend college. But language barriers and
a lack of knowledge about how to pay for college too often get in
the way of Latinos realizing their dreams, according to Lisceth
Cruz, a PhD candidate in the School of Education.
“Given the strong familial ties of Latino communities, parental
engagement is central to understanding and addressing the
disparities in educational attainment among Latinos,” said Cruz.
Most educators recognize the ubiquity of mobile devices in the
lives of their students and too often see them only as
competition to learning in the classroom. Two researchers at the
UC Davis School of Education are exploring another possibility:
that mobile devices have the potential to bridge formal and
informal learning, particularly in mathematics, and can be
leveraged to increase student engagement in learning math.
School is a fact of life for virtually every child in America,
but in the world’s poorest countries, school is not a given.
For instance, nearly two million children in Bangladesh lack
access to a formal classroom, so the government relies on
international development organizations and corporate partners to
provide nonformal education to their most marginalized citizens.
But does this approach work?
Educators are always on the lookout for ways to engage students,
particularly those who are more likely to drop out or be pushed
out of school. For Angela Booker, assistant professor of
education, the key is finding ways to forge meaningful
relationships between and among students and adults in and out of
school.
Michal Kurlaender, associate professor in the UC Davis School of
Education and Matthew F. Larsen, a postdoctoral teaching fellow
in economics at Tulane University, recently released a study on how high
school achievement tests can be good predictors of how students
will fare in community college. The researchers also point out a
“disturbing” achievement gap, with Latino and black students
being less likely than their Asian and white peers to take and
pass transfer-level college courses. And that the gap occurs even
among students who performed well on their high school tests.
Read Paul Fain’s article at
Inside Higher Ed.
Professors Tobin White and Lee Martin have penned an article on
how schools can leverage the ways students are already using
mobile digital devices to organize and support learning
activities in STEM content areas in the November/December 2012
issue of Leadership, a magazine published by the
Association of California School Administrators.
Their article, which “calls attention to opportunities, often
missed, to capitalize on emerging media for innovative and even
transformative educational use,” appears on pp. 22-26.
Access the magazine online here.
