Making School Count reports on four years of classroom research in which alternative teaching strategies, designed to motivate under-achieving inner-city, African-American middle school students were used and evaluated. The book offers insights into the discrepancy between students' academic dreams (their high performance aspirations) and the realities of their classroom performance. Issues include: *the authors' convictions that the disproportionate under-achievement of African-American students is the result of inappropriate teaching strategies *the prevalent use of a Eurocentric curriculum *results of the authors' research *a guide for teachers wishing to carry out their own research *a study of the collaboration between a university and a schools in an attempt to bring about change from the ground up.

In Making Pre-Med Count, med student Elisabeth Fassas shares personal stories from her own experiences to help guide you through the pre-med process. You’ll get first-hand guidance and learn how to apply her advice to your own med school journey. Counselors and checklists are helpful, but your pre-med journey cannot be boiled down to a list of activities and a collection of accolades. In Making Pre-Med Count, Fassas teaches you how to translate your accomplishments into a compelling and personalized med school application. Fassas gets into the weeds of the pre-med years to touch on the most fundamental and gnawing questions that interested applicants must face. Using examples from her own journey from freshman year to acceptance, plus tips and tricks from her peers, she guides readers through an endless stream of conflicting advice towards preparing academically, mentally and psychologically for the med school application process. Her advice starts with the idea that anything and everything can get you into medical school if you’re able to get into the heads of the admissions committee. You’ll also get her take on many of the questions raised in student forums. Fassas, who will begin med school in the fall of 2019, helps relieve some of the common pre-med doubts, anxieties, and fears that you’ll feel. Making Pre-Med Count compiles Fassas’ advice in one place -- it’s like having your own personal med school advisor.

Despite long-term and ongoing efforts to close the achievement gap between disadvantaged and advantaged students, low-income students continue to perform at considerably lower levels than their higher-income peers in reading and mathematics. Research has shown that students' skills and knowledge often deteriorate during the summer months, with low-income students facing the largest losses. Instruction during the summer has the potential to stop these losses and propel students toward higher achievement. A review of the literature on summer learning loss and summer learning programs, coupled with data from ongoing programs offered by districts and private providers across the United States, demonstrates the potential of summer programs to improve achievement as well as the challenges in creating and maintaining such programs. School districts and summer programming providers can benefit from the existing research and lessons learned by other programs in terms of developing strategies to maximize program effectiveness and quality, student participation, and strategic partnerships and funding. Recommendations for providers and policymakers address ways to mitigate barriers by capitalizing on a range of funding sources, engaging in long-term planning to ensure adequate attendance and hiring, and demonstrating positive student outcomes.

A clear, practical, first-of-its-kind guide to communicating and understanding numbers and data—from bestselling business author Chip Heath. How much bigger is a billion than a million? Well, a million seconds is twelve days. A billion seconds is…thirty-two years. Understanding numbers is essential—but humans aren’t built to understand them. Until very recently, most languages had no words for numbers greater than five—anything from six to infinity was known as “lots.” While the numbers in our world have gotten increasingly complex, our brains are stuck in the past. How can we translate millions and billions and milliseconds and nanometers into things we can comprehend and use? Author Chip Heath has excelled at teaching others about making ideas stick and here, in Making Numbers Count, he outlines specific principles that reveal how to translate a number into our brain’s language. This book is filled with examples of extreme number makeovers, vivid before-and-after examples that take a dry number and present it in a way that people click in and say “Wow, now I get it!” You will learn principles such as: -SIMPLE PERSPECTIVE CUES: researchers at Microsoft found that adding one simple comparison sentence doubled how accurately users estimated statistics like population and area of countries. -VIVIDNESS: get perspective on the size of a nucleus by imagining a bee in a cathedral, or a pea in a racetrack, which are easier to envision than “1/100,000th of the size of an atom.” -CONVERT TO A PROCESS: capitalize on our intuitive sense of time (5 gigabytes of music storage turns into “2 months of commutes, without repeating a song”). -EMOTIONAL MEASURING STICKS: frame the number in a way that people already care about (“that medical protocol would save twice as many women as curing breast cancer”). Whether you’re interested in global problems like climate change, running a tech firm or a farm, or just explaining how many Cokes you’d have to drink if you burned calories like a hummingbird, this book will help math-lovers and math-haters alike translate the numbers that animate our world—allowing us to bring more data, more naturally, into decisions in our schools, our workplaces, and our society.

Like a strong foundation in a house, the climate of a school is the foundation that supports the structures of teaching and learning. This book provides a framework for educators to look at school and classroom climates using both informal and formal measures. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of climate and details techniques which may be used by heads or classroom teachers to judge the health of their learning environment. The book sets out to enhance understanding of the components of a healthy learning environment and the tools needed to improve that environment. It also looks at ways to assess the impact of change activities in improving and sustaining educational excellence. The international team of contributors bring perspectives from the school systems in America, UK, Australia and Holland.