Teachers are responsible for providing opportunities to use learning strategies in the classroom. The students' engagement shows an observable reflection of the educator's teaching practice. This qualitative case study highlights teachers' perceptions of student engagement in the urban elementary classroom. The research questions asked about…

The accountability era has produced school grading systems that purport to evaluate school effectiveness yet utilize hegemonic formulas that label low-scoring schools and neighborhoods, depriving them of incentive monies tied to their school grades. This quantitative study analyzed the publicly available data of 106 elementary schools in one large…

For many years schools located within concentrated areas of poverty in an urban school county in south Florida have experienced alarmingly high teacher turnover rates and alarmingly low academic performance scores. In 2015, in a lauded expose printed by the "Tampa Bay Times," five schools, all of which would go on to become part of the…

As parents, communities, educators, and policymakers continue to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on student learning in America, many have turned to recently released results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). NAEP measures what students know and what they can do in several tested subjects, including reading,…

Elementary schools should be adept at assisting students in meeting their mental health need, such as, providing a non-violence approach to conflict resolution; strengthening the students' relationships with their family members and friends; taking responsibility for their education and future; creating a stronger positive image; handling tough…

We examined the effect of multiple school-related, resilience-promotive factors against exposure to violence (ETV) at school among an urban sample of 6th-grade students (n = 441, 57% female, mean age = 11.81), 90% identify as students of color. Using multilevel mixed-effects linear models, we analyzed two waves of data (baseline and 4-month…

Math programming that includes assessments to predict standardized mathematics scores can help evaluate student performance and growth during the academic year. ACALETICS® is a highly interactive, culturally inclusive mathematics program that utilizes posttests as continuous comprehensive assessments to evaluate student mathematical knowledge.…

The purpose of this study was to understand the nature of writing instruction across time and grade bands. We used quantitative and qualitative analyses of teacher interviews and video records of classroom instruction of English language arts writing instruction in 97 fourth- through eighth-grade classrooms in 2010 and 2018. Video records showed a…

Minority underrepresentation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) perpetuates the income inequality that minorities experience and leads to a lack of diversity in STEM. The purpose of this quantitative nonexperimental study was to examine the effect of student demographics, STEM, science technology, engineering, art, and…

Summer is a time of enrichment, discovery, and fun for many students. But for others, especially those from low-income families, summer means time away from the support and resources that facilitate learning and social and emotional growth. Hundreds of school districts across the United States are committed to changing this opportunity gap. RAND…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 2017 pilot study of the Middle School Transcript Study (MSTS) is the first NAEP transcript study to focus on the middle school level, collect student coursetaking data at the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) level, and rely solely on the electronic submission of course catalogs and…

District leaders in a large urban school district in central Florida wanted to test the efficacy of a new curriculum designed to enhance the word knowledge of grade 5 students so as to improve reading achievement. The new curriculum, called Word Knowledge Instruction (WKI), consists of 15-minute lessons taught 4 days a week for 20 weeks. The…

Prior knowledge activation is a crucial component of reading comprehension. Previous studies have examined students' prompted (or solicited) purposeful knowledge activation, which occurs when the explicit goal is to activate knowledge, as well as ancillary knowledge activation, which is when students indirectly use their prior knowledge to fill in…

On average, Florida students earn only half of the points possible in the statistics content area of the state's annual mathematics assessment. Leaders in Broward County Public Schools, a large, diverse, urban school district, viewed changes to statistics curriculum and instruction as one way to address this issue. This study randomly assigned 40…

Broward County Public Schools (BCPS) has identified low student achievement in statistics in the middle grades as a critical concern. It has also expressed concern that statistics instruction does not meet the level of cognitive complexity described in the state curriculum standards. This randomized controlled trial in 40 BCPS middle schools…