IES Blog

By Grace Kena

The Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, is a working group of Federal agencies that collect, analyze, and report data on issues related to the well-being of children and their families. The Forum on Child and Family Statistics’ mission is to promote coordination and collaboration among member agencies and to improve efforts to collect and report Federal data on children and families. This forum is unique in that it compiles key findings across many domains of children’s lives. 

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has been involved with the Forum on Child and Family Statistics since the early stages of its development. Founded in 1994, the Forum on Child and Family Statistics was formally established by Executive Order No. 13045 in 1997. The Forum’s main activity is to produce the report, America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, which is a collection of national indicators of child well-being. Through the report, the Forum aims to improve the reporting of Federal data on children and families; make these data available in an easy-to-use, nontechnical format; and stimulate discussions among policymakers and the public, and between the statistical and policy communities.

Using Federal data, the America’s Children series presents a set of key indicators on aspects of children’s lives that measure their well-being and influence the likelihood that a child will become a well-educated, economically secure, productive, and healthy adult. While there are many, interrelated aspects of children’s well-being, America’s Children reports on seven major domains:  family and social environment, economic circumstances, health care, physical environment and safety, behavior, education, and health. Currently, 23 agencies contribute to the report, including NCES, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Economic Research Service, the U. S. Census Bureau, and the National Center for Health Statistics and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. 

The Forum on Child and Family Statistics has published the America’s Children report since 1997. Beginning in 2004, the Forum started producing a brief report, America’s Children in Brief: Key National Indicators of Well-Being in even-numbered years; the full report is still published in odd years. Although this shortened version of the report focuses on selected indicators, data for all indicators are updated on the website each year. In 2014, the Forum published a one-time, special issue report titled America’s Young Adults. In addition to producing reports, the Forum collaborates with partner and other organizations on a number of research projects and in supporting conferences, workshops, and policy seminars. Most recently, NCES experts participated in a day-long workshop on Measuring and Reporting Social-Emotional Development in Early Childhood. NCES experts also authored the 2013 special feature on the academic knowledge and skills of kindergarten students using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010–11 (ECLS-K: 2011).
 
The 2015 America’s Children report shows several improvements in children’s well-being. The number of babies born prematurely has continued to decline, and recently, the percentage of children with asthma has decreased. High school completion rates have increased, particularly for Hispanic students. On the other hand, some aspects have not improved. The percentage of children experiencing a major depressive episode has continued to increase over the past several years. 

This year’s report also contains a special feature on health care quality, which provides information on well-child and well-adolescent visits, preschool vision screenings, asthma management plans, and access to care.

Learn more about the Forum on Child and Family Statistics and its activities, and the 2015 America’s Children report at the website. Also, tune in to a recent podcast describing findings from the latest report.

By Becky McGill-Wilkinson, NCER Program Officer

Gone are the days of library card catalogs and having to consult the 26-volume hardbound encyclopedia gathering dust on your parents’ bookshelf. Students these days have seemingly infinite information at the tips of their fingers. Most households in the U.S. have a computer, and most teachers report at least one computer in their classrooms. Research shows that the majority of high school students use the Internet to complete school assignments, and 71 percent of students use their laptop computers for school. In this changing world, it becomes more and more important to understand how reading and researching on the Internet are different from performing those tasks with books and other paper texts.

Don Leu and his team at the University of Connecticut have been examining this topic for several years. First on their agenda was studying whether reading online is the same as reading on paper. They discovered that students who are poor readers on paper may be good readers online, and students who are good readers on paper are not necessarily good readers online, suggesting that reading online requires some unique skills. Leu and his collaborators argue that reading online requires that students be able to: (1) use search engines; (2) choose appropriate search result; (3) judge whether the source can be trusted to be accurate and unbiased; and (4) consolidate information across multiple websites or online texts.

