This research examined if or to what extent there was a relationship between maternal home-based involvement, based on the Family Involvement Questionnaire-Elementary from a mother's perspective, and fifth and sixth-grade students' reading and mathematical achievement scores as measured by STAR reading and math in the state of California. The…

Academic achievement disparities based on parental education are robust during the middle school years. The current study examined whether cross-class friendship (i.e., reciprocal relationships between peers with different levels of parental education) decrease class-based achievement differences during a developmental phase when friends are…

Using student-level longitudinal data from one large urban school district, I examine Long-term English Learners' (LTELs) characteristics and their linguistic and academic performance in comparison to on-track English learners and initially fluent students. I also investigate what factors are related to their becoming LTELs. This study focuses on…

Existing research on self-management skills shows that measures of self-management predict student success. However, these conclusions are based on small samples or narrowly defined self-management measures. Using a rich longitudinal dataset of 221,840 fourth through seventh grade students, this paper describes self-management gaps across student…

In this work we examined the content of approximately 950 mathematics questions used in measuring achievement among 4th, 5th and 6th graders in the US in an attempt to determine how the current standardized examinations, which were developed to reflect new national curricular mandates, compared to the old measures used for the same purpose. Using…

We investigated general vocabulary and academic vocabulary growth trajectories of adolescent language minority students using an individual growth modeling approach. Our analytical sample included 3161 sixth- to eighth-grade students from an urban school district in California. The language minority students in our sample were classified as…

Focused on an equity of educational access issue, this qualitative study identified grade 4-6 teacher perceptions of English language learning in Southern California. The historic failure of English language learners (ELLs) on standardized tests in Southern California was presented as an important problem to solve. The literature review for this…

California has the largest share of the English Language Learner (ELL) student population in the U.S., and it continues to grow. English Language Learners are the fastest growing group in the public school population and they are underachieving. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the longitudinal changes in the performance of English…

Questions about how best to place students into appropriate middle grade math courses have been central to ongoing education policy and practice discussions in California and across the United States. Recent studies have shown that enrolling in algebra I in grade 8 works well for some students but backfires for others. This REL West report…

This experimental study examined how the reading and writing development of sixth-grade L2 students was affected by syntactic enhancement. Visual-syntactic text formatting (VSTF) technology, which visualizes syntactic structures, was used to convert a textbook to the one with syntactic enhancement. The sample (n = 282), which was drawn from a…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine if classroom configuration--departmentalized and self-contained--is related to the academic achievement of Grade 6 students in a large urban school district as measured by California Standards Test (CST) scores in mathematics and English Language Arts (ELA) when controlling for prior academic…

An investigation of the relationship between background knowledge and reading comprehension performance on standardized reading tests (the California STAR Test) was conducted with sixth, seventh, and eighth-grade ethnic minority children from low-income backgrounds (N = 68). Predictor variables examined included perceived background knowledge…

In 2005, a group of concerned parents who had arrived in the United States as refugees from war-torn Somalia received approval from their local school district to establish the Iftin Charter School (ICS). The K-8 school continues to engender hope and intellectual strength in its students and parents. ICS finds itself uniquely equipped to meet the…

Ironically, adults control most of the world of children's literature: adults write the books; adults choose which books to publish; adults review the books, adults bestow the awards on books and adults purchase the books for bookstores, libraries, and their children. In this paradigm of adult control, children's opinions are often overlooked. The…

For the large population of school-age English language learners in California and the United States, the challenge of learning a second language while learning academic content is formidable. Learning to read English skillfully is key to their success. Reading instruction focused on development of oral text-reading fluency has shown strong…