Immigration and migration to New York City (NYC) collectively create a dynamic population of students. In this brief the authors use a decade of detailed, longitudinal data on NYC's 1st-8th graders to explore both the "stock" of students enrolled and the "flow" of new entrants in each academic year. Together, these paint a…

A long-awaited federal study of reading and math software found no significant differences in standardized-test scores between students who used the technology in their classrooms and those who used other methods. The study compared classes overseen by teachers who used the technology-based products with those of other teachers who used different…

Over the past three decades, enrollment in full-day kindergarten has grown considerably--from roughly one-tenth to just over half of US kindergartners today. Full-day kindergarten reappeared first in the 1960s as an intervention designed to help disadvantaged children ''catch up'' to their peers through additional schooling. More recently, it has…

This article describes Everyday Mathematics, a new math education curriculum targeted to kindergarten, first grade, and second grade students in Holland. It will be introduced to third and fourth grades in 2008. The curriculum helps prepare pupils for standardized tests; allows for students to work at their own rate; involves parents in helping…

A total of 278 children at Time 1 (144 male and 134 female) from School Years 1 and 2 in the United Kingdom serve as participants. The children complete self-rated scales of school adjustment, and their teachers complete the Teacher Rating Scale of School Adjustment (TRSSA) twice across a 1-year period. At Time 1, children's performance on…

In a pair of recent studies, Fryer and Levitt (2004a, 2004b) analyzed the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study--Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) to explore the characteristics of the Black-White test score gap in young children. They found that the gap grew markedly between kindergarten and the third grade and that they could predict the gap from…

Research shows that language-minority students both do poorly on standardized tests, and receive low academic ratings from their teachers (August & Hakuta, 1998). Explanations for the low performance, however, are limited. This is at least partially due to the fact that language-minority status is intimately entangled with issues related to…

The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) are a series of fluency-based measures designed to assess early literacy skills. These fluency-based measures function as predictors of future reading performance and target critical component skills required to learn to read. This study was conducted to establish the convergent…

At a time when many states are poised to roll out new standardized tests to evaluate English-language proficiency in unprecedented depth, California is balking at carrying out a federal requirement to test the literacy of young children who are learning English. Recently, the California board of education decided to ask the U.S. Department of…

Data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care, a prospective, longitudinal study involving 933 children, were used to examine relations between cumulative participation in 5 types of out-of-school care (before- and after-school programs, extracurricular activities, sitters, fathers, and…

Of the 1,828 grade 6 students who received accelerated instruction outside of the regular classroom, 27% participated in both reading and math interventions. Of the 1,872 grade 7 students who participated in accelerated instruction outside of the classroom, 26% participated in both reading and math interventions. The overall state test results for…

Goal: Educators believe that parents can help their children learn to read. But what evidence supports this belief? And if parent involvement does matter, what kinds of parent involvement are most efficient? The goal of this report was to review the scientific literature on parent involvement in the acquisition of reading from kindergarten to…

On average, black students typically score one standard deviation below white students on standardized tests--roughly the difference in performance between the average 4th grader and the average 8th grader. Historically, what has come to be known as the black-white test-score gap has emerged before children enter kindergarten and has tended to…

Task persistence, measured by a composite score of independent teacher, tester and observer reports, was examined using behavioral genetic analysis. Participants included 92 monozygotic and 137 same-sex dizygotic twin pairs in Kindergarten or 1st grade (4.3 to 7.9 years old). Task persistence was widely distributed, higher among older children,…

Curriculum-based measurement (CBM) is a well established tool for formative assessment. CBM has also been used for prediction of state test scores. However, validity coefficients between math-CBM and state tests have been moderate at best (Skiba, Magnusson, Martson, and Erickson, 1986; Martson, 1989; Putnam, 1989). The purpose of the present…