Providing instruction to students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can be challenging for teachers since students can have a range of unique learning needs, particularly in reading comprehension. Given that reading comprehension is a complex process requiring the use of various knowledge and skills simultaneously, many students with ASD often…

As a facilitator of the Incredible Years for Teachers Programme (IYT), I have found that the classroom management strategies participant teachers learned during the 6-month programme period have not been embedded and sustained in their use through time. This inquiry investigated the benefits and barriers to IYT being spontaneously, consistently…

Home language (HL) effects on academic language literacy have been extensively discussed. However, previous research has mostly focused on Indo--European languages. This study extends the literature by using data (n = 17,600) collected in a diversified language area: Guangxi, China. We examined the effects of four HLs and four socioeconomic…

Measures of school-level growth in student outcomes are common tools for assessing the impacts of schools. The vast majority of these measures use standardized tests as the outcome of interest, even though emerging evidence demonstrates the importance of social-emotional learning (SEL). In this article, we present results from using the first…

California's shift towards continuous improvement in education makes understanding how districts and schools can learn to improve a more pressing question than ever. The CORE Improvement Community (CIC), a network of California school districts engaged in learning about improvement together, is an important testing ground to learn about what this…

The purpose of this report is to demonstrate the power of connecting Children's Savings Account (CSAs) to college access-success programs and show that, when done together, they produce greater outcomes. First, we briefly describe these closely related fields and explain the merit of partnerships between CSA initiatives and college access and…

Does service learning impact the personal growth of middle grades students in grades 4-8? If so, in what ways? A review of the literature indicates that it does, in terms of the development of empathy, responsibility, civic engagement, and self-efficacy. In addition, findings include growth in students' communication with parents and teachers. In…

This study examined aspects of peer clique participation that mitigated victimization by peers over a school year. Participants were 1,033 children age 8-14 years (M[subscript age] = 11.81; 444 boys and 589 girls), including 128 (66 boys) victimized children. Cliques (N = 162) and clique participation were assessed by using the Social Cognitive…

This annual report provides information for the 2013-14 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…

This annual report provides information for the 2014-15 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…

Individual growth curves yield insights about growth that are not available from any other methodology; and developmental scales based on conjoint measurement models provide unique interpretive advantages for investigations of academic growth. The advantages are apparent when: (1) 15 consecutive statewide reading growth curves are annotated with…

Many (quasi-)experimental studies show that students tend to learn more in classes with better peers. However, the (presumably numerous) factors mediating the positive relationship between peer and own achievement have received less attention in the literature. I present evidence on one particular transmission channel: teachers tend to grade…

"Achieve3000®" is a supplemental online literacy program that provides nonfiction reading content to students in grades preK-12 and focuses on building phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, reading comprehension, vocabulary, and writing skills. "Achieve3000®" is designed to help students advance their nonfiction reading skills…

Instructional time is a fundamental educational input, yet we have little causal evidence about the effect of longer school days on student achievement. This paper uses a sharp regression discontinuity design to estimate the effects of lengthening the school day for low-performing schools in Florida by exploiting an administrative cutoff for…

In the first systematic study of gender achievement gaps in U.S. school districts, we estimate male-female test score gaps in math and English Language Arts (ELA) for nearly 10,000 school districts in the U.S. We use state accountability test data from third through eighth grade students in the 2008-09 through 2014-15 school years. The average…