Many states now mandate early screening for dyslexia, but vary in how they address these mandates. There is confusion about the nature of screening versus diagnostic assessments, risk versus diagnosis, concurrent versus predictive validity, and inattention to indices of classification accuracy as the basis for determining risk. To help define what…

There is a significant need for kindergarten entry assessments (KEA) that meet state education agency (SEA) requirements and are psychometrically sound measures of a broad range of school readiness domains such as language, literacy, math, science, executive function, and social-emotional skills. Research Findings: In this paper, we describe five…

Assessing students' emerging literacy skills is crucial for identifying areas where a child may be falling behind and can lead directly to an increased chance of reading success. The Waterford Assessment of Core Skills (WACS), a computerized adaptive test of early literacy for students in prekindergarten through 2nd grade, addresses this need.…

Federal initiatives and other research have led states across the nation to sharpen their focus on teacher evaluation in recent years. In 2009 a seminal report, "The Widget Effect," from The New Teacher Project revealed that in districts using a binary rating system to evaluate teachers, less than 1 percent of teachers received an…

As cyberschooling options expand, it is vital that we understand the nuances of these particular learning opportunities. Because little research exists on leaders of K-12 cyberschools, this exploratory case study had two purposes. We first examined how 18 cyberschool leaders in the United States obtained their position. Second, we explored the…

We present the development and validation of a science notebook rubric intended to measure the academic language and conceptual understanding of non-mainstream students, specifically fifth-grade male and female economically disadvantaged Hispanic English language learner (ELL) and African-American or Hispanic native English-speaking students. The…

This article presents a case study of one high performing high poverty campus serving students of color in South Central Texas. The researchers utilized the criteria for 90/90/90 schools established by Douglas Reeves (2004). In order to meet these criteria, schools had to have the following characteristics: 90% or more of the student body had to…

Responding to federal policy and recent research, states and districts have developed and begun implementing multiple-measure teacher evaluation systems. These systems generally include observational and/or student survey measures of instructional quality alongside measures of teachers' contributions to student learning (e.g., value-added models…

This study focused on a lately constructed survey instrument that was intended to test the family perspective on a home visiting program and school. The four areas investigated were parent-teacher communications, student-teacher interactions, the parent's perception of the school and the parents' understanding of the home visiting program. The…

Because of the increased prevalence of autism and current legislation mandates, public schools are increasingly responsible for educating students with autism. The current literature describes a variety of instructional methods that have been successful in educating these students. However, many educators are not exposed to this information. To…

This study used data from 3 sites to examine the invariance and psychometric characteristics of the Brief Symptom Inventory-18 across Black, Hispanic, and White mothers of 5th graders (N = 4,711; M = 38.07 years of age, SD = 7.16). Internal consistencies were satisfactory for all subscale scores of the instrument regardless of ethnic group…

In this article the authors present a confirmatory factor analysis of the Teachers' Attitudes Toward Computers (TAC) and the Teachers' Attitudes Toward Information Technology (TAT) scales by Christensen and Knezek (1996, 1998) using large samples from three states. The TAC was reduced from 98 items and nine factors to 35 items and eight factors,…

The purpose of this study was to determine the perceptions of second grade students about reading, themselves as readers, their motivation to read, and their subsequent reading achievement. Allowing students time to read independently during the school day and providing various reading materials in the classroom are options that some school…

A study to predict teachers' self-efficacy in using technology for pedagogical purposes was conducted in a predominantly Hispanic school district in south Texas; 438 elementary teachers completed a 32-item survey aligned to the National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers. Findings suggested that the instrument is highly reliable in…

Objective: To assess reproducibility of a School-Based Nutrition Monitoring (SBNM) questionnaire for fourth-grade students. Design: Test-retest. Setting: Fourth-grade elementary school classrooms. Participants: Multiethnic fourth-grade students from 2 area school districts (N = 322). Main Outcome Measures: Reproducibility coefficients with time…