In October 2023, the California Department of Education released test scores for all students in Grades 3-8 and 11 for the 2022-23 school year. These results represent an opportunity to analyze whether and to what extent student learning has rebounded after the dramatic declines in scores resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and related school…

Seventh- and 8th-grade students in a within-teacher randomized control study read from visual-syntactic formatted text for 44 min per week over the course of 1 year. On the annual state assessment, we found small statistically significant improvements on the overall English Language Arts scaled score (ES = 0.05, p < 0.05) and the writing…

While the contents of K-6 basal readers have been recently examined (Dewitz, Leahy, Jones, Sullivan, 2010; Moss, 2008; Moss & Newton, 2002), the contents of secondary school literature anthologies have been vastly ignored in the last 2 decades. Given the Common Core State Standards' division of literary and informational text across content…

California's Academic Performance Index (API) is the state's main accountability metric. Authorized by the Legislature in 1999, around the time California was implementing rigorous new standards in math, science, social studies, and English language arts, the API relies heavily on the results of standardized tests designed to align with those…

RESEARCH WITH STUDENTS IN GRADES 6, 7, AND 8 DEMONSTRATED THAT CHILDREN CAN BE TAUGHT TO SPELL IF--(1) EACH CHILD USES A SPELLING PROGRAM GEARED TO HIS OWN LEARNING LEVEL, DEVELOPS HIS OWN SYSTEM OF LEARNING TO SPELL, WORKS ON WORDS NOT YET MASTERED, AND REALIZES CONTINUING SUCCESS, AND (2) THE TEACHING METHOD DEVELOPS THE PUPIL'S LISTENING…

This study investigated the extent to which instructional objectives in eighth grade English classes provide criteria for a program in English for the early adolescent student. The study was conducted in eight representative eighth grade classes in public schools in Los Angeles County where eighth grade English teachers had signed Stull Act…

This handbook, intended for English language arts teachers, principals, curriculum and testing specialists, superintendents, and all educators interested in preparing students for the grade 8 California Assessment Program (CAP) writing assessment, provides the practitioner with information about the content of the test, the rationale underlying…

The main goal of this report is to present evidence on the predictive validity of an English language arts (ELA) performance assessment (PA) administered in Grades 2-9 in a large urban school district. To account for the hierarchical structure of the data (students are nested within schools), we employed hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to…

This study examines the relationships between student literacy performance and discussion-based approaches to the development of understanding in 64 middle and high school English classrooms. A series of hierarchical linear models indicated that discussion-based approaches were significantly related to spring performance, controlling for fall…