Policy: Student Misuse of Electronic Communication Devices in Schools.

A new study from the University of San Diego’s Center for Education Policy and Law crafts two model student discipline policies—a short and a long version—to guard against student misuse of student-owned and district-owned mobile devices.

The report also includes a recommended district policy to aid educators in discipline enforcement, free speech and privacy concerns pertaining to student misuse of their own devices, and resources to help educators learn about student device use.

The short version (2 pages) lists, in order, what qualifies as a mobile device (or, to use the study’s term, electronic communication device), when school rules governing device use apply, what kinds of behaviors are defined as misuse, when misuse on a student’s own personal time still falls within a school’s jurisdiction, and what consequences schools may enforce.

Designing a Research Instrument: Survey

Effective design and implementation of a research instrument such as a survey is considered both challenging and crucial part of any research. Several books and articles were written to guide the process. Such materials provide support for both novice and more experience researchers by providing them with a number of best practices and guidelines. This is one way to show how crucial research instruments such as survey design is for good research where by we will be able to measure what we expect to measure. Thus findings from research studies can be more useful for our practices in the real world beyond the research settings.

As a doctoral student in the learning sciences and technology, I am interested in both research and development. I believe that our research findings will be able to change the way we do things in the educational environments. Research helps us innovate and enhance our work as educators. We find great many possibilities as well as great many challenges when conducting research in education especially research involving students and teachers and the learning environments.

Study: Reducing class size may not be the best solution

Reducing class sizes—a popular policy among parents, teachers, and lawmakers—has long been viewed as a way to increase student achievement. But while shrinking the number of students in a class can lead to higher test scores overall, it might not necessarily reduce the achievement gaps that exist between students in a given classroom, a new study suggests. The study examined 11,000 elementary students from kindergarten through grade 3, and the results indicated that higher-achieving students benefited more from being in smaller classes in early grades than other students. The findings also indicated that although all types of students benefited from being in small classes, reductions in class size did not reduce the achievement gap between low and high achievers. Download the study