There is growing evidence that school starting age impacts children's likelihood of receiving special education services, but less is known about variations in this effect. Using a regression discontinuity design, I found that the youngest students in a kindergarten cohort are 40% more likely (p < 0.001) to be placed in special education than…

The present study examined whether teacher-child closeness and conflict across kindergarten and first grade varied by gender and disruptive behavior at kindergarten entry within a sample of 324 predominantly Black children from low-income, urban households. Three main findings emerged from the analyses. First, contrary to findings from previous…

California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB) and the Riverside County Office of Education (RCOE) were awarded an Investing in Innovation (i3) Development grant in 2015 to investigate the impact of an early education mathematics program on English Learner students at two rural school districts in Riverside, CA. Teaching English Learners…

Objective: Social and academic functioning are linked in elementary school, and both are frequently impaired in children with elevated symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This study evaluated the Making Socially Accepting Inclusive Classrooms (MOSAIC) program, a classroom intervention to support children's social and…

Conceptual replications are part and parcel of education science. Methodologically rigorous conceptual replication studies permit researchers to test and strengthen the generalizability of a study's initial findings. The current conceptual replication sought to replicate the efficacy of a small-group, first-grade mathematics intervention with 240…

School rating websites are increasingly used by parents to assess the quality and fit of U.S. K-12 schools for their children. These online reviews often contain detailed descriptions of a school's strengths and weaknesses, which both reflect and inform perceptions of a school. Existing work on these text reviews has focused on finding words or…

Background: The delivery of effective, evidence-based early reading instruction depends partially on teachers' knowledge about reading acquisition, development, and pedagogy. Research shows that teachers often perform poorly on measures of reading-related knowledge, often cited as one explanation for a gap between reading research and classroom…

Direct Behavior Rating (DBR) is an efficient method for monitoring changes in student behavior in response to intervention. Emerging research on DBR Multi-Item Scales (DBR-MIS) indicates DBR-MIS has promising characteristics as a progress-monitoring assessment. Specifically, the multiple items within DBR-MIS allow stakeholders to measure specific…

The purpose this study was to evaluate the reliability, validity, and accuracy of scores from the "Intervention Selection Profile--Function (ISP-Function)": a brief functional assessment tool founded upon Direct Behavior Rating (DBR) methodology. Participants included 34 teacher-student dyads. Using the ISP-Function, teachers rated the…

The relationship between learning disabilities and behavior disorders is well documented and has led to the development of integrated interventions that target both academic and behavior deficits in elementary students. This paper describes the rationale, development, and implementation of an integrated academic-behavior intervention called…

Purpose: Multiple-measure principal evaluation systems have become commonplace in the last decade, but we do not know how principals perceive their evaluations under these regimes. This study analyzes how principals perceive evaluation in a state that was an early adopter of such a system. It describes how attitudes are explained by individual and…

Existing approaches to measuring writing performance are insufficient in terms of both technical adequacy as well as feasibility for use as a screening measure. This study examined the validity and diagnostic accuracy of several approaches to automated text evaluation as well as written expression curriculum-based measurement (WE-CBM) to determine…

We examined the extent to which automated written expression curriculum-based measurement (aWE-CBM) can be accurately used to computer score student writing samples for screening and progress monitoring. Students (n = 174) with learning difficulties in Grades 1-12 who received 1:1 academic tutoring through a community-based organization completed…

Decades of research conducted worldwide has resulted in a taxonomy for word problems involving additive situations. Research published in the 1980s found that U.S. curricula only exposed first-grade students to a small subset of the easiest types of word problems. Widely adopted curriculum standards in the United States call for first-grade…

The primary goal of this study was to assess the treatment sensitivity of four newly developed Direct Behavior Rating--Multi-Item Scales (DBR-MIS) that assess the domains of academic engagement, disruptive behavior, organizational skills, and oppositional behavior in the context of a Daily Report Card (DRC) intervention. To achieve this goal, we…