Excerpt is from Enrollment Management Learning Collaborative Annual Report 2009. Boston, MA: Eduventures, January 2010. Used by permission of Eduventures.

The complex role that parents play in the college search and selection process deserves greater scrutiny in order to shed light on how parents understand both the global benefits of postsecondary education and the specific value propositions of individual schools.

Parents and students alike attest to the significant role that parents play in the college search: about 53% of parents and 45% of students in our surveys characterize the division of labor in their family’s college search as a 50-50 partnership. Parental influence is especially strong early in the process, when many parents are likely to suggest possible schools, establish criteria, ensure that students have taken all necessary entrance exams, ask them to make lists of their academic interests, or simply nudge them to get started. By the beginning of the summer before eleventh grade, nearly half of surveyed students and more than half of surveyed parents had begun the college search.

Moreover, because parents tend to research institutional websites more thoroughly than students (who are more likely to rely on third-party sources of information such as College Board), colleges and universities have ample opportunity to target parents directly through use of parent portals, mailing lists, electronic newsletters, and the like. This effort is particularly crucial in the case of Black, Hispanic, and first-generation college-attendee students, who tend to start their college searches earlier than average (many by the spring of ninth grade) and rely more heavily on online sources of information than their wealthier peers—and, in the case of minority students, whose parents tend to be more involved in the college search. Early engagement, therefore, can be key to recruiting for diversity; middle school is not too early to begin outreach to desirable students from these backgrounds.

Excerpt is from The Future of Gaming: A Portrait of the New Gamers. Beverly, MA: Latitude Research, September 2011. Used by permission of Latitude Research.

Insight/Opportunity 2: Games for Life and Personal Development

Everyday Immersion Meets Productive Diversion

More than nine in ten participants want access to more life-relevant games, and half of them would like to gamify mundane or repetitive tasks in order to make everyday experience more interesting. Recent entrants into this space—such as Chromaroma, the London-based public transit game that allows commuters to amass points for distance traveled—stand to command user loyalty by valorizing the routine.

First-Person Tutor

Over two-thirds of participants view games as a medium for self-improvement. Women were more likely than men to desire games that would help them improve skills or achieve goals, and significantly more women than men wanted to see games applied to the realms of personal wellness and learning, encompassing such areas as goal setting, time management, financial literacy, and brain fitness.

Excerpts from SAE Vehicle Design Challenge 1: Technical Proposal. Submitted in response to Request for Proposals for the Creation of an Activity to Replace the Steel Can Rover in SAE’s A World In Motion® Challenge 1. Newton, MA: Education Development Center, March 2007. Used by permission of Education Development Center.

The AWIM curriculum does not require students to master a given set of scientific or mathematical concepts; it does, however, introduce students to the real-world application of such ideas as force, motion, friction, inertia, and potential and kinetic energy. By systematically collecting data on prototype versions of their vehicles, student design teams investigate how certain variable factors affect the forces acting upon a simple machine, and how changes in those variables bring about changes in the machine’s performance. Students are then able to revise their designs to meet certain sets of criteria. In replicating the process of inquiry as practiced by engineers and scientists, the challenges emphasize independent observation and reasoning as well as ongoing assessment and self-assessment. Students find out that trial and error are important aspects of knowledge building, and that failed experiments pave the way for successful ones. Above all, they discover the connection between the items they see and use every day and the engineering process, and they experience something of the excitement and creativity that are vital components of that process.

During the course of the project, industry volunteers visit the classroom to describe their fields of work and act as resources for the students. Rather than give ready answers to student questions about how to fix or improve their toy vehicles, these practicing engineers encourage students to perform their own investigations and suggest how they might find out more in order to solve the design problem at hand. Volunteers also provide information on engineering as a career, thus offering students an example of success in the field and a narrative of how it was achieved. Especially for female and minority students, the presence of role models who are women and/or from diverse racial or ethnic backgrounds can help forge connections in the minds of young people between academic achievement and the engineering profession. The volunteer component of A World In Motion underscores SAE’s long-standing commitment to authoritative information, active dissemination, and effective outreach.

