The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of Uncommon Schools in a turnaround setting. Uncommon was awarded a 2016 grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) to support TurnNJ, a project intended to support Uncommon's whole-school turnaround efforts in Camden and Newark, New Jersey. The study…

This research aimed to study current situations, problems and needs for the development of an English teaching evaluation model focusing on task-based learning to develop English writing ability and creative thinking in the language; to create the development of the English teaching evaluation model, implement and evaluate the model designed. The…

This study examines the development of the reading comprehension of young learners of Chinese as a second language (CSL) in Hong Kong, with reference to the Simple View of Reading model. The model postulates that reading comprehension is a product of decoding and linguistic comprehension. A sample of 121 ethnic minority senior primary students was…

Language comprehension is crucial to reading. However, theoretical models and recent research raise questions about what constitutes this multifaceted domain. We present two related studies examining the dimensionality of language comprehension and relations to reading comprehension in the upper elementary grades. Studies 1 (Grade 6; N = 148) and…

When implementing standard setting procedures, there are two major concerns: variance between panelists and efficiency in conducting multiple rounds of judgments. With regard to the former, there is concern over the consistency of the cutoff scores made by different panelists. If the cut scores show an inordinately wide range then further rounds…

This study examined the influence of student demographic variables (i.e., SES, race, attendance, and gender) and the school variable of placement in an inclusion setting on the academic achievement of general education students in grades 6, 7, and 8 (n = 1200) in an urban school district as measured by the 2010-2011 NJASK, the state's annual…

This dissertation examines the student academic achievement through various mechanisms, put in place by the public school district, classroom student behavior, and negative external shocks to the students' living environment. I examine the impacts of various treatments on student short and long run academic outcomes such as math and English test…