Educators and researchers have been fighting the reading wars for the last century, with battles see-sawing literacy instruction in American schools from phonics to whole language and, most recently, back to phonics again. Over the last decade, 32 states and the District of Columbia have adopted new "science of reading" laws that require…

This paper is the first to examine the longitudinal results of six years of implementation of Literacy Squared, a biliteracy model for Spanish/English speaking emerging bilingual students. This model includes paired literacy instruction with grade-specific time allocations for Spanish literacy and literacy-based ELD. Furthermore, cross-language…

We examined the predictive value of early spelling for later reading performance by analyzing data from 970 U.S. children whose spelling was assessed in the summer following the completion of kindergarten (M age = 6 years; 3 months). The word reading performance of most of the children was then tested after the completion of Grade 1 (age 7;5),…

The purpose of this paper is to showcase new research that seeks to provide guidance on the heterogeneity of treatment effects by utilizing the variance of demographic differences in state assessments. This study is focused on a simple randomized block design where students are nested within schools, and within each school students are randomized…

Randomized experiments are often considered the strongest designs to study the impact of educational interventions. Perhaps the most prevalent class of designs used in large scale education experiments is the cluster randomized design in which entire schools are assigned to treatments. In cluster randomized trials (CRTs) that assign schools to…

The American Association of School Librarians (AASL) Standards for the 21st Century Learner do not just pay lip-service to the value of reading. They have been aligned with the Common Core standards that were derived from, and now influence, state standards-based tests, such as the Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) reading tests. It is…

Background: Cluster-randomized experiments that assign intact groups such as schools or school districts to treatment conditions are increasingly common in educational research. Such experiments are inherently multilevel designs whose sensitivity (statistical power and precision of estimates) depends on the variance decomposition across levels.…

The study uses a quasi-experimental comparison group design to test the effectiveness of "Treasures" by comparing outcomes for students who used "Treasures" to those who did not use "Treasures", adjusting for differences between the "Treasures" and comparison groups on baseline characteristics. The study…

"Kids Count in Colorado!" is an annual publication of the Colorado Children's Campaign, which provides the best available state- and county-level data to measure and track the education, health and general well-being of the state's children. "Kids Count in Colorado!" informs policy debates and community discussions, serving as…