The U.S. Department of Education, under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, underscores every child's right to integrate, receive support, and fully participate in school life. The problem is that significant disparities exist in reading growth scores between students with disabilities taught in special-education resource settings and…

Background: Universal masking, with additional layered prevention strategies, was an essential tool for limiting the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and ensuring a safe return to in-person learning for kindergarten through 12th grade (K-12) students and staff. Few studies have examined mask adherence in this setting and none have described types of…

The problem addressed in the study is the significant numbers of elementary school students who fail to demonstrate proficiency in reading/language arts as determined by the Georgia Milestones English Language Arts Test. The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to investigate teachers' perceptions of effective research-based parental…

The world is confronted with wicked environmental problems that cannot be well understood or acted upon without addressing their ethical dimensions. Research shows that official science curricula on environmental science and ecology topics are shaped by the scientific discourse and environmental discourses of "ecological modernization"…

Georgia's Pre-K Longitudinal Study followed a statewide sample of 1,169 children who attended Georgia's Pre-K Program in 2013-14 through their 4th grade year in 2018-19. The study was conducted by researchers at the Frank Porter Graham (FPG) Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The following summary…

The purpose of this evaluation study was to examine children's longitudinal academic and social outcomes associated with attendance in Georgia's Pre-K Program and to examine the quality of the classrooms attended. This report covers pre-k to 4th grade outcomes collected between the 2013-2014 and 2018-2019 school years as well as a sub-study…

Propensity score matching was used to compare third-grade test scores in English language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies for children who had and had not participated in Georgia's Pre-K 4 years earlier. After matching, each group included 46,262 children (mean age 8.36 years in third grade). In all subject areas, children who had…

This study examined the relationship between the structural classroom environment (self-contained, team-taught, and departmentalized) and student performance on the 2014 Georgia Criterion-Referenced Competency Test (CRCT) in reading, Language Arts, mathematics, science, and social studies in grades three through five. A secondary purpose examined…

The aim of the present study is to explore a variety of cognitive and social variables which are most relevant to children's linguistic success in an educational setting. The study examines kindergarten English language outcomes in classrooms containing monolingual English speaking children and bilingual children who speak English and one other…

"'Do You Want Paper or Plastic?' An Inquiry into Single-Use Grocery Bags" is an inquiry-based, solutions-focused environmental education unit developed for the U.S. Fund for UNICEF. Field-tested in two U.S. southeastern regions, the unit engages students as informed change makers who investigate the production, consumption, and disposal…

Child sleep and adjustment research with community samples is on the rise with a recognized need of explicating this association. We examined reciprocal relations between children's sleep and their internalizing and externalizing symptoms using 3 waves of data spanning 5 years. Participants included 176 children at Time 1 (M = 8.68 years; 69%…

This executive summary presents results from a study that began in 2013-2014, and involves a longitudinal design to follow a sample of 1,169 children (139 Spanish-speaking DLLs) who attended 199 randomly-selected Georgia's Pre-K classrooms. These findings focus on results from the second year of the study, which included 1,034 of these children…

The Title I program was established to support students who were enrolled in schools that had high rates of children from low-income households. The program's goal was to provide supplemental services that would assist in raising the academic success of students in Title I schools so that they achieve comparable outcomes to children in Non-Title I…

An innovative DVD of classic nursery rhymes and stories empowered at-risk kindergarten children to control in the home when and how much they listen, promoting better listening, reading, and overall literacy comprehension skills. Coupled with modest teacher training, and limited use in the classroom, the DVD generated dramatic vocabulary growth in…

Public school education and reform face a myriad of challenges that are uniquely different from those of years past. Tougher curriculum standards, societal differences, cultural diversity and an overall shift in educational attitudes and practices may limit and change the educational success of many children. The cognitive development of students…