Standards-based grading has been used in many Illinois public elementary schools for years, offering educators a different way of assessing and communicating to parents about their student achievement and performance on the grade level state standards. Educators faced many benefits and challenges using a standards-based grading system identified.…

These are the appendixes for the report, "Trends and Gaps in Reading Achievement across Kindergarten and Grade 1 in Two Illinois School Districts." This study examined reading achievement data for kindergarten and grade 1 students in two districts in Illinois: District U-46 (Elgin Area Schools) and District 186 (Springfield Public…

Few Spanish language tools are available for assessing important social-emotional learning (SEL) skills. The present study presents evidence of the psychometric properties of a Spanish-language version of SELweb (SELweb-S), a web-based system for assessing children's ability to recognize others' emotions and perspectives, solve social problems,…

"Sustainable" development refers to development that meets our needs, while making it possible for future generations to meet their needs. Societal and personal choices will dictate if sustainable development will be possible, or, rather, if the environmental, economic and social impact of our continual lifestyle demands will lead to…

Achieving fluency with basic subtraction and add-with-8 or -9 combinations is difficult for primary grade children. A 9-month training experiment entailed evaluating the efficacy of software designed to promote such fluency via guided learning of reasoning strategies. Seventy-five eligible first graders were randomly assigned to one of three…

River Trails School District 26--a K-8 public school district in Mount Prospect, Illinois, with 1,580 students--developed, implemented, and celebrated a student-centered public relations event that focused on reading and technology. The literacy and technology fair drew hundreds of parents, students, staff, and community members to the district…

The study reported in this paper examined the effects of "First Step to Success (First Step)," a school- and home-based program intended to improve outcomes for students with moderate to severe behavior problems who may be at risk for academic failure. The study took place in six locations across five states: San Jose, California; Tampa,…

Children's early approaches to learning (ATL) enhance their adaptation to the demands they experience with the start of formal schooling. The current study uses individual growth modeling to investigate whether children's early ATL, which includes persistence, emotion regulation, and attentiveness, explain individual differences in their academic…

Accessing Curriculum through Technology Tools (ACTTT), a model development project, was developed and tested by staff of the Center for Best Practices in Early Childhood (the Center), a research and development unit within the College of Education and Human Services at Western Illinois University. The major goal of ACTTT was to develop,…

This project describes a 12-week program developed to improve student spelling of high frequency words for transfer in written work across the curriculum. The targeted population consists of kindergarten, first, and third graders in two public elementary schools in a community located in central Illinois. Following an extensive literature review,…

To complement the information gathered on middle school and high school literacy initiatives as reported in "Middle and High School Literacy across the Curriculum" (Task 1.2 Fast Response Project), the Regional Educational Laboratory Southeast (REL-SE) staff conducted a scan of the six southeast states to gather the following information…