Given the growing number of Latino English learners and the lack of evidence-based educational opportunities they are provided, we investigated the impact of one potentially effective literacy intervention that targets struggling first-grade Spanish-speaking students: Descubriendo La Lectura (DLL). DLL provides first-grade Spanish-speaking…

Given the growing number of Latino English learners and the lack of evidence-based educational opportunities they are provided, we investigated the impact of one potentially effective literacy intervention that targets struggling first-grade Spanish-speaking students: Descubriendo La Lectura (DLL). DLL provides first-grade Spanish-speaking…

The research purpose was to investigate the differences between learning preferences (i.e., Active-Reflective, Sensing-Intuitive, Visual-Verbal, and Sequential-Global) determined by the Index of Learning Style and gender (i.e., Male and Female) in regards to standardized achievement multiple-choice test performance determined by the Illinois Nurse…

"Prentice Hall/Pearson Literature©" (2007-15) is an English language arts curriculum designed for students in grades 6-12 that focuses on building reading, vocabulary, literary analysis, and writing skills. It uses passages from fiction and nonfiction texts, poetry, and contemporary digital media. The curriculum is based on a textbook.…

This chapter is a research summary of the author's doctoral dissertation completed in May, 2015, which investigates the way Standardized Assessment (SA) is used in state educational accountability structures. This quasi-experimental quantitative study found that SA scores trend towards consistency over time, and that there is additional variance,…

Chicago Public Schools and school districts throughout the country are seeking new ways to foster racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic equity as desegregation consent decrees are being lifted. One of Chicago's selective enrollment high schools drafted parents, educators, administrators, and community representatives to address its own diversity…

Twenty-first century principals have multiple roles as leaders of public K-12 schools. Since school reform of the 1980s, principals are expected to be school managers and instructional leaders along with understanding and knowing policies, rules, and practices of the organization. Research has shown that effective leadership is necessary to lead…

This study examined the achievement trends of advanced learners and the relationship between Illinois' school district characteristics and student performance using Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) scores. The 3rd grade students scoring in the Exceeds category in ISAT reading and math within 707 Illinois school districts during the…

This study clarifies achievement trends that occurred under NCLB and explains why NCLB reporting practices made those trends so hard to see. It concludes by describing important contributions that new PARCC exams can make and warns of new reporting problems that threaten to squander those contributions before they see the light of day.

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. One important tool is the concordance table between MAP and state summative assessments. Concordance tables have been used for decades to relate scores on…

In this study, the outcomes of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), as implemented in Illinois, are evaluated in terms of high school standards testing results between 2003-2013. NCLB was a policy dedicated to closing the gap in schooling outcomes nationally in the space of a decade. There have been few systematic examinations of its macro-level results…

This longitudinal study examined the outcomes of Project Excite on reducing minority students' achievement gaps in STEM over 14 years. Project Excite was designed to provide intensive supplemental enrichment and accelerated programming for high-potential, underrepresented minority students from third through eighth grades to better prepare them…

The purpose of the study was to assess the impact that professional learning communities (PLCs) have on student achievement. Through this study, the statewide performance results of a school district that implemented PLCs were examined. This study of an Illinois school district's statewide assessment results served as a foundation for further…

The purpose of this research is to study the long-run impacts (i.e. on educational attainment) of a freshman math intervention called "double-dose algebra". The intervention was conducted in 2003 and 2004 within the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), a large, poor urban school district. In response to low passing rates in 9th grade algebra,…

This study tested the effects of 5 classroom contextual features on the social status (perceived popularity and social preference) that peers accord to aggressive students in late elementary school, including classroom peer status hierarchy (whether within-classroom differences in popularity are large or small), classroom academic level, and grade…