The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) fulfill a longstanding goal of ensuring that all students, regardless of ability, are college and career ready upon graduation. Students who meet the expectations of the standards are able to comprehend complex text closely and extract meaning and information from it. They are close readers, delving into…

This document was prepared to assist literacy specialists in the national Regional Comprehensive Center network as they work with states to improve educational policy and practice in the area of adolescent literacy. It comprises three major parts: Part One: "Improving academic literacy instruction for students in grades 4-12." Based on…

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, as of this writing, 21 states and three U.S. territories have ordered or recommended school building closures for the rest of the academic year, with closures impacting at least 124,000 U.S. public and private schools and affecting at least 55.1 million students. In addition, districts in nearly all other states…

The "TextEvaluator"® text analysis tool is a fully automated text complexity evaluation tool designed to help teachers, curriculum specialists, textbook publishers, and test developers select texts that are consistent with the text complexity guidelines specified in the Common Core State Standards.This paper documents the procedure used…

The most recent scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, 2013) indicate that the achievement gap between students with disabilities and their peers is widening and that 69% of 4th graders and 60% of 8th graders with identified disabilities score below basic levels. The Institute of Education Sciences' National Center for…

Lifelong learning is the only way to sustain proficient learning in a rapidly changing world. Knowledge and information are exploding across the globe. We need accurate ways to facilitate the process of drawing external factual information into an internal perceptive advantage from which to interpret and argue new information. Accurate and…

As the ongoing national indicator of what American students know and can do, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in Reading regularly collects achievement information on representative samples of students in grades 4, 8, and 12. Through The Nation's Report Card, the NAEP Reading Assessment reports how well students perform in…

An effective text dependent question first and foremost embraces the key principle of close reading embedded in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) Anchor Reading Standards by asking students to provide evidence from complex text and draw inferences based on what the text explicitly says (Standards 1 and 10). A close look at the intervening…

"Talk of the Town" is a community led approach to supporting the speech, language and communication (SLC) skills of children and young people, aged 0-19, living in areas of social disadvantage. It is delivered by the Communication Trust. This evaluation reports on a randomised controlled trial undertaken with 2696 pupils in 64 primary…

Experts widely consider decoding and fluency as the basis of reading comprehension, while at the same time consistently documenting problems in these areas as major characteristics of students with learning disabilities. However, scholars have developed most of the relevant research within phonologically deep languages, wherein decoding problems…

The purpose of this article is to identify the order of significance of the variables that affect science and mathematics achievement in middle school students. For this aim, the study deals with the relationship between science and math in terms of different angles using the perspectives of multiple causes-single effect and of multiple…

The Casey Foundation's "2018 KIDS COUNT® Data Book" warns that the 2020 census is mired in challenges that could shortchange the official census count by at least 1 million kids younger than age 5. This discrepancy would put hundreds of millions of federal dollars at risk and, in doing so, underfund programs that are critical for family…

This article is one of a series of papers generated from the Curriculum Reform study in Hong Kong with the purpose of understanding the impact of government's role in the change process of the reform. This paper specifically examines the 17 government initiatives in the Curriculum Reform in terms of their adoption percentages of schools from…

Close Reading Exemplars pull together several key shifts within the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in a single methodological approach towards reading texts. Close Reading Exemplars focus on investigating complex texts (Anchor Reading Standard 10) via text dependent questions that rely on evidence and inferences to answer them (Anchor Reading…

This "Eighth Annual Report Card" tracks progress on Boston's goals for educating learners of all ages. The report lays out Boston Opportunity Agenda's current metrics, the baseline that has been established for the future, and the progress to be made over the course of the next five years. This report card contains the most up-to-date…