Of course, it’s not enough to understand the process of reading and researching online. As with any skill, some students are better at it than others, and as computers, tablets, and smart phones become more common, it becomes more and more necessary for students to hone their online reading and research skills if they are to succeed in college and career. Teachers need to be able to teach these skills, and teachers need to be able to identify when their students need extra help or practice. In 2005, Leu received a grant from NCER to study Internet use in adolescents at risk for dropping out of school, and developed an intervention to help teach seventh-grade students specific strategies to locate, evaluate, synthesize, and communicate information on the Internet.

Building on this earlier work, in a 2009 grant from NCER, Leu and his team set out to develop measures of online reading comprehension. The end result of this project is a set of Online Research and Comprehension Assessments (ORCAs) for use with seventh grade students. The team developed both a multiple choice version and a version that allows students to work in a simulated internet environment. In both versions, the student is tasked with answering a research question posed by a simulated peer, and must use a search engine, choose the appropriate search result, determine whether a source is trustworthy, and then tell their simulated peer about what they found. The ORCAs were tested with 2,700 students in two different states, and the researchers surveyed teachers and other practitioners to determine whether the ORCAs were usable.

Leu has been especially interested in thinking about how changing ideas about literacy may impact low-income students differently from middle- and high-income students. In a recently published paper, Leu shows that students who came from families earning approximately $100,000 per year were more than a year ahead of students whose families earn approximately $60,000 per year on online reading abilities as measured by the ORCAs. This study highlights the importance of considering the achievement gaps between high- and low-income students on a variety of domains, including those not typically measured by standardized tests, such as online reading comprehension.

The ORCAs are available online for free, as is a professional development module to help teachers learn to use it. 

Questions? Comments? Please email us at IESResearch@ed.gov.

By Liz Albro, NCER Associate Commissioner of Teaching and Learning

Good Luck to Applicants!

Application deadlines for our main NCER and NCSER competitions have come and gone this month. We accepted applications for 5 competitions on August 6^th and 3 competitions on August 20^th. Now it’s time for us to begin screening applications and moving them into the peer review process!

NCER Staff Were Out and About

NCER staff had the opportunity to learn from experts in several meetings during the month of August.

Liz Albro attended the CRESST Conference 2015, where she participated in a session titled: Is There a Role for Evidence in the Future of K-16 Technology? The short answer was yes! She was joined at the meeting by Russ Shilling, the Executive Director of STEM Education at the Department, researchers with expertise in educational data mining, cognitive science, learning analytics, and assessment, and developers of education technology from around the world.

On August 20, NCER convened a technical working group (TWG) meeting on Researching the Influence of School Leaders on Student Outcomes. Nine researchers and practitioners who study education leadership met with ED staff to discuss the lessons learned from research that explicitly connects school leadership to student outcomes and the challenges to conducting such research. Department staff, including NCER’s Katina Stapleton, also presented information about education leadership studies funded by the National Center for Education Research, the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, and the Office of Innovation and Improvement. A meeting summary will be available soon on our TWG page.

In the final week of August, Meredith Larson, who oversees our research program on adult education, and Daphne Greenberg, the principal investigator of our National R&D Center, the Center for the Study of Adult Literacy, attended the 2015 National Meeting for Adult Education State Directors hosted by the Department’s Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education.

Between Parents and Kids: IES-Funded Research in the News

Two publications from IES-funded research hit the national news this month … and both highlighted the critical role that parent-child interactions play in children’s learning outcomes. In one article, featured on WebMD, Paul Morgan and his colleagues reported that 2-year-old children with larger oral vocabularies demonstrated better academic achievement and behavior at kindergarten entry. The team also discussed child and family characteristics that are related to vocabulary size at age 2, which may help identify which groups of children are at risk for needing early language intervention.

In the other, discussed in the New York Times, Sian Beilock, Susan Levine, and their colleagues reported that parents’ math anxiety is related to their young children’s math achievement – and seems to emerge when math-anxious parents try to help their kids with their math homework.

We Said Farewell to Our Interns

As August ended, our summer interns went back to school. We were sad to see them go, but excited for them as the new school year begins. Think you might be interested in interning at IES? Read an interview with one of our interns, and learn how to apply to the internship program at the Department.

Questions? Comments? Please send them to IESResearch@ed.gov.