In 2015-16, the United States spent over $660 billion on its public education system in hopes of providing children with greater opportunities to excel academically and to improve their life trajectories. While public education dollars have risen at a relatively fast pace historically, future challenges, including underfunded pension liabilities,…

Meeting standardized test benchmarks is a challenge for elementary school students in Texas. The problem is that some elementary schools do not meet the performance standards of the fourth-grade STAAR state test average. Problem-based learning is a model used in schools to initiate problem-solving skills with a hands-on approach to real-world…

Background: Observation Studies, Unmeasured Confounding, and Sensitivity Analysis: An important part of educational research is identifying important, potentially causal, factors that influence children's learning from observational studies. However, it is well-known that discovering such factors from observational studies can be biased due to…

Since the 1990's, schools across the United States have been held accountable for increased student learning. Increased use of growth-based accountability models and a lack of clarity on what each model measures have resulted in a need for additional research focused on the real-world implications for teacher agency and school accountability. The…

Self-regulatory interventions have demonstrated numerous benefits for helping improve the academic performance of students. The purpose of this review was to report on the effectiveness and focus of academic self-regulation interventions for children and adolescents with emotional and behavioural disorders. Thirty-six studies published in 35…

We exploit within-teacher variation in the years that teachers host an apprentice ("student teacher") in Washington State to estimate the causal effect of these apprenticeships on student achievement, both during the apprenticeship and afterwards. The average causal effect of hosting a student teacher on student performance in the year…

This quantitative research project identifies if a performance gap exists between student performance and student expected performance on the last two administrations of the FCAT 2.0 in Reading and the first two administrations of the FSA ELA for 9th and 10th grade students using descriptive statistics to identify the mean and distribution of the…

Increasing class size is one of the key variables that policy makers can use to control spending on education. But the consensus among many education researchers is that smaller classes are effective in improving student achievement. This view has led to a policy of class size reductions in a number of US states, the UK, and the Netherlands. This…

Zambia faces many challenges common to low- and middle-income countries as it seeks to improve its education system, including low literacy rates for young Zambians and low public expenditure on education. In the past 20 years, Zambia's school system has expanded to reach more children in rural areas, primarily through community schools, which are…

Nearly one in four students residing in the United States is from an immigrant family and these children's school readiness is related to their parent's nativity and other sociodemographic characteristics. Social-emotional skills are an important conduit for academic development, yet these relations have not been explored for children from…

The aim of this study was to estimate the within-child associations of in-school arts education and achievement in reading and mathematics, using four waves of data (kindergarten, 1st-grade, 3rd-grade, and 5th-grade) from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. Fixed effects techniques were applied to adjust for the confounding effects of all…

As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the School Improvement Grants (SIG) program received more than $3 billion with the goal of substantially improving student achievement. The SIG program's funding was to help states turn around the nation's persistently lowest-achieving schools using one of four school intervention…

This report describes ACT test results for Austin Independent School District (AISD) seniors in the 2018-2019 school year. In 2018-2019, the district's average ACT composite score of 23.0 exceeded the state (20.5) and national (20.7) average composite scores.

This study builds on a 2019 Fordham Institute report that examined the relationship between charter school enrollment share--the share of students in a community who enroll in a charter school--and the average achievement of all the students in that community, including those in traditional public schools. Like its predecessor, this report seeks…

Causal search algorithms have been effectively applied in different fields including biology, genetics, climate science, medicine, and neuroscience. However, there have been scant applications of these methods in social and behavioral sciences. This article provides an illustrative example of how causal search algorithms can shed light on…