Project Staff

• Dr. Bruce Bracken, Co-Principal Investigator
• Dr. Joyce VanTassel-Baska, Co-Principal Investigator
• Dr. Tamra Stambaugh, Project Manager

Contact Information

The College of William and Mary
Center for Gifted Education
PO Box 8795
Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795
Phone: 757-221-2362
Fax: 757-221-2184

Purpose

This project will demonstrate how the development and implementation of high-powered, interdisciplinary curriculum in language arts can raise the threshold of performance in economically disadvantaged high ability learners in the regular classroom as well as other educational settings. By setting high standards for curriculum content and instructional pedagogy and by working with administrators, teachers, students, and parents to embed these expectations in classroom practice with supporting structures in the home and community, this project will advance the state of the art of gifted education.

Objectives

• To develop and implement instrumentation sensitive to low socioeconomic learners for purposes of identification and assessment of learning.
• To implement, refine, and extend research-based language arts curriculum units of study in grades 3-5 in seven different school districts.
• To develop and implement professional training models for teachers, administrators, and broader school communities.
• To conduct research on short term and longitudinal student learning gains as well as the mechanisms that promote the institutionalization of innovation through scaling up.

Curriculum

Language Arts Units

• Journeys and Destinations
• Literary Reflections
• Autobiographies

Research-based Teaching Models

• The Change Model
• The Vocabulary Web
• The Literature Web
• The Hamburger Model
• The Writing Process
• The Research Model
• The Reasoning Model
  

Alignment with State Standards

The Project Athena language arts units have been carefully aligned with the state standards from each of the participating districts in South Carolina, Maryland, and Virginia.

The curriculum units address the standards in teaching students to think about literature and nonfiction, perform persuasive writing tasks, communicate orally, and understand language structure and usage.

Accommodating Diverse Learners

Many of the students in Project Athena will be on free or reduced lunch status, be minority students or have a learning disability of some kind. Beyond differentiation of reading and task demands, these students may need targeted instructional attention to assure success. The following ideas for teachers include cognitive and socio-emotional development considerations, written expression and organizational considerations, and ideas for working with twice-exceptional learners.

Cognitive Development
The teacher:

• Taps learning modalities, such as auditory, visual, and kinesthetic.
• Uses vocabulary study techniques.
• Encourages the use and creation of word analogies.
• Employs expressive activities, role-playing, debate, and oral interpretation of written material.
• Employs puzzles, games and spatial reasoning techniques.
• In order to stimulate thinking, uses challenging problems where students don't know algorithms.
• Employs creative thinking strategies such as brainstorming, synetics, elaboration.
• Engages students in activities that employ inductive and deductive thinking.
• Integrates the arts into teaching.
• Uses concept maps and other scaffolds for learning.
• Uses interdisciplinary approaches.
• Integrates technology.
• Asks students to reflect on their own learning in a variety of ways, such as journals, classroom discussions, etc.
• Encourages exploring multiple perspectives.
• Uses biographies and autobiographies to provide role models of success.

Organizational Accommodations
The teacher:

• Lists and verbally reviews step-by-step directions for assignments.
• Posts class and homework assignments in the same area each day and ensures that students record them and/or have a printed copy.
• Verbally reviews class and homework assignments.
• Works with students to establish specific due dates for short assignments and a time frame for long-terms assignments.
• Breaks up tasks into workable and obtainable steps.
• Provides examples and specific steps to accomplish tasks.
• Provides check-points for long-term assignments and monitors progress frequently.
• Directs students to review and summarize important information and directions.
• Coaches students about asking questions regarding unclear directions and assignments.

Social-Emotional Development
The teacher:

• Provides personal encouragement to each learner that is based on performance level.
• Promotes individual student understanding of their own giftedness.
• Communicates regularly with parents.

Written Expression Accommodations
The teacher:

• Breaks assignments down into smaller, manageable parts.
• Allows additional time.
• Reduces or alters written requirements.
• Guides students to proofread for one type of error at a time.
• Has students use scientific and technological products to communicate knowledge.
• Permits dictated response to a person or tape recorder.
• Teaches prewriting strategies including brainstorming, making a web, and drawing about a topic.

Twice-Exceptional Accommodations
Some students in Project Athena may be twice-exceptional, both gifted and learning-disabled or attention deficit. Those students may require additional accommodation approaches to be employed. The following represents some suggestions:

• Removing distractions (seating, use of desk clocks).
• Providing cueing.
• Allowing classroom movement.
• Providing regular contact with parents.
• Providing visual, auditory, and written reminders of assignments, procedures, and tasks.
• Adjusting deadlines/time requirements for tests, homework, and special projects.
• Allowing for alternative assignments.

Assessment

• Cognitive Abilities Test (CogAT)
• Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS)
• Universal Nonverbal Intelligence Test (UNIT)
• Test of Critical Thinking (TCT)
• The William and Mary Classroom Observation Scales-Revised (COS-R)
• The William and Mary Student Observation Scales (SOS)
• Pre and post performance-based assessments in writing and literature analysis

Professional Development

• Annual Summer Institute for experimental teachers, school and district administrators, and other school personnel
• List-serv for teachers and project staff
• Athena Web site
• On-site technical assistance to teachers and site coordinators
• Targeted products based upon site needs
• Midwinter Institute for post-implementation training
• Parent orientation workshops
• Community-building model for decision makers

Research Highlights

2005-2006 Findings

• During Year Three (2005-2006) implementation of Project Athena, experimental students continued to obtain higher mean scores than comparison students on measures of both critical thinking and reading comprehension.
• In Year Three, experimental teachers continued to demonstrate higher levels of differentiated instructional practices than their comparison peers.

Across three years (2003-2006)

• Across all three years, experimental students performed at a statistically significant better level than comparison students, suggesting that the project curriculum enforced critical thinking more than the alternative employed in comparison classrooms.
• Across three years, female students did better than male students on the test of critical thinking (TCT).
• The three year longitudinal data also indicated that there was an ethnicity effect on both the TCT and the ITBS reading assessment, with White Americans registering the highest group performance, followed by African Americans, and by Hispanic American students; this pattern was true for both experimental and comparison groups.
• Longitudinally, experienced teachers attained statistically significant better and educationally important and larger instructional improvement than comparison teachers, demonstrating a stable and effective use of research-based instructional strategies across three years’ project participation.
  
  

Major Products Developed

• Classroom Observation Scales-Revised (COS-R) and Student Observation Scale (SOS)
• Test of Critical Thinking (TCT)
• Navigators: Novel study guides
• Jacob's Ladder Reading Comprehension Program

Participating School Districts

• Fairfax County, VA
• Gloucester County, VA
• Greene County, VA
• Greenville, SC
• Montgomery County, MD
• Newport News, VA
• Westmoreland County, VA

Link to Javits Grant Information at OERI (United States Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement)

For more information on Project Athena, contact cfge@wm.edu.

Classroom Observation Scales-Revised (COS-R) and
Student Observation Scales (SOS)

The COS-R and the SOS are observation scales being used in all Project Athena classrooms. The scales are divided into six subscales:

Each subscale has 3-5 corresponding items that target certain teacher behaviors exhibited during classroom instruction. Each behavior focuses on research-based best practices in the field of gifted education. The scales are meant to be used as growth tools and baseline data on which to base professional development decisions. They are not meant to be used as teacher evaluation tools.

COS-R and SOS