This annual report provides information for the 2015-16 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…

Many children fail to master fraction arithmetic even after years of instruction. A recent theory of fraction arithmetic (Braithwaite, Pyke, & Siegler, in press) hypothesized that this poor learning of fraction arithmetic procedures reflects poor conceptual understanding of them. To test this hypothesis, we performed three experiments…

We study an early effort amid the COVID-19 pandemic to develop new approaches to virtually serving students, supporting teachers, and promoting equity. This five-week, largely synchronous, summer program served 11,769 rising 4th-9th graders. "Mentor teachers" provided PD and videos of themselves teaching daily lessons to "partner…

High-quality measures of instructional practice are essential for research and evaluation of innovative instructional policies and programs. However, existing measures have generally proven inadequate because of cost and validity issues. This paper addresses two potential drawbacks of survey self-report measures: variation in teachers'…

Charter schools in urban environments have been scrutinized for their effectiveness. This study attempted to determine whether students attending Midwestern urban charter schools outperformed students in traditional schools on the state's accountability system over a 5-year time period. Using a quasi-experimental research design, data were…

The effect of the implementation of student response systems (SRSs) in teaching on the critical thinking (CT) of young students was investigated. The study benefited from a quasi-experimental design and a pretest/posttest set-up. Subjects consisted of 156 K-8 students in Tehran during 2016-2017, selected through a multistage cluster sampling, and…

The present study describes the characteristics of students in Grades 3-12 with significant cognitive disabilities (SCD) and known hearing loss. The study analyzed results of a survey of teachers of students with SCD (n = 38,367) who were slated to participate in an alternate assessment based on alternate achievement standards in 14 states in the…

Physical and Health Education Canada has developed and implemented a formative, criterion-referenced, and practitioner-based national (Canadian) online educational assessment and support resource called Passport for Life (PFL). It was developed to support the awareness and advancement of physical literacy among PE students and teachers. PFL…

This study investigates Spanish and Chinese students' performance on both addition problems and proportion problems considering a cross-national perspective. The effect of number structure and nature of quantities was also considered. Nine hundred twenty-five 4th to 8th graders (453 Chinese, 472 Spanish) took a test which is composed of addition…

Student engagement has been shown to be essential to the development of research-based best practices for K-12 education. It has been defined and measured in numerous ways. The purpose of this research study was to develop a measure of online student engagement for grades 3 through 8 using a partial credit Rasch model and validate the measure…

The Great Recession was the most severe economic downturn in the United States since the Great Depression. Using newly available population-level achievement data from the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), we estimate the impact of the Great Recession on the math and English language arts (ELA) achievement of all grade 3-8 students in the…

In November 2014, the New York City Department of Education classified 94 low-performing schools as "renewal schools." New York's Renewal School Program (RSP), announced Mayor Bill de Blasio at the program's launch, represented a big change to the city's education policy: whereas former mayor Michael Bloomberg favored closing failing…

Literacy learning clubs are highly motivating small-group collaborations that can improve tweens' and teens' academic achievement, support their social-emotional development, and increase their enjoyment of reading and writing. This book explains the research basis for the author's approach and offers practical instructions for implementation in…

Theory and limited research indicate that race and socioeconomic status (SES) interact dynamically to shape children's developmental contexts and academic achievement, but little scholarship examines how race and SES intersect to shape Black-White achievement gaps across development. We used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study,…

According to the Multiple Deficit Model, comorbidity results when the genetic and environmental risk factors that increase the liability for a disorder are domain-general. In order to explore the role of domain-general etiological risk factors in the co-occurrence of learning-related difficulties, the current meta-analysis compiled 38 studies of…