Assessment, Evaluation & Documentation

ARTS SURVIVE: A Study of Sustainability in Arts Education Partnerships

This report shares findings and provides perspectives for partnerships to consider as they seek to build their capacity to survive and to thrive over time. It contains questions for partnerships to consider in building these capacities. Including sketches of the twenty-one arts education partnerships selected for this study, bibliographic resources, a research context for the study, and reflections from many Arts Survive! Advisory Group Members and Senior Consultants, the report provides tools for promoting the long-term sustainability of arts education partnerships between schools and arts organizations, artists, and/or cultural institutions. Whether you are an artist working in the schools, a teacher, an arts administrator, a parent, a school administrator, a school board member, or a funder, we hope these tools will be useful as you consider how best to sustain the life of your arts education partnership. 

Making Learning Visible: Children as Individual and Group Learners

In this richly-illustrated book, the culmination of a two-year research collaboration between teachers and pedagogues from Reggio Emilia and researchers from Project Zero illuminates ways in which documentation can foster both individual and group learning, creating a relationship between them. They identify methods and processes that will enable educators to reflect not only on the learning processes of children but also on those of adults. 

Schools Need to Pay More Attention to "Intelligence in the Wild"

Traditional schools usually emphasize the kind of intelligence students need to solve clearly defined problems. By stressing this kind of "laboratory intelligence," schools typically ask students to engage in focused, systematic tasks that have unambiguous goals and a clear choice of answers: learn this list of words and how to spell them, learn who the presidents were. The tasks may be challenging, but they are challenging in a predictable way. The attention paid to standards and assessments often works to increase the emphasis on this laboratory intelligence.

Intelligence in the Wild: A Dispositional View of Intellectual Traits

Most accounts of intelligence are "abilities-centric." They aim to explain intelligent behavior in terms of IQ or other measures of intellectual aptitude. However, several investigators have proposed that intelligent behavior in the wild--in everyday circumstances in which carefully framed tests do not tell people exactly what intellectual task to attempt--depends in considerable part on thinking dispositions. Definitionally, dispositions concern not what abilities people have, but how people are disposed to use those abilities. Everyday language includes a number of dispositional terms such as curiosity, open-mindedness, and skepticism. We review several dispositional constructs that researchers have investigated, sometimes under the label dispositions. The findings in trend show that dispositions are stable traits that help to explain intellectual performance over and above measures of intellectual aptitude. It is argued that a dispositional view of intelligence is warranted, and that it is an important area for continued research.

Why Teach Habits of Mind

Why teach habits of mind?