Background: Prior research shows that teachers' working conditions are important for teacher and student outcomes, such as teacher retention and student achievement. Because National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs) can be effective in the classroom and as instructional leaders, they are well positioned to create favorable working conditions for…

Over the past three decades, children from low-income families and those from more affluent families have increasingly been attending different public schools. While recent work has helped us understand patterns of income segregation between districts and schools within districts, we know very little about segregation of students as they…

Khan Academy is a large and popular open educational resource (OER) with little empirical study into its impact on student achievement in mathematics when used in schools. In this study, we examined the use of Khan Academy as a mathematics intervention among seventh grade students over a 4-week period versus a control group. We also compared…

Background: Many school systems have ended social promotion by implementing accountability systems where students who fail academic assessments are retained in grade. Additionally, some parents have delayed their children's entry into school, believing that older students have an advantage. While research has examined outcomes for students who…

New analytical tools have facilitated the exploration of the trajectories of alcohol use; however, there are a limited number of studies that explore early adolescence. A sample of 5,903 youths followed from sixth through eighth grade was used to (1) examine the trajectories of alcohol use and (2) determine the degree to which common correlates…

Despite policy efforts to encourage multiple measures of performance in newly developing teacher evaluation systems, practical constraints often result in evaluations based predominantly on formal classroom observations. Yet there is limited knowledge of how these observational measures relate to student achievement. This article leverages the…

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…

In this study, we examined how the relationships between one observation protocol, the Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observation (PLATO), and value-added measures shift when different tests are used to assess student achievement. Using data from the Measures of Effective Teaching Project, we found that PLATO was more strongly related to the…

With passage of The No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, the nation's schools have been under pressure to bring all students to a proficient level as defined by their state. The State of California currently uses a status model accountability system to measure whether a student, school, or district is proficient. Other states such as Arizona,…

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.…

The purpose of this study was to examine the educational services for students with autism in school districts (N = 115) in North Carolina to identify the characteristics and variables that contribute to positive student outcomes. This study used a secondary analysis of data from various resources across the state. Variables included number of…

Different functions within different forms of aggression were examined in relation to peer-perceived preference and popularity among middle school students. Two hundred and three 7th grade students were nominated by a subset of their grade mates based on indices of likeability, popularity, and aggressiveness. Both linear and curvilinear…

The authors test biosocial models that posit interactions between biological variables (testosterone, estradiol, pubertal status, and pubertal timing) and social context variables (family, peer, school, and neighborhood) in predicting adolescent involvement with cigarettes and alcohol in a sample of 409 adolescents in Grades 6 and 8. Models…