From “A New Resource for Teachers of Preschool English Learners,” R & D Alert, Vol. 6, No. 3. Excerpt is property of WestEd, 730 Harrison Street, Fifth Floor, San Francisco, California 94107-1242. Copyright 2004 by WestEd. Used with permission of WestEd.

Project Director Rebeca Valdivia says that the new material—especially the chapters pertaining to emergent literacy and children with disabilities—reflects newly prevalent issues. The earlier guide was geared almost entirely toward Spanish-speaking English learners, but the new book addresses the needs of children from a variety of language backgrounds—a change that acknowledges the increasing diversity of languages spoken in California and the rest of the country. An enhanced emphasis on building bridges between school and family life is also evident in the revised edition. “I think what our guide does really well is encourage teachers and practitioners to move away from a deficit-oriented teaching approach and to focus on the language skills students already have,” she says.

Joyce Palacio, principal of two Los Angeles–area child development centers and member of the panel that revised the guide, sees that approach in action every day. “Many of the lessons in the book are simply good child development practices extended to the field of language learning,” she says. “We give teachers specific activities, but the thing to remember is that children acquire knowledge all day long. That’s the beauty of it.” The necessity of visual cues, of daily interactive practice, of forging immediate connections between familiar and unfamiliar material—these ideas and many others are explained in detail, and numerous examples are provided. The guide outlines suggestions for directed teaching as well as for spontaneous interventions in children’s play.

Excerpt from “EWN Celebrates Successes in Enterprise’s Baltimore Education Initiative.” Text is property of Enterprise Community Partners, 10227 Wincopin Circle, American City Building, Columbia, Maryland 21044. Copyright 2006 by Enterprise Community Partners.

The Enterprise Women’s Network (EWN) of Baltimore drew 267 members and guests to its annual Spring Luncheon on April 26, more than double last year’s number of 120. This year’s theme, “Community Schools, Community Success: Building a Bridge Between Communities and Schools,” served as a cogent reminder of the ties between effective public education and effective community development—ties that Enterprise Community Partners and EWN have sought to strengthen in one Baltimore neighborhood for over a decade.

Held at the James Rouse Visionary Center of the American Visionary Art Museum, the luncheon featured keynote speakers Jane Quinn from the Children’s Aid Society (CAS) in New York and Tina Hike-Hubbard, Senior Program Director for Enterprise Baltimore. Quinn spoke about CAS’s Community Schools, a collaboration between CAS and the New York City Board of Education that enables ten at-risk public schools to keep extended hours during the week and stay open on weekends, offering health and social services as well as academic enrichment programs to students. And Hike-Hubbard told the story of what Enterprise has achieved over the past eleven years in the Baltimore neighborhood of Sandtown-Winchester, and of EWN’s role in those achievements.

From “Redesigning High Schools: Littleton High School, Littleton, Colorado.” Text is property of The Education Alliance at Brown University, 222 Richmond Street, Suite 300, Providence, Rhode Island 02903. Copyright 2004 by The Education Alliance.

A strong culture of collaborative leadership and faculty professional development undergirds much of what Littleton High School has accomplished. Four teacher committees oversee four of the major aspects of the ongoing reforms at LHS: the power standards, the at-risk academy, the literacy programs, and the student advisory teams. The school’s Curriculum Council is composed of department chairpersons, and its School Accountability Committee includes students as well as teachers. An intensive mentoring program exists for new faculty, featuring monthly new teacher meetings to discuss the Littleton approach, in-class observations and follow-up with an assistant principal, and one-on-one matching with an established faculty member. Teachers may elect to pursue a three-year, self-directed Professional Learning Plan for evaluation purposes instead of the standard six-year cycle of observations and conferences. During the planning for Direction 2000, the drive toward professional development accelerated. “Dr. Westerberg developed classes for college credit and taught them himself after school in order to support faculty with current research developments,” says teacher Erna Hedlund. “The majority of teachers took advantage of the opportunity to get college credit—but most importantly, teachers were talking among themselves.” To this day, LHS inservices are devoted to implementation and fine-tuning of current building goals.

