This study has tackled the thorny problem of closing the Student Achievement Gap (SAG) in California's elementary schools. To address that problem, an "Integrated" form of educational leadership called Transformational Instructional Leadership (TIL), a form grounded in "best practices" of Transformational and Instructional…

The purpose of this study was to discover and compare perceptions of three different groups of Indiana elementary educators concerning the importance of areas of the principal's literacy knowledge base, as well as responsibility for and use of this knowledge by principals to adequately support effective research-based literacy instruction. The…

The present study investigated Oral Reading Fluency and its ability to predict academic achievement in language arts and mathematics on 6,484 first through fourth grade students. Student, teacher, and school information from the 2006-2007 academic school year was collected from databases maintained by Salt Lake City School District. The…

The focus of this quantitative study was to identify third grade ISTEP+ data from the top 10 increasing and declining enrollment public school districts in the state of Indiana to determine if communities experiencing high percentages of increasing or declining enrollments have significantly different achievement in language arts. This data was…

Students entering school with little knowledge of English do not have the foundation in place to develop reading skills. This lack of foundation puts English Learners at a disadvantage that they struggle to overcome. The purpose of the quantitative study was twofold: (a) to determine whether measures of phonemic awareness are predictive of end of…

Middle-to-high school transition activities improve retention and graduation rates, reduce academic challenges, and support student social development. The purpose of this study was to investigate ninth-grade algebra I and literature/composition end-of-course test performance, attendance, and discipline in relationship to transition strategies…

This research examined the impact of collaborative teaching (co-teaching) on the Reading/Language Arts and Math achievement of Middle Tennessee students in grades 5-8, as measured by the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP) Achievement test. Within the context of this study, the co-teaching model of instruction is defined as the…

The purpose of this quantitative relational study was to examine if an association existed between the independent variables, instructional strategies, amount of class time used to teach science, frequency of science instruction, number of courses the teacher has taken in science method or content, and the dependent variable, a school's API…

The purpose of this exploratory two-group pretest-posttest comparative survey study was to determine the effect of a team adviser-advisee academic, behavior, and character mentoring program on the achievement, school engagement, and behavior outcomes of eighth grade students determined to be above (n = 21) and below (n = 15) eligibility guidelines…

This in-depth case study of classroom interaction illuminated how a white female teacher and African American students used talk to build positive authority relationships across their racial difference. Racial difference in classrooms can engender cultural misunderstandings between teachers and students around behavior, communication, and learning…

This study explored whether an intervention involving Brain Gym exercises designed to increase academic achievement in the areas of math and reading/language arts would be successful. Three groups were used in the study: an initial treatment group, a delayed treatment group, and a control group. Each of the three groups was comprised of 20…

This qualitative study examined middle grades preservice language arts teachers' perceptions of young adult literature through the lenses of reader response, new literacy, and activity theory. Undergraduate preservice teachers used synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) to respond online to three young adult books with…

Secondary student performance in the domain of reading has been a cause for concern for educators and scholars alike. To understand the demands placed on students we must first understand how reading changes within content areas and across grades. Furthermore, we must have an understanding of teachers' conceptions about the texts they teach. This…

Because research exploring how students with disabilities read and comprehend on the Internet is scarce, a mixed methods study was implemented to determine if Internet Reciprocal Teaching (IRT) is an effective intervention for improving online reading comprehension among seventh grade students with high-incidence disabilities in inclusive…

A formative intervention was employed to expose children to a variety of words to increase the breadth, or size of their vocabularies, and to repeatedly and supportively expose children to words to increase the depth, or semantic understanding of vocabulary. Science content words were selected since they are less likely to be included in an…