Students who struggle to read at an early age are likely to continue struggling for not only the rest of their schooling, but the rest of their lives. Schools need to begin adopting research-based reading programs and measuring their effectiveness formatively throughout the school year. Research suggests that effective reading programs need to…

This study reports achievement levels and fall-to-spring gains in grades K to 8 for three groups of English Learners (ELs): (a) ever-ELs who were ever eligible for service; (b) current-ELs who continue to require service; and (b) dually-identified students eligible for both EL and Special Education services. I leverage unique data that include…

With 55 million students in the United States out of school due to the COVID-19 pandemic, education systems are scrambling to meet the needs of schools and families, including planning how best to approach instruction in the fall given students may be farther behind than in a typical year. Yet, education leaders have little data on how much…

This article examines Teach For America's (TFA) placement strategy in Miami-Dade County Public Schools, in which large numbers of TFA corps members are placed as clusters into a targeted set of disadvantaged schools, to investigate whether the large-scale infusion of TFA corps members into these schools induced broader improvements across the…

An essential goal of educational instruction is to ensure that all students become competent readers. To support students in becoming qualified readers, teachers need to identify struggling students and implement adequate curriculum programs. This study examined the effects of a computer-adaptive reading program on third-grade students' reading…

Due in part to parent advocacy, Texas passed legislation and released guidelines to support identification and instruction for students with dyslexia, and their families. In alignment with state guidelines, since January 2020, the Houston Independent School District (HISD) implemented an additional instructional intervention using Reading by…

Current standards and assessments emphasize the importance of a variety of genres in students' literacy diets, which has placed increased attention on informational texts. Unfortunately, young students' current exposure to and experiences with informational texts are often limited by the texts' availability, quality, and relevance to children's…

The development of beginning decoding and encoding skills is influenced by linguistic skills as well as executive functions (EFs). These higher-level cognitive processes include working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility, and individual differences in these EFs have been shown to contribute to early academic learning. The present study…

The engage2learn approach to educator support provides an in-person and virtual coaching system that builds capacity and engagement in public schools. Engage2learn hired LXD Research to conduct an independent evaluation and analysis of NWEA Math and Reading data collected during the 2021-2022 school year. The goal was to measure how engage2learn…

This research examines online course-taking in high schools, which is increasingly used by students falling behind in progress toward graduation. The study looks inside educational settings to observe how online courses are used and assess whether students gain academically through their use. Drawing on 7 million records of online instructional…

Although several measures exist for frequently monitoring early reading progress, little research has specifically investigated their technical properties when administered on a frequent basis with kindergarten students. In this study, kindergarten students (N = 137) of whom the majority was receiving supplemental intervention for reading skills…

The purpose of this study was to examine if a relationship existed between two schools with regard to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and the growth scores from the Northwest Evaluation Assessment (NWEA). The research questions that guided this study were: (a) To what extent, if any, will students that have STEM intervention one…

Interactive Strategy Training for Active Reading and Thinking en Español, or iSTART-E, is a new intelligent tutoring system (ITS) that provides reading comprehension strategy training for Spanish speakers. This paper reports on studies evaluating the efficacy of iSTART-E in real-world classrooms in two different Spanish-speaking countries. In…

This report examines one component of the current school accountability system--learning gains. We find that learning gain percentages are affected by a variety of factors including starting achievement level, socioeconomic status, and English language learner status when the current definition of learning gains is used. Hence, we propose a new…

We present results from early learning programs in six African countries: Ethiopia, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda. In partnership with ministries of education, RTI International has worked within government systems to support the design and deployment of locally contextualized materials, training, and assessment tools, with the goal…