This report discusses the second year of Austin Independent School District's (AISD) High Dosage Tutoring Program: students' progress, program summaries, and participant survey results.

Several social-emotional learning (SEL) or social-emotional and character development (SECD) programs have been shown to be effective at improving SEL/SECD skills, and some have also provided evidence of effectiveness in improving student behavior and academic achievement (Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor, & Schellinger, 2011). Very few SEL…

Accumulating research has identified family behavioral interventions as an empirically supported psychosocial treatment for students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The mechanisms behind the effectiveness of these interventions, however, have been less well studied. The current study examined possible mediators of improvement…

The present study investigated the effects of socioeconomic and ethnic classroom composition on developments in students' motivation, sense of classroom belonging, and achievement. A sample of 722 primary school students completed questionnaires from 3rd to 6th grade. Latent growth curve analyses revealed that the reading comprehension scores of…

Geocaching is an inquiry-based activity encouraging creativity, active learning, and real-world problem solving. As such, it is an educational opportunity for students in all grade levels. Educators benefit by observing students using higher-order thinking instead of rote learning offered by using traditional worksheets, tests, or quizzes. Also,…

This technical report provides an overview of the New York State Alternate Assessment (NYSAA), including a description of the purpose of the NYSAA, the processes utilized to develop and implement the NYSAA program, and Stakeholder involvement in those processes. By comparing the intent of the NYSAA with its process and design, the validity of the…

Using longitudinal data on a nationally representative U.S. cohort, this study investigated the relationship between socioeconomic status and students' reading growth between kindergarten and eighth grade. Piecewise latent growth modeling was used to describe nonlinear growth trajectories in reading during three developmental periods: kindergarten…

Background: "With Significant Callous-Unemotional Traits" has been proposed as a specifier for conduct disorder (CD) in the upcoming revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V). The impact of this specifier on children diagnosed with CD should be considered. Methods: A multi-site cross-sectional design with…

While many jurisdictions ban teacher strikes on the assumption that they harm students, there is surprisingly little research on this question. The majority of existing studies make cross section comparisons of students who do or do not experience a strike, and report that strikes do not affect student performance. I present new estimates from a…

One of the main tenets of the mental model theory is that when individuals reason, they think about possibilities. According to this theory, reasoning on what is possible from the truth of a sentence would be psychologically basic, whereas reasoning the other way round, on the truth or falsity of a sentence from a given state of affairs, would…

This study explores the spontaneous explanatory models children construct, critique, and revise in the context of tasks in which children need to predict, observe, and explain phenomena involving magnetism. It further investigates what conceptual resources students use, and in what ways they use them, to construct explanatory models, and the…

When teachers, parents, and community members work together, children benefit (Henderson and Mapp 2002). This is especially true when the collaboration is coordinated and focused as it was for the Greenteam, a science ecology club and an event created by a network of educators, elementary students, and science professionals. The club and a…

The purpose of this evaluation was to measure the impact of the Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) Summer Institute on science performance of students whose teachers participated during the summers of 2011 and 2012. Paired t-tests revealed statistically significant increases in a sample of elementary students' Stanford 10 science scores at 3rd…

This study investigates the benefits of no-stakes educational testing during students' summer vacation as a strategy to mitigate summer learning loss. Fifty-one students in Grades 3-8 from the Every Child Valued (ECV) and Lawrence Community Center (LCC) summer programs in Lawrenceville, NJ, took short, online assessments throughout the summer,…

The overarching questions guiding this interprofessional design-based research study are: (1) How might a suite of assessment tools help K-7 educators visualize learning in their classrooms and (2) How might these visualization approaches inform K-7 educators' changes in classroom assessment? Recognized by their administrators as having…