The long-term impact of prekindergarten programs is an important consideration given the trend of dedicating more resources to these programs. However, long-term impact of prekindergarten programs is not well-understood and recent studies have shown preschool effectiveness can vary across states and programs. A state run prekindergarten program in…

Federal accountability policy mandates that states administer standardized tests beginning in third grade. In turn, third-grade test scores are often viewed as a key indicator in policy and practice. Yet literacy struggles begin well before third grade, as do racial and socioeconomic disparities in children's literacy skills. Kindergarten…

This study leverages six years of public prekindergarten (pre-K) and kindergarten data (N = 22,469) from the Boston Public Schools (BPS) to examine enrollment in BPS pre-K from 2012-2017 for students from different racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and linguistic groups. The largest differences in enrollment emerged with respect to race and…

Purpose: A growing trend in instructional improvement efforts is the use of formative assessment informed by research-based developmental trajectories of how students gain deeper understanding of subject matter content over time. This article reports the findings of a large-scale experimental study of an innovative mathematics professional…

Academic achievement and absenteeism are two areas that schools are held accountable. Helping families and communities understand the correlation between achievement and attendance is an essential part of improving attendance. The purpose of this research study was to compare student attendance and academic achievement on the CASE Benchmark exams…

This study examines the relationship between perceived stress, nonverbal cognitive functioning, and statewide academic scores in both Latinx and European American elementary students in rural school districts. A total of 44 third graders participated in the study, including 13 Latinx students and 31 European American (EA) students. Perceived…

A Vygotskian approach to assessment is proposed by invoking the distinction between the development of lower and higher psychological functions. Higher psychological functions are specifically human and develop with the use of cultural tools via mediation. Accordingly, a distinction is made between tests that are based on association, which have…

International standardized tests are showing an underperformance of students in geometry and spatial ability relative to other content domains. In this research, we examined the relationship between a teacher's judgment of third- and fourth-grade students' geometry and spatial ability (i.e., grades), three spatial ability tasks (Water-Level-Task,…

The academic achievement gap is the educational separation on standardized tests between students in low socioeconomic and high socioeconomic areas. The purpose of this study was to research academic variables that could impact the achievement gap for African American students by studying third grade literacy practices of Caucasian American and…

Purpose: Researchers have developed a constellation model of decodingrelated reading disabilities (RD) to improve the RD risk determination. The model's hallmark is its inclusion of various RD indicators to determine RD risk. Classification methods such as logistic regression (LR) might be one way to determine RD risk within the constellation…

Purpose: The purpose of this journal-ready dissertation was to examine the relationship of exclusionary discipline consequences assigned to Texas Grade 3 through 8 students enrolled in special education and their academic achievement during the 2012-2013 through the 2015-2016 school year. In addition, the relationship of exclusionary discipline…

Standardized assessment is the government measurement of academic success in Texas. Currently, students in Grades 3-11 participate in the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) as a measure of their comprehension of the state standards. In high school, students are required to pass the high school STAAR End of Course test in…

This longitudinal research project explored the relationship between a 1:1 computing initiative and student achievement on the North Carolina End of Grade Reading Comprehension and Math tests in the study school district. The purpose of this research study was to determine if the implementation of a 1:1 computing initiative impacted student…

Equitable assessment of students' mathematical thinking is imperative for effective instruction. This two-part study investigated teachers' judgement of students' mathematical thinking. In Study One, we used a national data set to determine the correlation between teachers' judgement of students' mathematical thinking and scores from a…

Purpose: The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine what correlation exists between a student's poverty coefficient and the daily number of minutes provided for independent reading and third grade reading achievement level as measured by California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) in small, rural school…