The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020 was marked by a transition to remote learning in Illinois schools and nationwide. The following school year, schools and families faced difficult decisions about how and when to return to in-person learning. School leaders, parents and caregivers, and students considered how to balance…

For over two years, schools, teachers, students, and families across Illinois have worked to adapt instruction and learning under the ever-changing conditions wrought by COVID-19. This report, the third and final in the Learning During the Pandemic in Illinois series, investigates how much time students spent learning in-person and/or remotely…

The purpose of this evaluation was to examine the impact of i-Ready Personalized Instruction that met Curriculum Associates' recommended usage levels on ELA achievement, as measured by the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) ELA assessment. This study compared the ELA achievement growth in the 2020-21 school year of students who…

The use of standardized assessments to monitor the success and productivity of public school systems in the United States is arguably a necessary component of state accountability systems. This research study is not intended to challenge the compulsion of accountability via testing, but the results of this study do raise questions regarding the…

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…

The aim of this study is to analyze the types of visual representations in primary and secondary science textbooks in Turkey. The sample of the research constitutes six textbooks prepared by private publishers for primary and secondary science courses (3rd -8 th Grade) in Turkey in 2018-2019 academic year. Document analysis design, which is one of…

Homework is a common instructional practice that is used to motivate students, develop students' studying skills and habits, inform parents about student learning, and increase student achievement. Homework provides an opportunity for students to revisit daily topics, and improve students' understanding of math concepts and problem-solving skills,…

REL Southeast developed this facilitator's guide on the topic of mathematical problem solving for use in professional learning community (PLC) settings. The facilitator's guide is a set of professional development materials designed to supplement the What Works Clearinghouse practice guide, Improving Mathematical Problem Solving in Grades 4…

This annual report provides information for the 2016-17 school year on grade-level retention and student performance in the Texas public school system. Student retention and promotion data are reported with data on the performance of students in Grades 3-8 on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) reading and mathematics…

Stagnation or promise? The third and final installment of "Quality Counts 2019" offers evidence for both in an annual summing up of the nation's K-12 system. The Education Week Research Center analyzed dozens of factors ranging from the academic to the socioeconomic in coming up with its all-inclusive state rankings and A-F grades. The…

Contextualized items have been widely used in science testing. Despite common use of item contexts, how the influence of a chosen context on the reliability and validity of the score inferences remains unclear. We focused on sequential cues of contextual information, referring to the order of events or descriptions presented in item contexts. We…

This dissertation targets young students' developing knowledge relevant to a fundamental practice in academic mathematics: the use of diagrams to represent idealized mathematical objects whose properties are established by definition (as in the use of drawn dots to represent zero-dimensional points and drawn lines to represent one-dimensional…

Background: TIMSS 2019 is the first assessment in the TIMSS transition to a computer-based assessment system, called eTIMSS. The TIMSS 2019 Item Equivalence Study was conducted in advance of the field test in 2017 to examine the potential for mode effects on the psychometric behavior of the TIMSS mathematics and science trend items induced by the…

Globalization is a powerful force with far reaching impacts on education and education policy. The growth of large scale international surveys of student achievement and the increasing role played by intergovernmental agencies in education means that the influence that globalization exerts on education is likely to increase even further in the…

The purpose of this research study was to determine if there was an academic achievement gap between third through eighth-grade students in Title I and Non-Title I schools in the academic content areas of English Language Arts and Mathematics. The study focused on the following subgroup: economically disadvantaged students. The data was gathered…