Schafkopf ist ein Spiel, ohne das viele Neubayern leben könnten-- aber nicht sollten! Schafkopf for Expats nimmt sich zum Ziel, diesen unterhaltsamen bayerischen Brauch für eine größere Öffentlichkeit zu erschließen. Das vorliegende Buch erklärt Regeln und Strategie des Kartenspiels auf einfache und humorvolle Weise. Stich für Stich wird der Leser durch Rufspiel, Wenz und Solo geführt, um ein Gefühl für die Raffinessen des Spiels zu vermitteln und eine erste Basis fürs Mitspielen zu schaffen. Sowohl als Spielerpartei als auch in der Verteidigung lernt der Leser wichtige Techniken, um als Nicht-Bayer in der urbayerischen Welt des Schafkopfs mitzumischen. Auch im Buch ist ein Glossar mit wichtigen Schafkopfbegriffen sowie die Regeln zu anderen Kartenspielen mit bayerischen Karten: 66, Schnauz, Schafkopf zu Dritt. "I'm playing with the acorn!", "With an under you won't go under!", "The duck is fat in the butt!" Bavaria's national pastime is a ride of highs and lows, guaranteed to get your heart thumping and your overs trumping. Whether you're deep down in Oberbayern, or far beyond the Weißwurst equator, Schafkopf for Expats puts all you need to know about this classic card game into plain English. Life's too short to learn German? Life's too short not to learn Schafkopf! Schafkopf for Expats explains the rules and strategy of the game in a simple and entertaining way-- in English! Trick for trick, the reader is guided through partner games, Wenzes and suit solos. Each move is described and visualized to give the beginning player a feeling for the subtleties of gameplay, as well as a solid first footing on Schafkopf strategy. A glossary describes key Schafkopf terms in English, and the back of the book includes rules for other Bavarian games (66, Schnauz, Three-Player Schafkopf). A must-have for any expat in Bavaria or Bavarian abroad!

Reading is critical to children's academic and future economic success. Yet reading skills continue to lag in the upper elementary grades. One way that school districts across the country have responded to the challenge of improving students' reading skills has been to hire additional, presumably more skilled, teachers as "instructional coaches" to work with teachers to improve their instructional practice. However, there is no agreed upon definition of the coaching job, and the actual tasks that coaches carry out vary widely. The authors' project implements and studies a structured coaching program (Content-Focused [superscript SM] Coaching; CFC) that is designed to improve reading comprehension instruction in the upper elementary grades. The fundamental research question for their study is: 1) What is the effect of a well-defined instructional coaching program (CFC) on reading comprehension instruction and students' reading achievement? Results indicate that teachers' in the CFC schools significantly and positively increased in the frequency of their participation in coaching focused on enacting instruction and understanding the theory underlying effective reading comprehension instruction. Teachers in the CFC schools also showed modest improvement in the quality of their observed and self-reported reading comprehension instruction. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.).

Research on whether teachers can give accurate self-reports in surveys about their mathematics instruction is fairly mixed. Some of that research indicates that teachers can provide some general approximation of their mathematics instruction in survey self-reports, while other studies find very little correlation between teachers' survey responses and their mathematics practices. This diversity of findings points to elements within school district and program implementation context that influence teachers' understanding of mathematics instruction and, thus, the accuracy of their reports about that instruction. While some research provides evidence that teachers' understanding drives the accuracy of their survey responses, no research to date has provided evidence about what aspects of district context impact the accuracy of teachers' self-reports and whether that accuracy can change over time. In this paper, the authors consider the accuracy of teachers' survey reports about their mathematics instruction over a two-year period in two urban school districts. Their work suggests that several elements of district context matter for the accuracy of teachers' self reports, including their mathematics learning opportunities and the presence of other big instructional initiatives within the district. These findings, drawn from in-depth quantitative and qualitative data gathered in two localized education settings, provide key hypotheses to guide future survey research and controlled studies on teachers' understanding of their mathematics instructional practices. In the present study, the authors find that the same district with higher-quality instruction also had many more teachers who provided accurate self-reports of that instruction, while teachers in the other district often overestimated the quality of their instruction in surveys. Using additional survey and interview data, they present some individual and district factors that explain the accuracy of teachers' responses.

The authors aimed to incorporate learning into the cognitive assessment framework that exists for static assessment data. In order to accomplish this, they derive a common likelihood function for dynamic models and introduce Parameter Driven Process for Change + Cognitive Diagnosis Model (PDPC + CDM), a dynamic model which tracks learning indirectly through student membership in latent states which drive the distributions of the student parameter in the static portion of the model. They described this model both theoretically and empirically through application to the article data set (Chan, 2012). One limitation of this data set is that the items are single skill. In order to truly test PDPC + CDM, the authors need to find data that have items with multiple skills. In general, by adding a dynamic component to the cognitive assessment framework, they provide education researchers with a method to track individual student learning while taking item and skill features into consideration. In addition, one could use a model such as this to define learning trajectories which could lead to better instructional methods and sequences (Haertel, 2012). Teachers could also use this information to better focus their lessons. One goal for the future would be to make these models accessible to researchers and teachers who can use the results to further student learning and the field of education research. (Contains 2 figures.) [This work was supported in part by the Program for Interdisciplinary Education Research, Carnegie Mellon University, under Institute for Education Sciences, Department of Education.].

This study presents preliminary findings from research developing an instructional quality assessment (IQA) toolkit that could be used to monitor the influence of reform initiatives on students' learning environments and to guide professional development efforts within a school or district. This report focuses specifically on the portion of the IQA used to evaluate the quality of teachers' reading comprehension assignments and student work. Results are limited due to a very small sample of participating teachers (N = 13, 52 assignments), and indicate a poor to moderate level of inter-rater agreement and a good degree of consistency for the dimensions measuring academic rigor, but not the clarity of teachers' expectations. The rigor of the assignments collected from teachers also was associated with the rigor of observed instruction. Collecting four assignments (two challenging and two recent) from teachers did not yield a stable estimate of quality. Additional analyses looking separately at the two different assignment types indicate, however, that focusing on one assignment type would yield a stable estimate of quality. This suggests that the way in which assignments are collected from teachers should be revised. Implications for professional development are also discussed. The 2003 Draft Observation and Assignment Rubrics for Reading Comprehension is appended. (Contains 6 tables, 4 figures, and 4 footnotes.).