Success for All (SfA) is a comprehensive school reform program designed to support schools serving many students of disadvantaged backgrounds to increase students' achievement. SfA includes daily 90-min reading lessons with extensive use of cooperative learning, tutoring for struggling readers, and an emphasis on parental involvement. School teams…

Recently, there has been increasing evidence showing that males estimate whole numbers more accurately than females on the number line. However, relatively little is known about what factors contribute to this gender gap. The current study explored potential mediators of the gender difference in number line estimation, including spatial skills and…

The current study aimed to explore the COVID-19 impact on the reading achievement growth of Grade 3-5 students in a large urban school district in the U.S. and whether the impact differed by students' demographic characteristics and instructional modality. Specifically, using administrative data from the school district, we investigated to what…

Public policies often target individuals but within-family externalities of such interventions are understudied. Using a regression discontinuity design, we document how a third grade retention policy affects both the target children and their younger siblings. The policy improves test scores of both children while the spillover is up to 30% of…

The aim of this study was to examine the impact of Reading for Ethiopia's Achievement Developed Community Outreach (READ CO) project intervention on students' oral reading fluency, reading comprehension, academic achievements, and listening comprehension. It also aimed at identifying the students and teachers' awareness and practices about the…

The current study investigated the impact of manipulating reading strategy, reading the questions first (QF) or the passage first (PF), during a reading comprehension test, and we explored how reading strategy was related to student characteristics. Participants' eye movements were monitored as they read 12 passages and answered multiple-choice…

This study is the first to empirically examine how school districts allocate resources in response to capital investment revenue from statewide penny sales taxes (called SAVE funds), and whether SAVE funds affect student outputs (i.e., educational achievement). We found evidence that school districts do not use SAVE funds to increase capital…

In this longitudinal study, we examined what kind of profiles of reading fluency and spelling skills could be identified among pupils (N = 467) and how stable these profiles were during the first three years of school. We also investigated how monolingual (Swedish) and simultaneously bilingual (Finnish-Swedish) pupils and gender were distributed…

Third-grade reading proficiency predicts later reading achievement and high school graduation, yet third-graders from historically marginalized groups experience differential learning opportunities and sometimes perform poorly in reading. Similar to the effects of summer learning loss, lost instructional opportunities due to COVID-19 have…

There is a wide gap between what research evidence identifies as effective reading intervention and what is currently offered in schools. This effectiveness study reports the results of a long-term research/school system partnership that is implementing reading intervention for children with reading difficulties in Canadian community schools. In…

The promise of access to key 21st-century skills (i.e., bilingualism, biliteracy, and global awareness) has resulted in the rapid gain in popularity of dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs in the United States over the past two decades. Despite their integrative and additive nature, concerns have been raised about lack of equity in…

Despite the implementation of district approved programs at Maplebrook Elementary, a Mid-Atlantic school district, students in third, fourth, and fifth grades continue to show reading comprehension below grade level as measured by standardized test scores and district-created assessments. The goal of this study was to gain teacher perceptions…

A randomized controlled trial was conducted to study the effectiveness of two readers' theater (RT) programs in promoting reading skills and motivation of dysfluent readers in Grades 3-4. One program (RT Goal) included a goal of preparing a performance for an audience (n = 50), while another program (RT Practice) did not include such a goal (n =…

This study was part of a larger longitudinal study in which we focused on measuring reading acquisition and observing the impact of SES, curriculum and gender on reading subtest scores. In Part 1 of our study (in review), we reported on findings for students in Grade 1. For Part 2 of our study, we report on our findings for students in Grades 3…

Despite repeated findings that within-year growth in oral reading rate is nonlinear for many students, existing decision-making frameworks to evaluate response to intervention assume that growth is linear across an entire school year. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the consequences of failing to account for nonlinear growth among…