Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest partnered with the Arkansas Department of Education to examine Arkansas's middle school and high school indicators of postsecondary readiness and success, building on an earlier study of these indicators (Hester et al., 2021). Academic indicators include attaining proficiency on state academic…

According to the compensation model of aggression (Staub, 1989), some people bully to defend against their own feelings of weakness and vulnerability. Classmates and teachers rated a sample of American sixth graders in terms of trait: defensiveness (i.e., defensive egotism), self-esteem, bullying, and related behaviors. Consistent with the model,…

Randomized experiments are often considered the strongest designs to study the impact of educational interventions. Perhaps the most prevalent class of designs used in large scale education experiments is the cluster randomized design in which entire schools are assigned to treatments. In cluster randomized trials (CRTs) that assign schools to…

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship of principal characteristics and school socio-economic factors and their relationship to student achievement as measured by the literacy portion of the Arkansas state standardized test, with a particular interest in male students. The study was undertaken to contribute to the existing…

Background: Cluster-randomized experiments that assign intact groups such as schools or school districts to treatment conditions are increasingly common in educational research. Such experiments are inherently multilevel designs whose sensitivity (statistical power and precision of estimates) depends on the variance decomposition across levels.…