Background: Despite the establishment of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA) in 2010, child nutrition programs continue to experience challenges impacting participation. Prior qualitative studies have explored how to reduce barriers to implementation of these programs in schools, but few studies have examined attitudes held by students, who…

This article describes a curricular program for use in middle school social studies classrooms that supports the development of emergent bilinguals' language, literacy skills, and acquisition of content knowledge. The program leverages four supports found to be impactful for emergent bilinguals: (1) foregrounding content to increase students'…

Gaming the system is a persistent problem in Computer-Based Learning Platforms. While substantial progress has been made in identifying and understanding such behaviors, effective interventions scarce. This study uses a method of causal moderation known as Fully Latent Principal Stratification to explore the impact of two types of interventions --…

This study examined the impact of a classroom-level component of The Inclusive Skill-building Learning Approach (ISLA), an instructional and restorative alternative to exclusionary discipline, on student behaviors and school discipline practices in middle schools. Intervention implementation, classroom observations, and all other data collection…

The current study investigated how prior knowledge moderated the effects of three educational technologies ("From Here to There," "DragonBox 12+," and problem sets in "ASSISTments") on seventh-grade students' later algebraic knowledge. Pretest scores only moderated effects of "From Here to There," with…

It is essential for items in assessments of mathematics' teacher knowledge to evoke the desired response processes -- to be interpreted and responded to by teachers as intended by item developers. In this study, we sought to unpack evidence that middle school mathematics teachers were not consistently interacting as intended with constructed…

In this study, we asked whether Montessori schools, which tend to have high student engagement, are associated with lower average rates of chronic absenteeism and/or smaller racial disparities therein relative to non-Montessori schools. We use multilevel modeling to answer this question, following an approach proposed in Author et al., (in press)…

Understanding science allows students with and without developmental and behavioral-based (DB) disabilities to better appreciate the world around them as well as prepare them for the growing science-related job market. However, students in the United States consistently underperform on science achievement tests compared to students from other…

Extended Reality (XR) experiences for mathematics teachers can allow them to understand both pedagogy and the mathematics itself in new ways. In this study, we explore a virtual reality (VR) simulation for learning about geometric shapes where teachers could engage in joint, shared manipulation of holograms in three dimensions. We examine what…

Though emerging research supports the effectiveness of school-based coaching models utilizing motivational interviewing (MI), an examination of the specific drivers behind these effects is notably lacking in the prevention field. This study leveraged sequential analysis to examine how teachers' verbalization of change talk (i.e., language in…

Understanding how environments influence learning requires attending not only to what is present but also to what is absent. In the context of mathematics learning, this means attending not only to problems that children encounter frequently in textbooks but also to ones that appear rarely. We present research in this article showing that students…

Introduction: We report predictive validity of the newly defined Student Risk Screening Scale -- Internalizing and Externalizing (SRSS-IE 9, with 9 items) when used for the first time by middle and high school teachers from 43 schools. Methods: The sample included 11,773 middle school-aged students representing four geographic regions, and 7,244…

Learning experience designers consistently balance the trade-off between open and close-ended activities. The growth and scalability of Computer Based Learning Platforms (CBLPs) have only magnified the importance of these design trade-offs. CBLPs often utilize close-ended activities (i.e. Multiple-Choice Questions [MCQs]) due to feasibility…

Organization, time management, and planning (OTMP) skills are behavioral manifestations of executive functioning linked to academic outcomes. Interventions to improve OTMP skills have shown favorable outcomes. The Children's Organizational Skills Scale parent and teacher forms (COSS-P, COSS-T) are widely used for assessing OTMP skills, but there…

We examine effects of the pandemic on student attendance, course grades, and grade retention in North Carolina in 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 using descriptive and regression analyses. We find each outcome worsened on average in 2020-2021, with larger changes at the high end of the absence distribution, the low end of the grade distribution, and among…