“I really love this school. We are always trying to improve and create a new vision. To work at Littleton High School you need some extra energy,” says Marcia Scofield. Today a long waiting list exists for students outside the district who wish to enroll at LHS. The number of students passing subjects is up, and average CSAP scores are in the high category. Overall enrollment has increased, as has the proportion of ESL students. Change is ongoing at LHS—testimony to the “extra energy,” the vision, and the dedication of the Littleton High School community.

Excerpt from draft version of Institutions Weigh In on Learning Management System (LMS) Hosting in Higher Education: A Catalyst for Achieving Institutional Objectives and Managing Limited Resources. Boston, MA: Eduventures, November 2007. Used by permission of Eduventures.

UAL had hosted the system in house for several years, and the selection of [the company]’s hosted offering was, for Atkins at least, an easy one. The first version of the software was poorly maintained at UAL; for two or three years there was only one person looking after it, and at one point the school had a three-week outage. Increased enrollment in the institution’s online programs rendered some kind of change necessary. “We’d already looked at the investment of supporting the program internally, and it was clear that we needed vendor hosting in order to achieve what we wanted to achieve,” he says. “The choice was, formally speaking, the outcome of an evaluation, but there simply are not a lot of options out there. Vendor hosting of LMS may be a mature model in the U.S., but it’s still fairly new in Europe.”

Although Atkins clearly saw the benefits of a [company]-hosted solution, he faced two sets of cynics within the university: those within IT who feared redundancy and loss of status, and those on the academic side who feared loss of control over the application. It took three or four months to get approval for the adoption, with a ruling that the school would try vendor hosting for a year. The success of the yearlong hosting “experiment” speaks for itself. “A review was performed at the end of the year, and the decision to continue with the service boiled down to one line in the meeting minutes,” says Atkins.

From draft version of Mapping the Adult Learner Landscape: Growth and Change in the Pursuit of Workforce Excellence. Boston, MA: Eduventures, September 2006. Used by permission of Eduventures.

A number of education experts have sounded a warning about this trend, arguing that the GED was never intended as a shortcut to a high school diploma for school-age young people but rather as a second-chance option for adults in the workforce (Arenson, K.W. More Youths Opt for GED, Skirting High School Hurdle. The New York Times, May 15, 2004). Two reasons have been cited for the wave of younger GED participants: (1) high-stakes standardized testing in high schools has ensured that diplomas are harder to get, and (2) students have become acutely aware that they should acquire some sort of high school–level credential in order to have even minimal job opportunities. Some low-performing students fail the standardized tests increasingly required by high schools for graduation; others, faced with the prospect or expectation of failing, drop out of school before even taking the tests. Changes in government policy have also played a role in the shift: between 1989 and 1997, the number of states allowing 16-year-olds to earn a GED rose from 25 to 35. And there is evidence that new school accountability rules under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) have led some districts to encourage low-performing students to leave school and pursue an alternative credential like the GED, since significant numbers of low-achieving students would harm a school’s adequate yearly progress (AYP) rating (National Center for Education Statistics. 2005. GED: Issue Brief. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education).

From “FES Forges Links Between 20 Schools and Colleges in First Step of National Initiative.” Text is property of College for Every Student (formerly Foundation for Excellent Schools), PO Box 247, 13 Church Street, Essex, New York 12936.

Every student participating in The Century Program (TCP) will pair with a college-based mentor and participate in such college preparation activities as early awareness workshops, admissions and financial aid information sessions, campus visits, application tutorials, and job shadows. Teams from each school–college partnership will develop excellence plans tailored to individual school needs at a workshop conducted by FES on November 12, 13, and 14 at the Sagamore Hotel on Lake George, New York. FES-assigned program directors will monitor and facilitate progress at each TCP school.

In June the W.K. Kellogg Foundation awarded FES a $1 million seed grant to launch The Century Program. Since then, other funders—including the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham, the Travelers Foundation, the Irene E. and George A. Davis Foundation, and the State Street Foundation—have pledged more than $500,000 to support the first group of schools. FES will be selecting 40 more schools to join TCP in the fall of 2004, and 40 additional schools will come on board in 2005. Schools will remain in TCP for at least three years.