In the midst of the pandemic, this school district made a significant investment with recovery dollars to expand enrichment opportunities in art, music, and physical education for students in their K-8 schools. The hypothesis was increasing the quality and quantity of these opportunities, the school district would increase student engagement, lead…

Do children with better reading competence read more, or do avid readers increase their reading competence? This highly relevant question has been discussed for many years, yet conclusive results are rare. Previous studies suffer from small sample sizes or omitted variable bias, rendering their findings questionable. We provide new insight using…

Attempting to balance all the aspects of teaching can be overwhelming and challenging without the appropriate measures for novice teachers. The purpose of the mixed-methods study was to examine the challenges and opportunities in teacher retention of K-12 novice teachers in a rural, south Mississippi school district. Novice teachers may struggle…

Ritual teaching, which provides students with ritual opportunities to learn, is common worldwide, notwithstanding extensive research calls for more reform-oriented teaching. Such resilience to change suggests that there are gains for ritual teaching. Therefore, in this study, we search for possible goals of ritual teaching. For this purpose, we…

Statistical literacy is key in this heavily polarized information age for an informed and critical citizenry to make sense of arguments in the media and society. The responsibility of developing statistical literacy is often left to the K-12 mathematics curriculum. In this article, we discuss our investigation of K-8 students' current…

Existing measures of belonging in schools do not explicitly elevate the contextual and cultural insights of the educators and students they were designed to assess. Our study addresses this shortcoming through the co-creation of an Opportunities to Belong survey measure for urban middle schoolers. The tool was developed in partnership with…

The first year of teaching has and continues to be fraught with challenges for early educators in public school contexts across the United States. A persistent problem that has been documented across the globe is the ability of novice teachers to engage in developmentally appropriate practices (DAP) with their students. We examine this issue…

The purpose of this two-phase, sequential explanatory mixed-methods research study was to examine the correlation between kindergarten through fifth-grade teachers' self-efficacy and the impact on literacy achievement to determine how professional development (PD) positively impacted teachers with high self-efficacy. The study was conducted in a…

Recent studies suggest that benefiting early from both a cochlear implant (CI) and exposure to cued speech (CS, support system for the perception of oral language) positively impacts deaf children's speech perception, speech intelligibility, and reading. This study aims to show how: 1/CS-based speech perception ("cue reading"), and…

As student engagement in science learning continues to garner significant attention from educational researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, the importance of understanding person and context-related factors that impact student engagement is increasingly recognized. In this mixed methods study, middle school students' (N = 1,848) engagement…

Pandemic-era disruptions to schooling resulted in academic setbacks for many students. To help students catch up, school districts nationwide are implementing a range of academic recovery interventions. In this paper, we use multiple data sources to evaluate the impact and implementation of academic recovery interventions in four school districts…

There is a paucity of research on the causal relationship between arts learning and educational outcomes. Investigating these relationships has become imperative as policymakers increasingly prioritize empirical evidence of educational impacts, which often leads to curriculum narrowing that favors traditionally-tested subjects. Employing a…

Prior research has found that financial investments in North Carolina's early childhood education programs--Smart Start and NC Pre-K--generated positive effects on student achievement in reading and mathematics through eighth grade (Bai et al., 2020). The current study examined if these effects were moderated by two dimensions of educational…

Low-income students and students of color are faced with pervasively lower levels of opportunity to learn compared with their peers, creating unequal opportunities for educational success. Textbooks, which serve as the backbone of the curriculum in most mathematics classrooms, present a potentially powerful tool to help mitigate unequal…

Background: The gender gap in engineering presents a critical barrier to achieving a diverse and innovative engineering workforce. This gap is influenced by gender stereotypes, socialization processes, masculine culture, and insufficient early experiences with engineering. These contribute to diminished STEM self-concept, interest, and…