Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) commissioned Dr. Marcus Winters to analyze the factors driving the special education gap between Denver's charter and traditional public elementary and middle schools. Using student-level data, Winters shows that Denver's special education enrollment gap starts at roughly 2 percentage points in…

"Prentice Hall/Pearson Literature©" (2007-15) is an English language arts curriculum designed for students in grades 6-12 that focuses on building reading, vocabulary, literary analysis, and writing skills. It uses passages from fiction and nonfiction texts, poetry, and contemporary digital media. The curriculum is based on a textbook.…

Socio-ecological models of victimization reporting incorporate normative constraints and instrumental considerations at the individual and contextual levels. Drawing on this model, we explore factors related to students' willingness to report problem behaviors that they might observe in school. Data obtained from student and teacher/administrator…

In 2011, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation created the Project Mastery grant program to support competency-based education initiatives in large school systems that serve a high proportion of disadvantaged youth. Competency-based education meets students where they are academically, provides students with opportunities for choice, and awards…

Results from the 2013 NAEP assessments show fourth-and eighth-graders making progress in mathematics and reading. Nationally representative samples of more than 376,000 fourth-graders and 341,000 eighth-graders were assessed in either mathematics or reading in 2013. Results are reported for public and private school students in the nation, and for…

Results from the 2013 NAEP assessments show fourth- and eighth-graders making progress in mathematics and reading. Nationally representative samples of more than 376,000 fourth-graders and 341,000 eighth-graders were assessed in either mathematics or reading in 2013. Results are reported for public and private school students in the nation, and…

This project is a multi-site, multi-year study designed to test the efficacy of a fully developed intervention, Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR), with adolescent readers. In year 1, the research questions were: (1) "Does CSR improve reading comprehension for adolescent readers attending relatively low SES schools?"; and (2)…

The iDREAMS project aims to reinvent Computer Science education in K-12 schools, by using game design and computational science for motivating and educating students through an approach we call Scalable Game Design, starting at the middle school level. In this paper we discuss the use of Computational Thinking Patterns as the basis for our…

"AVID" ("Advancement Via Individual Determination") is a college-readiness program whose primary goal is to prepare middle and high school students for enrollment in four-year colleges through increased access to and support in advanced courses. The program, which focuses on underserved, middle-achieving students (defined as…

Newly developed assessments of nutrition and exercise knowledge, attitudes, and behavior were administered to 383 eighth-graders. Evidence for the validity of assessment scores was evaluated with five findings. First, parent- and self-reported behaviors were similar and congruent for healthy eating and exercising but not for sedentary behaviors or…

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent that diagrammatic literacy is necessary for success on standardized science tests at the late-elementary and middle grade levels. Towards this goal, we quantified the frequency, form and function of graphical representations on select state science tests. 985 tests items from 14 states were…

The current study examined the relations among self-esteem, approving normative beliefs about bullying, school climate, and bullying perpetration using a large, longitudinal sample of children from elementary, middle, and high school. Self-report surveys were collected at two points in time over the course of 1 year from 7,299 ethnically diverse…

Guided by a new framework, the NAEP science assessment was updated in 2009 to keep the content current with key developments in science, curriculum standards, assessments, and research. The 2009 framework organizes science content into three broad content areas. Physical science includes concepts related to properties and changes of matter,…

A representative sample of 122,000 eighth-graders participated in the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) science assessment, which is designed to measure students' knowledge and abilities in the areas of physical science, life science, and Earth and space sciences. This report covers the overall results, achievement level…

This study investigated middle school students' conceptual understanding of algebraic equations. Participants in the study--257 sixth- and seventh-grade students--were asked to solve one set of algebraic equations and to generate story problems corresponding with another set of equations. Structural aspects of the equations, including the number…