KU Center for Research on Learning
KU-CRL News Archive
ALTEC to help Fort Leavenworth students build 21st Century Skills
Thursday, September 08, 2011
ALTEC, a division of the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning, will help students in Unified School District 207 in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., develop 21st Century Skills as part of a $2.5 million grant from the Department of Defense Education Activity’s Educational Partnership. USD 207 is a public school system of 1,800 students in kindergarten through ninth grade within Fort Leavenworth.
The school district will use the funds to blend best practice learning methods to better prepare students for careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). STEM careers have been identified as vital to U.S. competitiveness in the 21st century economy.
CYBER-TEAMS (a modification of STEM to acknowledge the link between arts education and the sciences) will allow USD 207 to expand student thinking beyond the traditional physical classroom model. Learning spaces will evolve with investments in technology and teacher professional development. For example, teams of student will engage in challenge-based learning, addressing the “big idea” of energy. Challenges will play out differently at each grade level, with activities appropriate to each age group. Teams will use traditional math, language, history, and science and art skills along with technology to identify and solve a challenge, such as energy efficiency.
“Over 90 percent of our students are children of military families. Due to deployment schedules, a typical student is with us less than two years. CYBER-TEAMS is designed to spark an interest in STEM careers that will continue long after they have left our community,” said Alan Landever, Director of Technology Services at USD 207.
In addition to ALTEC and the school district, the following are CYBER-TEAMS partners:
• Frontier Army Museum, Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
• Decent Energy, Leawood, Kan.
• Wisdom Tools, Bloomington, Ind.
• Mid-America Regional Council, Kansas City, Mo.
• National Simulation Center, Fort Leavenworth
• NASA Office of Education
• Apple Computer
For more information about the CYBER-TEAMS project, please contact Alan Landever, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or (913) 651-7373
KUCRL lands $12.5 million award
Thursday, August 25, 2011
A $12.5 million award to the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning will help the nation’s largest federal training program for skilled and semi-skilled workers better prepare young people for jobs in 11 industries, beginning with the construction and health care industries.
Under the five-year federal Department of Labor contract, the center will lead a consortium charged with training Job Corps staff and contractors to use more effective teaching methods in their work with the 60,000 individuals ages 16-24 who enroll in Job Corps programs each year, many of whom come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and have had limited success in school.
“These are youth, young adults, who I think are going to be in a better position to beat the odds and have better employment opportunities than their counterparts who don’t participate in Job Corps programs,” said Daryl Mellard (left), executive director of the Consortium for Excellence in Job Corps Staff Development and director of the Center for Research on Learning’s Division of Adult Studies.
Mellard, the 2011 recipient of KU’s Research Achievement Award, is a member of the National Academy of Science committee on Foundations and Application to Adolescent and Adult Literacy.
“This project gives us the opportunity to apply the fruits of our research to a persistent national problem: How to prepare young people, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, for careers in today’s highly competitive fields,” said Don Deshler, director of the Center for Research on Learning. “The potential benefits for the students, the instructors and the nation’s employers are profound.”
The consortium initially will work with two Job Corps “centers for excellence” in Dennison, Iowa, and Pinnellas County, Fla.; and then will expand to all 125 Job Corps sites in 48 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Job Corps provides training related to jobs in 11 industries. The consortium’s efforts initially will focus on health care and construction.
Job Corps instructors typically are experts in their fields—culinary arts or nursing, for example—but may not have experience teaching others. KUCRL will draw on more than three decades of research on literacy, teaching and coaching in designing the Job Corps program.
“We want to improve the knowledge, skills and abilities of the Job Corps instructors, counselors and program managers,” Mellard said. “Our emphasis is on building local capacity so they won’t be so dependent on outside experts in the future.”
The consortium will use a mix of face-to-face and online methods to accomplish the goals of the project, including tapping the expertise of KUCRL’s ALTEC division, which has 10 years of experience in developing web-based resources for teachers and schools.
In addition to KUCRL, the Consortium for Excellence in Job Corps Staff Development consists of five organizations bringing diverse experience and expertise to the project:
- Alternate Perspectives Inc., a small, woman-owned business in Washington, D.C.
- Coffey Consulting, LLP, a participant in the federal government’s development program for small businesses, located in Bethesda, Md.
- Cornerstone Solutions Inc., a veteran-owned business in East Point, Ga.
- Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL), a private non-profit educational research agency and a U.S. Department of Education Regional Laboratory in Denver
- Telesolv Consulting, a HUBZone (historically underutilized business zones) small business with experience in website development, maintenance and analytics in Washington, D.C.
“The diversity of the consortium is important because of the complexity of issues that are involved,” Mellard said. “To create systems change on this scale, we have to have the capacity to deal with the multiple facets of the Job Corps system.”
CRL researcher in the news
Monday, July 18, 2011
Jean Hall, a researcher in the CRL’s Division of Adult Studies, recently spoke to the Orlando Sentinel about the federal government’s Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP).
