Socioeconomic status (SES) is considered a major predictor of student and school achievement. In most cases, SES is not malleable or available for manipulation to improve students' learning and achievement. Therefore, we explored other student and school-related factors that may be malleable to reduce achievement differences between students and…

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) have shown considerable improvements in student achievement over the last 20 years, but concerns about unequal educational opportunities across different communities in the city continues to be a pressing issue. The North Lawndale Cluster Initiative (NLCI) sought to improve academic achievement and educational…

Advances in technology have changed the world. Finding effective means for incorporating technology in the learning environment is important to educators. One of the newer strategies is blended learning, which is also known as flipped instruction. With this mode of instructional delivery, teachers maintain the role of instructional leader but…

Children with special educational needs (SEN) are known to experience lower average educational attainment than other children during their school years. But we have less insight into how far their poorer educational outcomes stem from their original starting points or from failure to progress during school. The extent to which early…

Recent work examining science test performance in the earliest grades of school has demonstrated that science test score gaps by race/ethnicity are apparent as early as kindergarten and that, in a number of cases, the racial/ethnic test score gaps in science are significantly larger than the corresponding gaps in reading or mathematics. This study…

The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement's (IEA) mission is to enhance knowledge about education systems worldwide and to provide high-quality data that will support education reform and lead to better teaching and learning in schools. In pursuit of this aim, it conducts and reports on major studies of student…

The achievement gap between African American students and their Caucasian peers is a problem that has persisted within the educational system since the early 1970s. Researchers have been investigating whether differences in oral language, such as, Nonmainstream American English (NMAE) use contribute to this gap. There is also concern from…

African Americans have long struggled in this nation, they continue to endure hardship in the workplace, workforce and in the school systems. This study hopes to contribute to the body of research on closing the achievement gap. If education is the passport, then we have a responsibility to close this gap, especially for our students in New York…

Several countries have expanded extended education in recent years. In Germany, the most substantial educational reform is the ongoing transformation of the traditional half-day school system into an all-day school system. Among politicians, expectations are high that all-day schools will promote student achievement and reduce social achievement…

This paper explores the practices of division in operation in primary schools in England in response to the pressures of high stakes tests at age 10/11, known as SATs. Using data from interviews with 20 primary headteachers and information from a survey of nearly 300 primary heads, we argue that the organisation of pupils in preparation for SATs…

The paper presents results from the evaluation of the Teach for Bulgaria (TFB) program, which is part of the Teach for All global network. TFB activities have relevance for a variety of fast-track pathways to the teaching profession. The evaluation is based on a quasi-experimental assessment of teacher performance through student value-added…

This study investigated the impact of school closures for COVID-19 on the attainment of pupils in Key Stage 1 in reading and math, and on the gap between the attainment of disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged children. It explored pupils' attainment compared with pre-pandemic samples, as well as any changes in attainment over the course of the…

The COVID-19 pandemic period confronted schools with new challenges related to school closures and the transition to distance learning, which brought with it several problems and obstacles that schools had to overcome. The main objective of our study is to qualitatively explore the problems and obstacles of distance learning at the first level of…

Significant racial and ethnic achievement gaps exist between students in the U.S. by elementary school, although the underlying causes for these achievement gaps differ. One factor for racial/ethnic achievement gaps is between-group differences in socioeconomic status (SES), particularly exposure to poverty. Moreover, other factors contributing to…

Teachers in Nevada have faced the problem of providing consistent, effective literacy instruction to elementary students, which impacts overall student achievement; only 48.3% of students in Clark County, Nevada were proficient in English Language Arts (ELA) in the 2018-2019 school year. This problem was explored from a case study perspective…