This document provides information about Wyoming Test of Proficiency and Progress (WY-TOPP) English Language Arts (ELA/comprehension) performance rates for each of the eight Fremont County school districts. This information is intended to help the Wyoming Department of Education (WDE) and the Region 11 Comprehensive Center develop and implement a…

Roaring Falls Unified School District (a pseudonym), an urban New Jersey district near NYC, was challenged by K-8 Multilingual Language Learners (MLLs) who lagged significantly behind general education students in English Language Arts (ELA). The District had roughly 12,000 students, of whom 93.0% were Hispanic, 26.2% were MLLs, and 32.0% were…

This study examines teachers' instructional practices during seatwork in primary Norwegian Language arts classrooms. Although seatwork is a common activity in classrooms, our knowledge about what teachers actually do during this activity is limited. In this qualitative study, six teachers in third grade primary school were videotaped while pupils…

Within the last decade, two large reading reform efforts have directed state and local state school reading instruction, the Reading First Initiative (2002) and the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts (2010). These initiatives have heavily shaped literacy teaching and learning with a focus on disparity reduction in literacy…

Curriculum Associates' i-Ready is an adaptive diagnostic and individualized instructional tool that has been used in M-DCPS in the last few years. In addition, Curriculum Associates provides the District with results of their predictive model, which uses the students' outcomes on the Fall and Winter i-Ready diagnostic testing as well as the…

Spending more time teaching science and social studies in K-3 can have at least four potential benefits: (1) Increased learning in these subjects is likely to improve students' reading comprehension in later grades; (2) Introducing students to science and social studies in the early grades is likely to better prepare them for learning those…

This report examines one component of the current school accountability system--learning gains. We find that learning gain percentages are affected by a variety of factors including starting achievement level, socioeconomic status, and English language learner status when the current definition of learning gains is used. Hence, we propose a new…

The Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) has seen the number of English learner students in grades K-12 increase in recent years, even as overall enrollment has decreased. In addition, the English learner student population has grown more diverse in race/ethnicity, country of origin, and native language. The increasingly diverse English…

Professional development is a term researched, defined, and developed for decades. The term professional development is a critical component to the effectiveness of teacher practice and implementation of teacher resources that can ultimately affect student achievement. As professional development evolves, research on this topic centers on changes…

This paper introduces a new observation system that is designed to investigate students' and teachers' talk during literacy instruction, "Creating Opportunities to Learn from Text" (COLT). Using video-recorded observations of 2nd-3rd grade literacy instruction (N=51 classrooms, 337 students, 151 observations), we found that nine types of…

The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of the Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) program as implemented by ABC District on pre-kindergarten students' Early Screening Inventory (ESI) academic assessment scores and kindergarten through second-grade students' Northwest Evaluation Association-Measure of Academic Progress (NWEA-MAP)…

The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of the Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) program as implemented by ABC District on pre-kindergarten students' Early Screening Inventory (ESI) academic assessment scores and kindergarten through second- grade students' Northwest Evaluation Association-Measure of Academic Progress (NWEA- MAP)…

This practical guide shows teachers how to introduce academic language to young children, with an emphasis on appreciating and leveraging linguistic diversity. New educational standards are asking students to master content-area concepts and increasingly complex texts in earlier grades. This practitioner-friendly text provides instructional…

In response to legislation from the federal government and the rising number of ELs in public schools many school districts are searching for ways to ensure ELs are making adequate progress on English proficiency. The problem is defining the best method for teaching ELs in the mainstream classroom is difficult. The current gap in educational…

In March of 2020, in response to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the state of Illinois mandated the transition to remote instruction for all schools. Although schools had the option to resume in-person instruction during the 2020-21 school year (SY21), the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) acknowledged that in-person instruction may not…