Background/Context: In the early elementary grades, many students do not achieve literacy proficiency due to inadequate personalized literacy instruction (Taylor et al., 2010). Despite increasing evidence that differentiated instruction informed by assessments of students' reading abilities can improve learning more effectively than…

Preparing to become a music teacher educator is a complex process and one component of this process should be learning to model, demonstrate, and teach assessment practices to preservice music educators. The purpose of this exploratory qualitative study was to discover how, and to what extent, music teacher educators (MTEs) are educated about…

Monitoring Advising Analytics to Promote Success (MAAPS)is a multi-institutional project of the University Innovation Alliance (UIA) initially funded and supported by a US Department of Education First in the World Grant to Georgia State, the lead UIA member on this project. MAAPS is a large-scale randomized-controlled trial designed to validate…

In most states kindergarten entry assessments (KEA) are employed primarily to inform parents and teachers. KEAs can serve as a key indicator of child development at formal school entry to inform education, but also could serve as a baseline for assessing progress in the early grades. However, their usefulness for this purpose is limited because…

This paper describes and compares the profiles of the top accounting programs in the United States as identified by "U.S. News and World Report" in 2004 with the profiles of the top accounting programs in the United States as identified by the "Accounting Degree Review" in 2014. The "Accounting Degree Review"'s list…

Evaluation studies can provide feedback on implementation, support continuous improvement, and increase understanding of evaluation systems' impact on teaching and learning. Despite the importance of educator evaluation studies, states often need support to prioritize and fund them. Successful studies require expertise, time, and a shared…

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…

To best train and support school leaders in their evolving roles, they require high-quality preparation and in-service pipelines that both address the changing demands on their positions and acknowledge the cascading effects that well-prepared leaders have on both student outcomes and in school culture and retention. Including school leaders in…

An innovative system-building initiative known as the STEM Learning Ecosystems Community of Practice (SLECoP) is transforming U.S. STEM education through cross-sector partnerships between schools, afterschool and summer programs, libraries, museums, and businesses, among others. Although logic models exist to describe how SLEs can make positive…

Most studies of test-based promotion policies focus on measuring the effect of retention (being left back) on later student outcomes, and the evidence is fairly mixed. However, test-based promotion policies do not only affect the students who are retained. Presumably, they also affect students and schools as they try to improve reading performance…

Teacher evaluation systems introduced by states and school systems in the past several years have focused attention on improving the performance of public school teachers, but they have been cost- and time-intensive, placing a significant burden on states' and districts' resources. In Tennessee, for example, trained evaluators conducted nearly…

This first analysis of aggregated data from the Kahoot! game-based player response system demonstrates that it can provide assessments of overall US student polar knowledge and identifies differences in polar knowledge across several states. A kahoot online quiz on polar topics recorded over 25,000 United States teacher-hosted classroom players…

Bar graphs and histograms are core statistical tools that are widely used in statistical practice and commonly taught in classrooms. Despite their importance and the instructional time devoted to them, many students demonstrate misunderstandings when asked to read and interpret bar graphs and histograms. Much of the research that has been…

Evaluations of educational programs or interventions are typically conducted in nonrandomly selected samples of schools or districts. Recent research has shown that nonrandom site selection can yield biased impact estimates. To estimate the external validity bias from nonrandom site selection, we combine lists of school districts that were…

States use their accountability systems to identify low-performing schools, which can receive added support and are expected to improve. Alternative schools serve students whose needs are not met in a regular school. They often serve at-risk students who are struggling academically or behaviorally. Given this unique population, the Government…