Schools are a critical setting for improving child nutrition and food security and preventing obesity in the United States. The U.S. Department of Agriculture mandates that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program--Education, known as CalFresh Healthy Living (CFHL) in California, implements obesity prevention efforts that utilize…

Ensuring that teaching candidates are well prepared to enter the classroom is a critical mission for teacher preparation programs and state agencies that approve programs and set teacher licensure standards. Teaching performance assessments (TPAs) can be used to assess the readiness of potential teachers because they require candidates to provide…

Since the pandemic, the United States has faced tremendous teacher shortages (Riser-Kositsky, 2021) and national organizations have called for measures to address barriers related to teacher hiring and retention (NEA, 2022a., b; White House, 2022). Many states -- including California -- require pre-service teachers to pass state performance…

Teaching performance assessments (TPAs) can be used to assess the readiness of potential teachers because they require candidates to provide evidence of their planning and teaching skills through classroom videos accompanied by commentaries Ensuring that teaching candidates are well prepared to enter the classroom is a critical mission for teacher…

The purpose of this nonexperimental correlational quantitative research design is to examine if there is a relationship between parents' understanding of summative student score reports and accessing further resources online, while also examining the relationship between parents' comprehension of the summative student score report and other…

Prior work has shown that students' self-reported levels on social-emotional measures predict achievement levels and gains, but we have little evidence on whether within-student changes in self-reports on social-emotional surveys are predictive of changes in theoretically related academic and behavioral outcomes. We use large-scale data from the…

This report concludes a multiyear series of implementation studies intended to inform the California State University (CSU) system about the implementation of Executive Order 1110 (EO 1110). A major policy established in 2017, EO 1110 requires CSU campuses to eliminate noncredit developmental courses (often known as "remedial" courses)…

The purpose of this evaluation was to examine the impact of i-Ready Personalized Instruction on ELA achievement, as measured by SBA scores. We compared "striving learner" students who were assigned to use i-Ready Personalized Instruction (Treatment students) and "striving learner" students assigned to only receive i-Ready…

This study sought to find if the implementation of the strategy of goal setting and reflective portfolios would improve reading comprehension among long-term English learners (LTELs), which in turn would impact their FastBridge aReading scores. LTELs have difficulty reclassifying, resulting in negative outcomes regarding graduation rates and…

This program evaluation focused on the Palcare Literacy Innovation Project. The general research problem was to see if the enhanced preschool literacy project would show an improvement in the preschool classroom literacy environment, overall parent participation and a deeper connection to the community over a three-year period. The specific gap in…

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…

In December 2015, President Barack Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which replaced No Child Left Behind (NCLB), as the nation's major law governing public schools. ESSA retains the requirement that states test all students in reading and math in grades three through eight and once in high school, as well as the requirement that…

The goal of this study was to examine IXL usage among high school students in California and its relation to academic performance in math and ELA, as measured by the Smarter Balanced Summative Assessment (SBA). At the high school level in California, the SBA is taken only by 11th- grade students each year. We analyzed students' math and ELA SBA…

The purpose of the quantitative ex post facto design of this study was to determine if, and to what extent, self-efficacy increases after the implementation of a pre-entry program for community college student athletes in Southern California. The self-efficacy theory provided the theoretical foundation to address the research questions in this…

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (2009) underscored the need for better assessments of the pedagogical skills of new teachers when he identified the efforts of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) and its 800 colleges and universities to improve student learning through developing a national assessment of…