High teacher turnover imposes numerous burdens on the schools and districts from which teachers depart. Some of these burdens are explicit and take the form of recruiting, hiring, and training costs. Others are more hidden and take the form of changes to the composition and quality of the teaching staff. This study focuses on the latter. We ask…

Research suggests that academically gifted students are often underserved when it comes to the school setting. Academically gifted students require specialized instruction to challenge them. Several successful strategies exist for creating an educational environment that appropriately challenges and helps these students achieve academic growth;…

Background: Prior research shows that teachers' working conditions are important for teacher and student outcomes, such as teacher retention and student achievement. Because National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs) can be effective in the classroom and as instructional leaders, they are well positioned to create favorable working conditions for…

This paper discusses a longitudinal study of North Carolina middle level student proficiency levels on standardized assessments since the shift to the Common Core curriculum. Student poverty and its impact on student achievement the focus of this paper, and this study analyzes long-term proficiency trends and while delving into inequity…

While multiple valid measures exist for assessing outcomes of environmental education (EE) programs, the field lacks a comprehensive and logistically feasible common instrument that can apply across diverse programs. We describe a participatory effort for identifying and developing crosscutting outcomes for Environmental Education in the…

Individual growth curves yield insights about growth that are not available from any other methodology; and developmental scales based on conjoint measurement models provide unique interpretive advantages for investigations of academic growth. The advantages are apparent when: (1) 15 consecutive statewide reading growth curves are annotated with…

The paper presents a model for addressing the critical question of opportunity to learn for students with disabilities. The model was tested through a two-year study with schools and teachers in three states. Opportunity to learn analysis is critical in this educational era of push toward access and inclusion. The study results indicate that…

Northwest Evaluation Association™ (NWEA™) is committed to providing partners with useful tools to help make inferences from the Measures of Academic Progress® (MAP®) interim assessment scores. Recently, NWEA completed a concordance study to connect the scales of the North Carolina End-of-Grade (EOG) English language arts (ELA) and math with those…

Despite policy efforts to encourage multiple measures of performance in newly developing teacher evaluation systems, practical constraints often result in evaluations based predominantly on formal classroom observations. Yet there is limited knowledge of how these observational measures relate to student achievement. This article leverages the…

Randomized experiments are often considered the strongest designs to study the impact of educational interventions. Perhaps the most prevalent class of designs used in large scale education experiments is the cluster randomized design in which entire schools are assigned to treatments. In cluster randomized trials (CRTs) that assign schools to…

Self-report data from 2,088 sixth-grade students in 11 middle schools in North Carolina were combined with administrative data on their eighth-grade end-of-the-year achievement scores in math and reading to examine the influence of students' perceived parental school behavior expectations on their academic performance. Through use of multilevel…

In this study, we examined how the relationships between one observation protocol, the Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observation (PLATO), and value-added measures shift when different tests are used to assess student achievement. Using data from the Measures of Effective Teaching Project, we found that PLATO was more strongly related to the…

No published studies using statewide end-of-grade (EOG) scores have compared the academic achievement of homeless and normally housed students. This preliminary quasi-experimental study used archival records from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction of more than 57,000 grade six students in 2006 and more than 94,000 grade six…

One goal of the US Department of Education-funded Project Insights was to see if the use of Problem-based Learning (PBL) would encourage students to reveal previously unseen academic potential. Two PBL units were taught to 271 sixth grade students in 13 classrooms. Afterwards, teachers identified students who demonstrated previously unseen…

The McKinney-Vento Homeless Education Assistance Improvements Act of 2001 (MCKV), which provides funds to local educational agencies (LEAs), is almost a decade old, yet no evaluations of its academic effectiveness have been reported. Using a systems theory framework, the authors answer the question of whether homeless students in grade 6 from LEAs…