This paper reports the findings of the second year of a four-year empirical research project. Its aim is to modify 'step-by-step' instructions for practical activities in a way that may enable the development of experimental design skills among junior high school learners. Each school year pupils spend six lessons doing practical activities using…

Successful school reform is dependent on the quality of decisions made by educational leaders. In such decision making, educational leaders are charged with using sound research findings as the basis for choosing school reform initiatives. As part of the debate regarding the usability of various evaluative research designs in providing information…

The purpose of this study was to assess the effects of a dependent group contingency on eighth-grade students' heart rates. Participants were 18 male and female students. A multielement research design was used to examine the intervention effects. The intervention consisted of: (a) teacher explanation about effort; (b) students' suggestions to…

The literature suggests that adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) typically are not socially engaged during unstructured school activities and do not initiate social activities with typically developing peers. This study assessed whether implementing socialization opportunities in the form of lunch clubs based around aspects of the…

The regression discontinuity design (RDD) has the potential to yield findings with causal validity approaching that of the randomized controlled trial (RCT). However, Schochet (2008a) estimated that, on average, an RDD study of an education intervention would need to include three to four times as many schools or students as an RCT to produce…

The concept of "implementation fidelity" is broadly used to capture the extent to which an intervention is executed as intended by the designers of the intervention (Century, Rudnick, & Freeman, 2010; Huntley, 2005, McNaught, Tarr, & Sears, 2010, Munter, 2010). Though implementation fidelity instruments are often used to assess…

Randomized trials of educational interventions often face logistical hurdles (Cook, 2002). For example, sometimes they are prevented from reaching their full-term. This would happen if, as a condition of participation, subjects insist on receiving the treatment program within a certain timeframe. This timeframe may be shorter than the full-term…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of the Jigsaw method, a cooperative learning tool, on content knowledge and attitude toward learning science. A group of 64 students in an 8th grade physical science class located in rural western New York participated in this study. As an intervention for this action research study, science…

In 2005, the U.S. Department of Education awarded eight Striving Readers grants to projects around the country. The goal of Striving Readers is to improve literacy skills and achievement for struggling readers in middle and high school and to increase the research base using randomized clinical research to address improvement in adolescent…

A pre-post experimental design with 6-week delayed posttest was implemented to investigate the effects of reading comprehension strategy (RCS) instruction with and without attribution retraining (AR) on reading outcomes for seventh, eighth, and ninth graders with learning and other mild disabilities. Students were randomly assigned to one of three…

Communities That Care (CTC) is a prevention system designed to reduce adolescent substance use and delinquency through the selection of effective preventive interventions tailored to a community's specific profile of risk and protection. A community-randomized trial of CTC, the Community Youth Development Study, is currently being conducted in 24…

This is the first of two reports that summarize the findings from an impact evaluation of a violence prevention intervention for middle schools. This report discusses findings after 1 year of implementation. A forthcoming report will discuss the findings after 2 years and 3 years of implementation. In 2004, the U.S. Department of Education (ED)…

One purpose of educational research is to provide information about the likely impact of interventions or treatments on policy-relevant populations of students. Randomized experiments are useful for estimating the causal effects of interventions on the students in schools that participate in the experiments. Unfortunately, the samples of schools…

Background: Research on Sport Education (SE) has shown the curriculum model to be effective in motivating students to undertake specific role responsibilities and engage in the student-led tasks of the curriculum. Despite this level of engagement, emerging evidence suggests that student leadership within the peer teaching tasks of the curriculum…

This appendix accompanies "Gaining Ground in the Middle Grades: Why Some Schools Do Better. A Large-Scale Study of Middle Grades Practices and Student Outcomes. Initial Research Report." This appendix contains the full bibliography of all research and policy documents consulted during the development of the ten research domains and three…