January 2012
English/Language Arts Faculty Collaborative forms Disciplinary Literacy Task Force
The College and Career Readiness Initiative (CCRI) English/Language Arts Faculty Collaborative has pulled together teacher education representatives from 10 different institutes of higher education to form a Disciplinary Literacy Task Force. The task force will get right to work, developing six to eight modules for use in teacher education courses. The modules will emphasize methods to support students as they read rigorous texts.
The task force met in January for its first training session, which explored metacognitive reading strategies for English/language arts, social studies, science, and mathematics texts. Future task force initiatives will include site visits to universities, a meeting in May to discuss strategy integration, and an online course for faculty members. Upon completion, the online course and literacy modules will be available on the English/Language Arts Faculty Collaborative external website.
RTI Institute Director Pamela Bell presents at teacher preparation seminar
Pamela Bell, director of MCPER's Response to Intervention Institute, delivered a presentation titled "Implementing Response to Intervention: Challenges for Secondary Campuses" at the College and Career Readiness Initiative seminar "Preparing Teachers for 21st Century Teaching" on September 15 in Austin. For the talk, Bell represented the Building Capacity for Response to Intervention Implementation project, of which she is principal investigator.
Eric Oslund to speak on predictive validity of curriculum-embedded measures for kindergarteners
Eric Oslund, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Educational Psychology at Texas A&M University, will lead a MCPER Brown Bag event on Jan. 17 titled "Examining the Predictive Validity of Curriculum-Embedded Progress-Monitoring Measures for Students in Kindergarten." The event will be held from noon to 1 p.m. in the Pittenger Room (SZB 418). Send an e-mail to rsvp@meadowscenter.org to RSVP.
Oslund will describe two studies of kindergarten students in a tier 2 reading intervention. The first study examined the ability of measures taken throughout kindergarten to predict end-of-kindergarten outcomes. The second study examined the longitudinal (i.e., end of first grade and end of second grade) predictive validity of the measures. The outcome variables for both studies were latent factors composed of measures of early reading skills. Findings indicate that curriculum-embedded measures can predict end-of-kindergarten and longitudinal reading outcomes.
UT Austin special education researchers ranked third in nation for scholarly articles
The University of Texas at Austin was ranked third in the nation for special education articles published by faculty researchers from 2005 to 2009. According to ScienceWatch, UT researchers—primarily faculty members of the Department of Special Education, including MCPER Executive Director Sharon Vaughn and several other MCPER researchers and board members—contributed 95 papers to Thomson Reuters-indexed special education journals, or 2.25% of all papers published in those journals during that time period.