Today's economy demands that all young people develop high-level literacy, quantitative reasoning, problem solving, communication, and collaboration skills, all grounded in a rigorous and content-rich K-12 curriculum. Acquiring these skills ensures that high school graduates are academically prepared to pursue the future of their choosing.…

Making causal inferences from a quasi-experiment is difficult. Sensitivity analysis approaches to address hidden selection bias thus have gained popularity. This study serves as an introduction to a simple but practical form of sensitivity analysis using Monte Carlo simulation procedures. We examine estimated treatment effects for a school-based…

This paper provides the first population-based evidence on how much standardized test scores vary among public school districts within each state and how segregation explains that variation. Using estimates based on roughly 300 million test score records in math and English Language Arts (ELA) for Grades 3 through 8 from every U.S. public school…

This study examined the relationship between parental involvement in family math night activities and student State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness test score using the following constructs: (a) parental involvement at school (b) parental involvement at home (c) parental involvement in math (d) monitoring schoolwork (general involvement…

Papay (2011) noticed that teacher value-added measures (VAMs) from a statistical model using the most common pre/post testing timeframe--current-year spring relative to previous spring (SS)--are essentially unrelated to those same teachers' VAMs when instead using next-fall relative to current-fall (FF). This is concerning since this choice--made…

Inclusive educational practices are rooted in a body of research indicating that when students in need of support through special education are meaningfully included in schools, academic and social outcomes improve for all students. To realize this promise of better outcomes, traditional schools with separate classrooms and even schools designated…

Disrupted schooling can heavily impact the amount of education pupils receive. Starting in early June of 2011 a huge social outburst of pupil protests, walk-outs, riots and school occupations called the Chilean Winter caused more than 8 million of lost school days. Within a matter of days, riots reached the national level with hundreds of…

Main idea and summary are essential elements of reading comprehension. We report results from Grades 4 and 5 student performance on two years of state-mandated standardized reading testing which indicate that students perform statistically significantly lower on main idea and summary questions on the tests than any other question category. In this…

This study investigated direct and indirect effects of executive functions on reading comprehension in adolescents (N = 87, M = 14.0 years, SD = 1.5) by testing for parallel mediation of effects of working memory, task-switching, and inhibitory control via decoding and text recall/inference. Working memory showed direct and indirect effects on…

English learners (ELs) lag behind their peers in academic achievement and attainment, partly due to limited exposure to academic content. Prior studies that examine high school course-taking find significant course access gaps between ELs and non-ELs but provide little information on the relation between course-taking and time spent as an EL. This…

This program evaluation assessed the utility and efficacy of lead4ward toward facilitating meaningful instructional planning, and improving STAAR reading, English language arts, and math performance of students whose teachers participated in lead4ward professional development. A web-based survey on HISD's HUB yielded responses from 340 educators…

This study explored print-processing and vocabulary differences among a group of 5th- and 6th-grade students who had scored below the 50th percentile on a standardized reading test. Guided by the simple view of reading, we applied cut scores (low/high) to the students' performance on print-processing and vocabulary tasks. The design allowed for…

Two hundred and two (n = 202) sixth-grade students in social studies were administered a weekly vocabulary-matching curriculum-based measure (CBM) for 35 weeks. Students were also administered the Scholastic Reading Inventory (SRI), along with the annual state high-stakes test in Communication Arts. CBM scores were analyzed with respect to…

The quality of national examination items plays an enormous role in identifying students' competencies mastery and their difficulties. This study aims to identify the difficult items in the Junior High School Mathematics National Examination, to find the factors that cause students' difficulty and to reveal the strategies that the teachers and the…

This article reports the results of a quasi-experimental study conducted to examine the efficacy of a new time management intervention designed for high school students. Participants were 149 students from a highly selective private high school in the northeastern United States who were in the ninth grade. Half of the students participated in a…