While instructional coaching has existed since the mid-1800s, such models became widespread in the 1950s. With so many annual federal mandates in educational legislation aimed to ensure high student achievement, there has been a nationwide increase in the use of instructional coaching models to improve the quality of instruction. The professional…

This five-year study focused on school processes that promoted the scaling-up of a high school academic literacy framework, Reading Apprenticeship, developed by WestEd's Strategic Literacy Initiative (SLI). Implementing an innovative strategy for scaling-up involving school-based cross-disciplinary teacher teams, SLI brought the framework to 274…

Recent methods to improve generalizations from nonrandom samples typically invoke assumptions such as the strong ignorability of sample selection, which is challenging to meet in practice. Although researchers acknowledge the difficulty in meeting this assumption, point estimates are still provided and used without considering alternative…

Most educational climate research is conducted among (day school) students who spend the bulk of their young lives outside of school, potentially limiting the amount of climate variance that can be captured. Boarding school students, on the other hand, spend much of their lives at school and thus offer a potentially unique perspective on…

With a national emphasis on integrated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in K-16 courses, incorporating technology in a meaningful way is critical. This research examines whether STEM and non-STEM teachers were able to incorporate technology in STEM courses successfully with sufficient professional development. The…

Legislation has mandated that secondary schools provide services for students with disabilities that prepare them for independent living, employment, and/or post-secondary education (IDEA, 2004). This study examined the perceptions of special education directors, assistant directors/program coordinators, and secondary special education teachers…

Variation in test performance among examinees from different regions or national jurisdictions is often partially attributed to differences in the degree of content correspondence between local school or training program curricula, and the test of interest. This posited relationship between test-curriculum correspondence, or "alignment,"…

Prior research shows that rural students' education expectations and aspirations, as well as their postsecondary enrollment and persistence rates, tend to be lower than those of nonrural students. However, much of that prior research may not apply to today's students because it uses old data or focuses on individual states or purposive samples.…

The purpose of this study was to compare the differences in rural high school teachers' (n = 256) self-efficacy in student engagement, instructional practices, and classroom management using selected teacher characteristics. Analysis of variance showed significant mean differences between different levels of education in self-efficacy for…

This quantitative study examined the data collected from the students who participated in a reading intervention and compared their growth rate after one year of implementation to their growth rate prior to the intervention. The study was conducted in an affluent school corporation located in Indiana. The study evaluated the effectiveness of this…

The purpose of this study was to determine Engineering/Technology Education (ETE) teachers' perceptions of Project Lead The Way's (PLTW) pre-engineering program in the state of Indiana utilizing the Characteristics of Technology Education Survey (CTES) (Daugherty, Hill, & Wicklein, 1996). The study focused on the perceptions of teachers who…

This study examined the early college success of students who graduated from an Indiana high school in 2010 and enrolled immediately in a public two-year or four-year college in Indiana. The study team identified data elements in Indiana's Student Information System that predicted the early college success of this cohort of students. Half of…

Our study adds to prior work on Indiana's Twenty-first Century Scholars(TFCS) program by focusing on whether participating in--rather than completing--the program affects the likelihood of students going to college and where they initially enrolled. We first employ binary and multinomial logistic regression to obtain estimates of the impact of the…

Purpose/Objective: School cafeterias have the potential to positively contribute to the prevention and treatment of childhood obesity. The purpose of this project was to assess adolescents' nutrition knowledge and dietary choices, and to measure the relationship between students' nutrition knowledge and the type of food items purchased in their…

We report on the scaling up of a high school content literacy framework, Reading Apprenticeship, over a period of four years as part of the independent evaluation of an Investing in Innovation grant from the U.S. Department of Education to WestEd's Strategic Literacy Institute (SLI). Our goal was to understand the school processes that support…