From the National Center for Education Research (NCER)

NCER Releases Two New Practice Guides

In September, NCER released Encouraging Girls in Math and Science and Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning. The IES practice guides, available through the What Works Clearinghouse, are designed to bring the best available evidence and expertise to bear on the types of education challenges that cannot currently be addressed by single interventions or programs. The guides consist of a list of discrete recommendations for educators that are intended to be actionable. These recommendations taken together are intended to be a coherent approach to a multifaceted problem. Each recommendation is explicitly connected to the level of evidence supporting it (e.g., strong, moderate, low). The practice guides are written by panels of nationally recognized experts and are subjected to rigorous external peer review. For more information visit the NCER practice guides page.

Grantee Receives 2007 Purves Award:

Carol Booth Olson, one of NCER's Teacher Quality grantees, received the 2007 Alan C. Purves Award by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) in November. Olson, director of the University of California-Irvine Writing Project, was selected for her article with Robert Land titled "A Cognitive Strategies Approach to Reading and Writing Instruction for English Language Learners in Secondary School," which was published in the journal Research in the Teaching of English. The Purves Award recognized Olson's article as "most likely to have a significant impact on teachers' understanding of literacy learning and/or teaching." Olson and Land's research was funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA). With a new $2.9 million grant from IES, they are currently implementing a randomized field trial designed to test the effectiveness of the cognitive strategies approach. www.nwp.org