Educators and researchers have been fighting the reading wars for the last century, with battles see-sawing literacy instruction in American schools from phonics to whole language and, most recently, back to phonics again. Over the last decade, 32 states and the District of Columbia have adopted new "science of reading" laws that require…

Randomized experiments are often considered the strongest designs to study the impact of educational interventions. Perhaps the most prevalent class of designs used in large scale education experiments is the cluster randomized design in which entire schools are assigned to treatments. In cluster randomized trials (CRTs) that assign schools to…

Previous research has examined whether manipulation of one environmental element, such as sound, significantly affected group norms for achievement. This investigation examined the relation of preferred and actual acoustic environment on reading performance. Subjects were 32 male and 32 female sixth-graders from a suburban school in New York State…