Improving Achievement with Digital Age Best Practices
Dr. Moersch's latest book, Improving Achievement with Digital Age Best Practices, is available now from 2013 from Corwin Press. This book is about making the critical connection between the effective implementation of 21st Century skills/themes and student academic achievement in the classroom using a clear set of guidelines or best practices referred to as Digital Age Best Practices. These Digital Age Best Practices include:
- Bolstering purposeful inquiry through student questions
- Accelerating individual growth through vertical differentiation (readiness)
- Promoting shared expertise with networked collaboration
- Implementing student-centered learning environments
- Personalizing and globalizing content by making authentic connections
- Accelerating individual growth through horizontal differentiation (interests/modalities)
- Anchoring student learning with digital-age tools and resources
- Clarifying student understanding with formative assessments
The Digital Age Best Practices represent research-based instructional strategies that promote digital age teaching and learning, but possess effect sizes rivaling convention best practices. The book uses the story of one of New Jersey’s poorest and ethnically-diverse communities, Atlantic City, as the backdrop to chronicle significant gains in student achievement attributable to these Digital Age Best Practices that enabled the school system to achieve “high performing” status from the Department of Education.
Besides Improving Achievement with Digital Age Best Practices and the International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE) book, Beyond Hardware: Using Existing Technology to Promote Higher-order Thinking, Dr. Chris Moersch has also published over a dozen articles focusing on the tenets of digital age teaching and learning, H.E.A.T.® (Higher order thinking, Engaged learning, Authentic connections, Technology use) and LoTi® (Levels of Teaching Innovation). The LoTi® Framework, itself, has been the focal point for over 100 doctoral dissertations and research projects published worldwide.
