Graduate School of Education

jats:titleAbstract</jats:title> jats:pThis chapter examines the right to education of refugees. International human rights instruments, including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the Refugee Convention, provide a framework for the right to education for refugees. As a social right, and as reflected in the ICESCR, the right to education is to be progressively realized and requires positive action and allocation of funding. Like all human rights, it is dependent on action by government, the availability of public resources, and enforcement mechanisms. The devolution of responsibility for the education of refugees to States through recent policy further entrenches the role of the State in respecting, protecting, and fulfilling refugees’ right to education. The chapter then explores the intersection of global and national frameworks for the right to education for refugees and its realization in the form of access to schools. Despite the widely embraced global articulation of the right to education for all refugee children, the realization of the right to education is highly variable, being largely dependent upon their State of asylum.</jats:p>

jats:titleAbstract</jats:title> jats:pEducation is one of the key tools of nation-building, as it aims to create future citizens. Yet what happens in seemingly ‘futureless’ contexts where refugees cannot access even social membership, let alone legal citizenship? In this introduction to our special issue on education for refugees, we explore the aspirations and conceptions of possible futures that students, teachers, governments, international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), and funders have when they promote and pursue education as the solution to the liminal position that refugees in protracted refugee situations find themselves in. Based on insights from the articles, we analyse disconnects between aspirations for education and realities of access to quality education and to opportunities after completing education. We argue that to address these disconnects requires us to move beyond temporal and spatial binaries—present vs. future, here vs. there—that are so common in refugee education discourse and policy. Our suggestion is to draw on and support stakeholders’ work, powerfully exemplified in this special issue, to contribute to improved conditions through pedagogies, practices, and policies that address these binaries.</jats:p>

jats:p Poor program implementation constitutes one explanation for null results in trials of educational interventions. For this reason, researchers often collect data about implementation fidelity when conducting such trials. In this article, we document whether and how researchers report and measure program fidelity in recent cluster-randomized trials. We then create two measures—one describing the level of fidelity reported by authors and another describing whether the study reports null results—and examine the correspondence between the two. We also explore whether fidelity is influenced by study size, type of fidelity measured and reported, and features of the intervention. We find that as expected, fidelity level relates to student outcomes; we also find that the presence of new curriculum materials positively predicts fidelity level. </jats:p>

jats:p This article explores middle school teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching and the relationship between such knowledge and teachers’subject matter preparation, certification type, teaching experience, and their students’ poverty status. The author administered multiple-choice measures to a nationally representative sample of teachers and found that those with more mathematical course work, a subject-specific certification, and high school teaching experience tended to possess higher levels of teaching-specific mathematical knowledge. However, teachers with strong mathematical knowledge for teaching are, like those with full credentials and preparation, distributed unequally across the population of U.S. students. Specifically, more affluent students are more likely to encounter more knowledgeable teachers. The author discusses the implications of this for current U.S. policies aimed at improving teacher quality. </jats:p>

This mixed-methods study explores the relationship between early elementary students’ domainspecific vocabulary knowledge and their ability to comprehend grade-level reading passages on unfamiliar science topics. Specifically, this study used (a) structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine the extent to which students’ networks of domain-specific vocabulary knowledge in Grades 1 and 2 mediated the effects of a Tier 1 content-based literacy intervention on domainspecific reading comprehension scores in Grade 2 (N = 2,156); and (b) quantitative survey and qualitative interview data from teachers (N = 48) to surface new themes about teacher vocabulary instruction that might suggest potential explanations for the SEM findings. SEM analysis revealed that students’ domain-specific vocabulary knowledge in first and second grade explained 69% of the treatment effect on a domain-specific reading comprehension outcome. Results from the quantitative survey also indicated that treatment group teachers reported providing more incidental exposures to vocabulary than control teachers (Effect Size [ES] = .54) and qualitative analyses revealed that teachers with high incidental exposures tended to provide expanded opportunities for their students to engage with words and to connect words to topics. Findings from this mixed-method study paint a more complete picture of (a) the important role domain-specific vocabulary knowledge plays in facilitating reading comprehension transfer in the domain of science, and (b) what teachers do during vocabulary instruction to promote transfer in domain-specific reading comprehension.