The study aimed to identify significant disparities in the reading growth of English learners (ELs) enrolled in either push-in or pull-out EL services, as measured by the ACCESS and MAP assessments. Conducted at a middle school in southwestern Illinois, the research focused on the impact of different EL programming types on the reading performance…

The purpose of this paper is to showcase new research that seeks to provide guidance on the heterogeneity of treatment effects by utilizing the variance of demographic differences in state assessments. This study is focused on a simple randomized block design where students are nested within schools, and within each school students are randomized…

Northwest Evaluation Association™ (NWEA™) is committed to providing partners with useful tools to help make inferences from the Measures of Academic Progress® (MAP®) interim assessment scores. One important tool is the concordance table between MAP and state summative assessments. Concordance tables have been used for decades to relate scores on…

"TAP"™: "The System for Teacher and Student Advancement (TAP™)" is an educator effectiveness program that aims to improve student achievement through supports and incentives for teachers. Based on the research, "TAP"™ teachers were found to have no discernible effects on student achievement in science, English…

In the first comprehensive analysis of Illinois' statewide survey of school climate and learning conditions, this report finds systematic differences among schools in the degree to which students and teachers report strength in the five essential supports. Previous University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research (UChicago CCSR)…

Equality of educational opportunity is threatened by long-standing gaps in student achievement by race, gender, and student poverty, as well as by school sector and school poverty. The true magnitude of these gaps cannot be understood, however, unless these factors are considered simultaneously. While accounting for the effects of demographic…

Many test-based accountability systems, including the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), place great weight on the numbers of students who score at or above specified proficiency levels in various subjects. Accountability systems based on these metrics often provide incentives for teachers and principals to target children near current…

The impact of mobility on academic achievement has been the focus of many studies. The findings are generally consistent and suggest that mobility lowers student achievement, particularly when the students are from low-income, less educated families. For this study, 30 students, classified as either mobile or stable, were randomly selected from a…

In the mid-1990s, the Chicago Public Schools declared an end to social promotion and instituted promotional requirements based on standardized test scores in the third, sixth, and eighth grades. This article examines the experience of third and sixth graders who were retained under Chicago's policy from 1997 to 2000. The authors examine the…

A study examined whether sixth grade students taught formal study skills would obtain significantly higher reading achievement than those not taught these skills. Study skills can be broken down into ten or more skill areas including: study habits, time management, test taking, lecture notetaking, reading comprehension, vocabulary, test anxiety,…

A study examined the use of the accelerated reader (AR) computer program to increase the reading comprehension scores on the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT) of sixth-grade students compared to the previous year when they did not use the program. The study reviewed results and methods from previous research regarding use of the AR program. Subjects…

The 1993 Illinois Goal Assessment Program (IGAP) Reading Tests measured reading comprehension using both narrative and expository reading passages. Noticeable differences in mean scaled scores occurred depending on whether the 1993 results were equated back to the 1992 narrative test or the 1993 expository test (Hsu and Ackerman, 1994). In an…