Jean and her CRL colleague Jan Moore have produced a report for The Commonwealth Fund examining enrollment trends and affordability of the PCIP program. They found that “although PCIP enrollment has been lower than expected due to affordability issues, a lack of public awareness, and the requirement that applicants be uninsured for six months, the plans are nonetheless playing an important role in making coverage available to otherwise uninsurable Americans with pre-existing conditions.”
The Sentinel contacted Jean for its article, “Floridians with Pre-existing Conditions May be Eligible for Cheaper Premiums.”
Talking about Teaching
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Jim Knight, director of the Kansas Coaching Project at the KU Center for Research on Learning, is working with the Teaching Channel on a new program called Talking about Teaching. For the program, Jim video records a teacher’s lesson and then conducts a “micro-coaching” session with the teacher. The whole experience is then edited into a short film so you see the teacher’s lesson and you see the conversation. Here’s the first Talking about Teaching video, also available on YouTube:
Mellard receives top research award
Monday, May 09, 2011
Daryl F. Mellard, an internationally renowned expert on basic adult literacy and learning disabilities, is the 2011 recipient of the Research Achievement Award at the University of Kansas.
The award is the highest honor given annually to a full-time academic staff researcher working in a department or research center at KU.
Mellard is an associate research professor in the School of Education and director of the Division of Adult Studies in the Center for Research on Learning. He will be recognized at 4 p.m. May 11 at 150 Joseph R. Pearson Hall. The award — including a plaque and $10,000 in research funds — will be presented by Steve Warren, vice chancellor for research and graduate studies. A reception will follow and the public is invited to attend.
Mellard was nominated for the award by Donald Deshler, director of CRL, who described him as “an enormously productive researcher whose work is making a difference in the quality of life enjoyed by individuals with disabilities. He is a wonderful colleague to other researchers in CRL and is an outstanding mentor to young scholars and graduate students.”
Mellard joined the CRL staff in 1982, following six years as a public school psychologist for districts in Leavenworth, Barber and Kingman counties in Kansas. His research focuses on education and employment issues for adults and interventions to improve adult literacy in adult education and other programs. His academic background includes a bachelor’s degree in psychology, an education specialist degree in school psychology and a doctoral degree in special education, all from KU.
Mellard is co-author of the highly regarded “RTI: A Practitioner’s Guide to Implementing Response to Intervention.” He is also the author or co-author of nearly 50 scholarly journal articles and principal investigator on funded research projects for the U.S. Department of Education, the National Institutes of Health and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. In Kansas, he has conducted funded research projects for the Department of Education, the Board of Regents, the Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services and other state agencies.
Under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council, Mellard is completing a two-year appointment on the prestigious Committee on Learning Sciences, Foundations and Applications to Adolescent and Adult Literacy. A committee colleague, Steve Graham of Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development, describes Mellard as “the top scholar nationally and internationally in the area of basic adult literacy.” His research is “systematic, addresses critical issues in adult basic literacy and provides sound guidance in terms of policy, research and service. In my opinion, his research in this area is without peer.”
The Research Achievement Award was established in 2006 and is administered by the Office of Research and Graduate Studies. Past recipients are David VanderVelde, former director of the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Laboratory; Rick Miller, senior scientist in the Exploration Services Section of the Kansas Geological Survey; Debra Kamps, director of the Kansas Center for Autism Research and Training; and Donald Huggins, senior scientist with the Kansas Biological Survey.
New SIM video
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
The Alameda Unified School District recently posted this video of teachers, students, and coaches talking about the Strategic Instruction Model®.
Striving Readers webinar
Friday, March 11, 2011
If you missed Don Deshler’s Striving Readers webinar on March 9, watch the video here.
Deshler, Mellard present at RTI Leadership Forum
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Don Deshler, KUCRL director, presented the opening keynote address for NCLD’s RTI Leadership Forum, December 8, 2010, in Washington, D.C. Daryl Mellard, director of KUCRL’s Division of Adult Studies, participated in a panel titled Meeting the needs of struggling learners - How is RTI addressing the needs of students with disabilities, other students who need differentiated instruction, and students who need adequate instruction?
Don Deshler keynote
Daryl Mellard panel
Learn more about the forum and find links to Don’s handouts and transcript of the address here. More information about Daryl’s panel, including links to handouts and transcripts, may be found here.
New publication
Friday, December 03, 2010
We’ve added a new article to our publication list: RTI Tier Structures and Instructional Intensity by Daryl Mellard, Melinda McKnight, and Joanna Jordan, published in Learning Disabilities Research & Practice. Visit our Research page for a comprehensive list of CRL publications. You can search the list by author or topic.
Moving the needle on adolescent literacy
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
The Harvard Graduate School of Education website features a story about Don Deshler’s presentation of the sixth annual Jeanne S. Chall Lecture.
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