The accession of Eastern European countries to the European Union increased family wealth and the returns to schooling. I analyze the change in student achievement due to the EU accession of Eastern Europe building on a panel of six PISA waves covering more than 1 million students in 32 countries. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I find…

Indicators of student academic growth are desired in state accountability systems in order to approximate student learning over time and attribute observed growth to schooling inputs. Through an extant analysis of five states' assessment data, this study offers evidence about whether longitudinal match rates and measures of growth differ at the…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the available peer-reviewed research regarding literacy achievement in deaf children with cochlear implants. A related goal is to identify gaps in the empirical literature and suggest directions for future research. Included in this review are studies that exclusively report reading and writing outcomes for…

The purpose of this report is to compare individual pupil achievement on two high profile sets of assessments in England: the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE). The research in this report will add to well-documented differences between PISA and GCSEs to look at the…

This article examined the extent to which administrative decisions that affected the implementation fidelity of Direct Instruction programs were related to student achievement. Data from three studies showed that administrative decisions that disregarded recommended protocols regarding teacher training, teacher preparation, and student schedules…

Purpose: The aims of the current project were twofold: (a) to describe the use of academic words in written language samples by fifth-grade students and (b) to examine the predictive relation between academic word use in academic writing and reading comprehension. Method: Investigators utilized written expository responses of 1,128 students in…

Concerns about poor L1 reading skills in undergraduate students have been expressed in several contexts. These skills form a basis for building robust L2 reading comprehension skills, vital for translators. This study, which is part of a larger organization-based action research study to improve L1 reading levels, aimed to explore how L1 reading…

Students of social and natural sciences are expected to achieve different learning outcomes because they employ different language learning strategies and are exposed to different vocabulary. This research was aimed at finding evidence from empirical data to determine whether the differences in learning outcomes are statistically significant. The…

Two major reforms have transformed California's K-12 education system over the past decade. To revamp English and mathematics instruction, the Common Core standards were adopted in 2010, with district implementation beginning several years later. In 2013, the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) was enacted to increase funding for disadvantaged…

The aggregation of various Asian American ethnic groups into one homogenous block and the comparatively sparse amount of research on Asian Americans creates of one the most misunderstood groups in American society and scholarship. The aim of this dissertation is to study one Asian American ethnic group, Korean Americans, and to find the…

Research Findings: Optimal sleep is important for children's learning and development. "Sleep disordered breathing" (SDB) refers to a spectrum of conditions from simple snoring to obstructive sleep apnea that is common in childhood and interrupts sleep. We examined pathways between SDB and academic performance of children (N = 163, M…

Background: Mind wandering (MW) has commonly been linked to bad scholastic performance; however, such association has rarely been investigated in the classroom. Moreover, in examining such association, motivational variables have been largely ignored. Aim: We aimed at examining the associations between the dispositional tendency to engage in MW…

In a Southern state at a rural high school, leadership staff implemented phonics-based strategies with 9th grade English teachers to improve students' Lexile reading scores. The absence of formative data related to program implementation left stakeholders without a clear understanding of the influence of the phonics-based strategies. The purpose…

The purpose of this quantitative correlational research study was to test the threshold hypothesis as it applied to the performance of English language learner students on the Oklahoma Core Curriculum Test (OCCT) in third grade reading and the Assessing Comprehension and Communication in English State to State for English language learners…

This study examined the strength and direction of the relationship between the STAAR exam's reading and mathematics portions and the FitnessGRAM's cardiovascular portion for fourth grade students located in Region 6 from the state of Texas. Using existing, archival data consisting of 4,215 students from 36 elementary schools, a non-experimental…