In international large-scale assessments, students may not be compelled to answer every test item: a student can decide to skip a seemingly difficult item or may drop out before the end of the test is reached. The way these missing responses are treated will affect the estimation of the item difficulty and student ability, and ultimately affect…

The Learning Forward Academy is Learning Forward's flagship deep learning experience, committed to increasing educator and leader capacity and improving results for students in the ever-changing landscape of education. For over 30 years, the academy has supported the problem-based learning of teachers, teacher leaders, instructional coaches,…

Self-directed learning (SDL) requires students to take initiative to learn and control their own learning process. Literature highlights the importance of SDL for lifelong learning. Yet, little understanding is known regarding how to support SDL at the school level, specifically for out-of-class learning context. To fill up this gap, this research…

Reading numbers aloud, a central aspect of numerical literacy, is a challenging skill to acquire, but the origins of this difficulty remain poorly understood. To investigate this matter, we examined the performance of 127 third- and fourth-grade children who read aloud, in Hebrew, numbers with 2-5 digits. We found several key observations. First,…

For students who perform inconsistently across subjects, teachers face challenges in formulating track recommendations, as their achievement will not point to one secondary school track. This issue may be more prominent for students from diverse backgrounds, given the achievement differences between specific subject domains within these groups.…

Background: Previous meta-analyses have shown that feedback targeting text comprehension given when students perform a reading task positively influences learning from text. So far, differences in the effects of feedback were explained by design features, such as the timing and richness of feedback. In the present study, we aim to investigate…

Although parental help with homework has been long understood as a valuable part of parental involvement with children's education and, as such, an important mechanism shaping educational inequality, previous studies showed contradictory findings about its influence on academic achievement. Using multiple waves of the Early Childhood Longitudinal…

Research shows that children's reading proficiency levels in the early grades positively correlate with students' future academic achievement. This study provides the first-ever analysis of reading achievement trajectories for a cohort of students in grades 3 to 5 in 2014-17 in Hawaii schools. Hawaii serves a diverse student population whose…

Understanding how early reading and mathematics co-develop is important from both theoretical and pedagogical standpoints. Previous research has provided mixed results. This paper investigates the development of reading and mathematics in a longitudinal sample of N = 355,883 students from the United Kingdom (2005-2019) aged 5 to 12 (49% girls).…

The purpose of this research was to determine the effectiveness of goal setting as a motivator for kindergarten students in learning grade-level sight words. This study was conducted over a 6-week period in two Midwestern kindergarten classrooms. The participants in the experimental group were trained in self-setting goals and participated in…

We situate education, and the science of reading (SOR) specifically, in the midst of a broad, evidence-based revolution involving an array of disciplines focused on improving the health and well-being of individuals and populations. Low and stagnant levels of reading proficiency, massive reading disparities, and a robust SOR knowledge base suggest…

In education, among the most anticipated consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic are that student performance will stagnate or decline and that existing inequities will increase. Although some studies suggest a decline in student performance and widening learning gaps, the picture is less clear than expected. In this study, we add to the existing…

Despite the general consensus on the positive impact of formative assessment on student learning, researchers have not shown the underlying mechanisms between specific formative assessment strategies and academic performance on an international sample. This study examines the link between student and teacher reports of teachers' formative…

Studies have shown that dialogic instruction can promote reading comprehension, but its contribution to lower-level skills like reading fluency is not as well understood. The paper reports on a dialogically oriented small group intervention for struggling second-grade Hebrew readers, targeting both comprehension and fluency. Rather than top-down…

Arabic is a diglossic language, where two language varieties are used: spoken Arabic (SpA) and standard Arabic (StA). The words may be "identical" (maintaining the same phonological expression in the SpA and StA) or "unique" to StA). This study examined the effect of diglossia on reading according to the lexical distance…