Although several longitudinal studies have confirmed that need-supportive teacher behaviour shapes intrinsic motivation in school, longitudinal studies on its role for intrinsic reading motivation are lacking. To fill in this gap, this study investigated whether changes in selected aspects of student-perceived teacher need-supportive behaviour in…

This paper introduces the LIDO, or the Low-Inference Discourse Observation tool, that captures discourse moves produced by students and teachers in whole-classroom discussions. Coding methods are described, followed by analyses that explore validity of the LIDO through correlations among LIDO-coded discourse moves and between LIDO scores and…

The purpose of this quantitative non-experimental cross-sectional study was to examine the possible relationship between students' autonomy, students' competence, and student-teacher relatedness, and their performance on ELA and math high-stakes tests. The self-determination theory was employed to guide the study. This study collected…

The purpose of this nonexperimental, quantitative study was to determine if there is a significant correlation among teacher-assigned grades (TAG), district checkpoint scores (CP), and student scale-scores on TNReady tests. The focus was on 1,445 seventh and eighth grade students who were enrolled at a middle school in northeast Tennessee during…

Extant research indicates culturally relevant literature (CRL) is linked to increased reading comprehension and interest in reading for Latinx students as well as other student groups. Current research also shows CRL can support home literacy instruction, facilitate writing instruction, foster sociopolitical awareness, underpin behavior…

Reading proficiency is crucial to academic success across all content areas. This study takes a close look at student reading achievement over the course of one full school year and the impact that the quality of teacher-student interactions have on student reading growth at the middle school level. The middle school level students participating…

In March of 2020, in response to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the state of Illinois mandated the transition to remote instruction for all schools. Although schools had the option to resume in-person instruction during the 2020-21 school year (SY21), the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) acknowledged that in-person instruction may not…

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020 was marked by a transition to remote learning in Illinois schools and nationwide. The following school year, schools and families faced difficult decisions about how and when to return to in-person learning. School leaders, parents and caregivers, and students considered how to balance…

For over two years, schools, teachers, students, and families across Illinois have worked to adapt instruction and learning under the ever-changing conditions wrought by COVID-19. This report, the third and final in the Learning During the Pandemic in Illinois series, investigates how much time students spent learning in-person and/or remotely…

Background: Prior research shows that teachers' working conditions are important for teacher and student outcomes, such as teacher retention and student achievement. Because National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs) can be effective in the classroom and as instructional leaders, they are well positioned to create favorable working conditions for…

Using two states' grades 3 through 8 state assessment databases, this study documents the extent to which students were assigned testing accommodations for ELA or mathematics in only one of two consecutive years. The percentage of students with disabilities who were assigned accommodations in the current year only or in the prior year only in a…

Automatic assessment of the quality of classroom discourse can have a transformative effect on research and practice on improving teaching effectiveness. We improve on a previous automated method to measure teacher authentic questions -- open-ended questions without pre-scripted responses that predict student achievement growth -- using classroom…

Many Latino students miss opportunities to develop their full potential in U.S. schools. Increasing attention is being paid to the malleable, nonacademic, factors that can affect student learning. The current study sought to evaluate the impact of school climate on Language Arts grade for Latino students in a large, low-income, urban middle…

This correlational, explanatory, longitudinal study sought to determine the combination of community and family-level demographic variables found in the 2010 U.S. Census data that most accurately predicted a New Jersey school district's percentage of students scoring proficient or above on the 2010, 2011, and 2012 NJ ASK 7 in Language Arts and…

This study reports on the development of an assessment to measure bilingual adolescents' knowledge of polysemous vocabulary and explores the contribution of polysemous word knowledge to reading comprehension among those students. Spanish-English bilingual students in seventh grade (n = 107) completed a battery of standardized reading and language…