Many U.S. students possess only a weak knowledge of fraction arithmetic. I hypothesize that textbooks are a critical reason for students' poor performance on fraction arithmetic. This is not because of what textbooks contain but rather because of what they lack. Distributions of fraction arithmetic problems in textbooks are imbalanced, with…

English orthography differs from that of other European languages in terms of complexity and regularity. This difference may impact the development of accurate spelling in English, especially when it is learned as a foreign language in school. In this study we wanted to explore spelling development patterns of Spanish speaking children learning…

Background: In opaque orthographies, such as English, children with low reading skills tend to rely more on semantic information due to their inadequate acquisition of sub-lexical knowledge. This tendency has also been reported for kanji, a non-alphabetic and opaque Japanese orthography. However, previous studies on this phenomenon have had…

Student growth percentiles (SGPs) are currently used by several states and school districts to provide information about individual students as well as to evaluate teachers, schools, and school districts. For SGPs to be defensible for these purposes, they should be reliable. In this study, we examine the amount of systematic and random error in…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the types of spelling errors made by children with mild to moderate hearing loss (CMMHL) compared with children with typical hearing (TH) and to determine if types of spelling errors were related to linguistic or audiologic factors. CMMHL and TH completed measures of spelling, spoken language, speech…

This study explored the effects of visual status and braille reading patterns on the reading accuracy of students with visual impairments in China. The sample consisted of 121 students aged 10-19 years: 48 were students with congenital visual impairments, 25 were students with adventitious visual impairments, and 48 were sighted students. Students…

Information on students' development of science skills is essential for teachers to evaluate and improve their own education, as well as to provide adequate support and feedback to the learning process of individual students. The present study explores and discusses the use of performance assessments as a diagnostic tool for formative assessment…

This study aimed to describe 1-year changes in students' vocabulary in written narratives. Secondary aims included examination of accuracy and the relationship between lexical diversity and achievement. Participants included 749 students in first through eighth grades. Within-subjects 1-year change in diversity, productivity, and accuracy was…

This study compares the effects of a concrete-representational-abstract (CRA) intervention against a modified CRA-Integrated (CRA-I) intervention using a pretest-posttest design with random assignment of matched pairs to intervention conditions. The researchers designed both interventions to improve participants' understanding of and ability to…

This study investigates the English spelling of students in grades 2 through 8 in Mainland China. A review of spelling and cross-linguistic research in spelling is presented. The orthographic development of 273 students was assessed "with validated spelling inventories" (Sterbinsky, 2007) to sample developmental features across three…

Informal reading inventories (IRI) and curriculum-based measures of reading (CBM-R) have continued importance in instructional planning, but raters have exhibited difficulty in accurately identifying students' miscues. To identify and tabulate scorers' mismarkings, this study employed examiners and raters who scored 15,051 words from 108 passage…

This study explored the potential of a rich assessment task to reveal students' multiplicative thinking in respect to a hypothetical learning trajectory. Thirty pairs of students in grades 5 and 6 attempted the task. Twenty-two pairs applied multiplicative structure to find the number of items in arrays. However counting and computational errors…

This study investigated the writing results from an existing data set of 36 students who performed braille writing dictation through the repeated writing activity in the braille writing app. The data was the writing results of students between the first and the sixth grade levels. Results were categorized into types of errors, the most common…

This study applies the Mathematics Acquisition Framework (MAF) (Bossé, Ringler, Bayaga, Fountain, & Young, 2018) to investigate fifth- through seventh-grade students' comprehension of fractions and decimals and examines how students build understanding of mathematical principles and concepts regarding fractions and decimals. Based on case…

The application to rational numbers of the procedures and intuitions proper of natural numbers is known as Natural Number Bias. Research on the cognitive foundations of this bias suggests that it stems not from a lack of understanding of rational numbers, but from the way the human mind represents them. In this work, we presented a fraction…