Background: In today's fast-paced world, the complexity of family relations is growing. This demands a closer look into the effects of parental marital relationships and parents' involvement on children's literacy outcomes. Objective: The study objective was to examine the connections between parental marital status, parental involvement, and…

The internal validity of observational study is often subject to debate. In this study, we define the counterfactuals as the unobserved sample and intend to quantify its relationship with the null hypothesis statistical testing (NHST). We propose the probability of a robust inference for internal validity, that is, the PIV, as a robustness index…

The nature of the literacy assessments valued in the persistent accountability climate within U.S. public education, coupled with an increasingly polarized discourse around what counts as the science of reading (SOR), have resulted in instructional gatekeeping that privileges constrained skill teaching and learning in K-3 settings. The gatekeeper…

The purpose of this article was to offer guidance to educators in evaluating the strengths, weaknesses, and most effective uses of commercial reading assessment suites. We provide three resources to help educators who are responsible for making instructional decisions in reading using formal screening, benchmark, interim, and progress-monitoring…

Important educational policy decisions, like whether to shorten or extend the school year, often require accurate estimates of how much students learn during the year. Yet, related research relies on a mostly untested assumption: that growth in achievement is linear throughout the entire school year. We examine this assumption using a dataset…

Background: Observation Studies, Unmeasured Confounding, and Sensitivity Analysis: An important part of educational research is identifying important, potentially causal, factors that influence children's learning from observational studies. However, it is well-known that discovering such factors from observational studies can be biased due to…

Causal search algorithms have been effectively applied in different fields including biology, genetics, climate science, medicine, and neuroscience. However, there have been scant applications of these methods in social and behavioral sciences. This article provides an illustrative example of how causal search algorithms can shed light on…

The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11 (ECLS-K:2011) is the third in a series of longitudinal studies of young children conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), within the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. The ECLS-K:2011 collected information about the early…

Policymakers have advocated academic skills building at kindergarten as a way of improving student achievement. However, early childhood educators have concerns with this policy as gains in achievement may come at the expense of children's social-emotional skills. Using a nationally representative data set of kindergartners, we find that advanced…

The Board of Education's mission is to equitably educate the whole child so that every student graduates with the tools to reach their full potential (Houston Independent School District (HISD), 2019). To succeed in their mission, the board participates in Lone Star Governance, whose intent is to provide a continuous improvement model for…

It has been common knowledge for decades that poor and working-class students tend to experience "summer learning loss," a drop in performance between spring and fall that serves to widen the gap between students. However, new research shows that the reality of summer learning loss is more complex. Megan Kuhfeld draws on data from the…

Articles in this issue examine (1) the primary sources of variability in reading and language achievement among Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs) in the United States, (2) the extent to which poor performance at the end of grade 2 is identifiable in developmental trajectories beginning in kindergarten, (3) the relations among core reading…

To effectively teach reading to students with and at risk for disabilities, special and general education teachers depend on principals who support effective specialized reading instruction. Yet, extant research indicates that principals have inadequate preparation for supporting specialized instruction. To address this issue, scholars have…

This is a data report on the Innovation for Learning (IFL) tablet instruction. The report presents the performance of students who were exposed to the IFL tablet instruction. The IFL tablet instruction involved the teaching of early reading in kindergarten and first grade in 29 elementary schools in the Houston Independent School District (HISD)…

Articles in this issue examine (1) the primary sources of variability in reading and language achievement among Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs) in the United States, (2) the extent to which poor performance at the end of grade 2 is identifiable in developmental trajectories beginning in kindergarten, (3) the relations among core reading…