This chapter examines research on professional development, or PD, focusing specifically on underlying assumptions about the nature of teaching and the nature of teacher learning. It examines PD programs according to their assumptions about what teachers need to learn, and it examines PD studies according to how and when they expect to see…

This methodological brief introduces the readers to the propensity score matching method, which can be used for enhancing the validity of causal inferences in research situations involving nonexperimental design or observational research, or in situations where the benefits of an experimental design are not fully realized because of reasons beyond…

An advantageous outcome of scientific inquiry is the creation of a community of professionals who were experienced in the gathering and use of student data and contributed to it through their own research. Although researchers had offered a range of explanations, a model for realizing this concern was nonexistent. The purpose of this study was to…

Previous work on statistical power has discussed mainly single-level designs or 2-level balanced designs with random effects. Although balanced experiments are common, in practice balance cannot always be achieved. Work on class size is one example of unbalanced designs. This study provides methods for power analysis in 2-level unbalanced designs…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships among bell schedules, GEE 21 science scores, and cumulative GPAs. Factors under consideration included teacher perspective, gender, ethnicity and students' at-risk status. The researcher collected data from the Louisiana Department of Education (LDE) targeting seven schools for three…

SEDL is providing analytic and technical support to three large-scale randomized controlled trials assessing the efficacy of promising literacy curriculum in afterschool settings on student academic achievement. In the field of educational research, competition among research organizations and researchers can often impede collaborative efforts in…

Social promotion has long been the normal practice in American schools. Critics of this practice, whereby students are promoted to the next grade regardless of academic preparation, have suggested that students would benefit academically if they were made to repeat a grade. Supporters of social promotion claim that retaining students disrupts them…

One valuable ingredient that is missing from common teacher practice is the measurement of ongoing student performance in the classroom in a way that supports improvement in student performance and in teacher instruction that can be shared with parents, teachers, and other professional colleagues. Treatment-only designs (TODs) with self-recording…