Despite ongoing efforts to reform schools, the longstanding racial/ethnic achievement gap still persists, particularly for boys of color; in many cases, the gap is widening, particularly for students transitioning from elementary to middle school. The focus of this study was to examine the impact of effective instructional practices for struggling…

This sequential explanatory analysis reports on the observed differences in growth on decoding, word knowledge, and reading comprehension between second grade males and females after participating in a readers theater treatment or business as usual instruction. The quantitative results revealed that males made greater gains than females in the…

Girls tend to do better than boys academically, in part because they are more engaged in school. What if they weren't? Using nationally representative data, I examine how equal starting points and trajectories of behavioral engagement in elementary school could change gender test score gaps. I find that equal engagement patterns could entirely…

To assess education progress in the early grades and identify achievement gaps, this study examined reading achievement data for kindergarten and grade 1 students in two districts in Illinois: District U-46 (Elgin Area Schools) and District 186 (Springfield Public Schools). Drawing on a different reading assessment in each district, the study team…

To assess education progress in the early grades and identify achievement gaps, this study examined reading achievement data for kindergarten and grade 1 students in two districts in Illinois: District U-46 (Elgin Area Schools) and District 186 (Springfield Public Schools). Drawing on a different reading assessment in each district, the study team…

Important educational policy decisions, like whether to shorten or extend the school year, often require accurate estimates of how much students learn during the year. Yet, related research relies on a mostly untested assumption: that growth in achievement is linear throughout the entire school year. We examine this assumption using a dataset…

This study estimated male-female and Black-White achievement gaps without accounting for low test motivation, then compared those estimates to ones that used several approaches to addressing rapid guessing. Researchers investigated two issues: (1) The differences in rates of rapid guessing across subgroups and (2) How much achievement gap…

Australia and New Zealand have participated in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Programme for International Student Assessment since 2000. Reading literacy was the main focus of the Programme for International Student Assessment in 2000, and at that time both countries' students generally performed well above the…

We analyzed data from a large-scale (N = 39,213), longitudinal study of urban students to assess child factors (gender, ethnicity, English language learner status, school readiness skills, type of pre-K attended, early elementary school academic performance) prospectively associated with eventual gifted identification in elementary school.…

The authors examined differential effects of interim assessments on minority and low socioeconomic status students' achievement in Grades K-6. They conducted a large-scale cluster randomized experiment in 2009-2010 to evaluate the impact of Indiana's policy initiative introducing interim assessments statewide. The authors used 2-level models to…

Utilizing the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data, this study examined (1) how fourth and eighth-grade ELLs' mathematics and reading scores on national tests compared to their non-ELL peers' scores over the testing period between 2003 and 2011, and (2) if gender and ethnicity contributed to variation in the growth patterns…

The present study used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study--Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 to examine whether the relationship between first-grade word-reading and reading-comprehension growth through eighth grade was different for language-minority learners (LMs) versus native English-speaking students (NEs). Among high word…

Each country's education system is intricate and unique, underpinned with different policies and priorities. International Large Scale Assessments (ILSAs) provide valuable insights into how a country's education system is performing. These studies gather in-depth contextual information about systems, schools, teachers and students; and explore the…

The importance of reading competence for both individuals and society underlines the strong need to understand the gender gap in reading achievement. Beyond mean differences in reading comprehension, research has indicated that girls possess specific advantages on constructed-response items compared with boys of the same reading ability. Moreover,…

As is the case in most OECD countries, boys in Norway are more likely to have lower levels of academic achievement and attainment than girls. While this phenomenon is not recent, it has become increasingly pronounced in recent years and, as a result, is attracting considerable attention from policy-makers in many countries. This paper develops…