The purpose of this paper is to showcase new research that seeks to provide guidance on the heterogeneity of treatment effects by utilizing the variance of demographic differences in state assessments. This study is focused on a simple randomized block design where students are nested within schools, and within each school students are randomized…

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…

"Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS)," a diagnostic reading tool used in the majority of school districts throughout the state of Louisiana, has been identified by many researchers as a reliable and valid tool to identify reading deficiencies in struggling readers (Good, Simmons, & Kame'enui, 2001; Ritchey,…

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.…

Twenty-seven third-grade children in a northern Louisiana public school participated in a study which examined whether a minimum amount of direct instruction in sight word recognition, combined with drill of sight words, could result in significantly better performance for the targeted at-risk children on the story and unit reading tests. The…

This executive summary reports on the number of students not reading on grade level in all second and third grades throughout Louisiana. The report notes the provisions of the legislation that requires such data be generated, and discusses selection of the Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) as the uniform assessment instrument to be…