Educators rely on a conglomeration of assessment instruments to appraise, measure, monitor, and document evidence of students' academic readiness, learning progressions, acquisition of interdisciplinary knowledge, and extensive educational needs. The Mississippi Academic Assessment Program for Mathematics (MAAP-M) and the i-Ready Assessment…

Background: Much research has been done on the factors that influence teachers' work. Yet, the nature and scope of those factors, and their impact on teachers, remain unclear. Indeed, different literature bases on teachers' work present different and often contradictory conclusions. For example, some researchers claim that mandated accountability…

The research featured in this paper is part of the CORE-PACE Research Partnership, through which Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) has partnered with the CORE districts to conduct research designed to support them in continuous improvement while simultaneously helping to improve policy and practice in California and nationwide.…

The research featured in this paper is part of the CORE-PACE Research Partnership, through which Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) has partnered with the CORE districts to conduct research designed to support them in continuous improvement while simultaneously helping to improve policy and practice in California and nationwide.…

City Year is a learning organization committed to the rigorous evaluation of its "Whole School Whole Child" model, which trains and deploys teams of AmeriCorps members to low-performing, urban schools to empower more students to reach their full potential. A third-party study by Policy Studies Associates (PSA) examined the impact of…

A review of the literature pertaining to the effect and influence that interim assessments have on student achievement lacks quantitative data to determine the efficiency of their use in the classroom as a school reform tool. This study examined the strength and the direction of the relationships between interim pre and posttest assessments in…

Middle schools are important because they launch students on trajectories that they are likely to follow throughout their formal educations. This study explored the relationship of first-generation segregation (elementary and middle school racial composition) and second-generation segregation (racially correlated academic tracks) to reading and…

In this paper we provide the first rigorous evidence of the impact of a partnership between public middle schools and informal science institutions (ISIs), such as museums and zoos, on student outcomes. This study focuses on Urban Advantage (UA), a program in New York City (NYC) that explicitly draws upon the expertise and resources of the city's…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to explore and describe the relationship between middle-level science curriculum structure and student science literacy. Although national and state science curriculum standards are based on an integrated model, there is little quantitative data supporting integration. This study explored the use of…

Researchers examined whether rewarding teams of teachers for student performance had an effect on student achievement or teacher practices or attitudes in a demonstration project in Round Rock, Texas. They found that the intervention had no effect in any of these areas. Students taught by teacher teams who were offered incentives scored slightly…

Educators have long used test scores to make educational decisions, but only within the last decade has the availability of data been systematic (Abelman, Elmore, Even, Kenyon, & Marshall, 1999). In recent years, interest has spiked in data-driven decision making in education (Marsh, Pane, & Hamilton, 2006). With technological advances and…

The purpose of this study was to determine if special education and at-risk students educated exclusively in a school-within-a-school setting showed improved high-stakes standardized reading test scores after learning the strategic instruction model (SIM) inference strategy. This study was focused on four groups of eighth-grade students attending…

Grounded within an understanding of literacy as social practice, this dissertation interrogates the disconnect between the ways youth are positioning themselves in online spaces as text designers and the way they are viewed as literacy learners in many urban public schools. Using a connective ethnographic approach that blends place-based and…

The purpose of this study was to determine if the four assessments for entrance into an academic middle school gifted English program were accurately predicting success, as measured by students' grades each nine-week grading period. Some students were dismissed from the program each year because they could not maintain the required minimum average…

The TALPS study aims to build on the existing research base to develop promising methodologies to identify chronically low-performing and turnaround schools, as well as to identify promising strategies for turning around chronically low-performing schools. By looking specifically at schools identified as turnaround, in comparison to nonturnaround…