Although the relationships between family income and student identification for gifted programming are well documented, less is known about how school and district wealth are related to student identification. To examine the effects of institutional and individual poverty on student identification, we conducted a series of three-level regression…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the incremental validity of a set of domain general cognitive measures added to a traditional screening battery of early numeracy measures. The sample consisted of 458 kindergarten students of whom 285 were designated as severely at-risk for mathematics difficulty. Hierarchical multiple regression…

Research on school leadership suggests that both principal and teacher leadership are important for school improvement. However, few studies have studied the interaction of principal and teacher leadership as separate but linked systems in how they relate to student outcomes. In this study, we examine how leadership pathways are related in the…

This study investigated the measurement of social emotional competence in low-income youth by assessing the validity of responses derived from the widely used, teacher-rated Devereux Student Strengths Assessment (DESSA). Based upon the five-component social emotional learning model proposed by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional…

Interactive Strategy Training for Active Reading and Thinking (iSTART) is an intelligent tutoring system that supports reading comprehension through self-explanation (SE) training. This study tested how two metacognitive features, presented in a 2 x 2 design, affected students' SE scores during training. The "performance notification"…

The computer-administered Multiple-Choice Online Causal Comprehension Assessment (MOCCA) for Grades 3 to 5 has an innovative, 40-item multiple-choice structure in which each distractor corresponds to a comprehension process upon which poor comprehenders have been shown to rely. This structure requires revised thinking about measurement issues…

The normal-distribution-based likelihood ratio statistic T[subscript ml] = nF[subscript ml] is widely used for power analysis in structural Equation modeling (SEM). In such an analysis, power and sample size are computed by assuming that T[subscript ml] follows a central chi-square distribution under H[subscript 0] and a noncentral chi-square…

This study investigates how cohesion manifests in readers' thought processes while reading texts when they are instructed to engage in self-explanation, a strategy associated with deeper, more successful comprehension. In Study 1, college students (n = 21) were instructed to either paraphrase or self-explain science texts. Paraphrasing was…

Understanding students' misconceptions and how they change is an essential part of supporting students in their science learning. This paper presents results from distractor-driven multiple-choice assessments that target students' misconceptions about energy. Over 20,000 elementary, middle and high school students from across the U.S. participated…

For students to thrive in the U.S. educational system, they must successfully cope with omnipresent demands of exams. Nearly all students experience testing situations as stressful, and signs of stress (e.g., racing heart) are typically perceived negatively. This research tested the efficacy of a psychosituational intervention targeting cognitive…

Knowing what we do not yet know is critical for learning. Nonetheless, people typically overestimate their prowess--but is this true of everyone? Three studies examined who shows overconfidence and why. Study 1 demonstrated that participants with an entity (fixed) theory of intelligence, those known to avoid negative information, showed…

Perceiving not just values, but relations between values, is critical to human cognition. We tested the predictions of a proposed mechanism for processing categorical spatial relations between two objects--the "shift account" of relation processing--which states that relations such as "above" or "below" are extracted…

Universal screening and progress monitoring measures are increasingly of interest to early interventionists who make decisions about the services provided to young children. A measure of infant-toddlers' growth in early movement, the "Early Movement Indicator (EMI)," was reported in 2002. However, the EMI has remained an experimental…

When fitting hierarchical regression models, maximum likelihood (ML) estimation has computational (and, for some users, philosophical) advantages compared to full Bayesian inference, but when the number of groups is small, estimates of the covariance matrix [sigma] of group-level varying coefficients are often degenerate. One can do better, even…

The researchers examined the theoretical factor structure fit and psychometric properties of the Transition Assessment and Goal Generator (TAGG). In the first study, 349 transition-aged students with disabilities, their special educators, and family members completed TAGG assessments, and using exploratory factor analysis (EFA)/confirmatory factor…