This Policy Guide draws on work with five states to provide context and guidance for policymakers looking to strengthen the pre-K to K-3 continuum and create opportunities to close the achievement gap. It includes a tear-out page of guiding questions at the end.

Using data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, this study examined the cross-lagged relations between behavioral engagement and reading achievement in elementary school and whether these cross-lagged relations differed between low-socioeconomic status (SES) and mid-…

Many parents, educators, and policy makers see great potential for leveraging tools like laptop computers, tablets, and smartphones in the classrooms of the world. Although increasing students' technology access may be associated with increased student achievement, there is little research directly investigating objective measures of student…

The present study examined the relationship between children's early literacy-related abilities and their reading achievement in late elementary school in the context of a Puerto Rican community in Massachusetts. The researcher examined four years of student achievement test data from the public elementary schools of Holyoke, Massachusetts. The…

Many educational policy initiatives use instructional coaching to accomplish their goals. Yet we know little about the role of reading coaches in mediating the relationship between policy and teachers' classroom practice. In this article, we investigate the role of reading coaches in mediating the relationship between Reading First policy and…

Background: Cluster-randomized experiments that assign intact groups such as schools or school districts to treatment conditions are increasingly common in educational research. Such experiments are inherently multilevel designs whose sensitivity (statistical power and precision of estimates) depends on the variance decomposition across levels.…

This study evaluated the relative effects of Tier II computer-assisted tutoring in small groups (Team Alphie) and one-to-one tutoring provided to struggling readers in 33 high-poverty Success for All (SFA) schools. In this year-long study, struggling readers in the Team Alphie schools were tutored in groups of 6. In the control schools, students…