The purpose of this technical appendix is to share more detailed results and to describe more fully the sample and methods used in the research included in the brief, "The Widening Achievement Divide during COVID-19." The authors investigated two main research questions in this brief: (1) To what degree have students' reading and math…

Project Explore targeted minority students in grades six through eight who attended 28 Houston Independent School District (HISD) middle schools during the 2019-2020 academic year. In 2019-2020, a total of 2,095 students were accepted for participation in the Project Explore program, and an additional 715 students were waitlisted for program…

The purpose of this study was to study the impact on student performance due to participation in the Catapult Learning Intervention program in the Mathematics and Reading services offered in a religious non-public school system in the Northeastern United States from grades 6-8. Student scaled scores from the NWEA MAP assessments administered at…

Solving a constructed-response item usually requires successfully performing a sequence of tasks. Each task could involve different attributes, and those required attributes may be "condensed" in various ways to produce the responses. The sequential generalized deterministic input noisy "and" gate model is a general cognitive…

Tiebout theorizes that local public services are provided more efficiently if costs are paid out of local revenues rather than by inter-governmental grants. But if local politics is not as pluralistic as Dahl has argued, citizens of higher socio-economic status will exercise greater influence, resulting in higher inequalities in service provision.…

Blended learning in the secondary setting is a growing and evolving method of instructional delivery. Current research continues to focus on the post-secondary setting and often neglects the impact on student growth in the secondary settings. The combination of technology and teacher involvement to deliver high quality instruction is important in…

International comparative assessments of student achievement are constructed to assess country-level differences and change over time. A coherent understanding of the international trends in educational outcomes is strongly needed as suggested by numerous previous studies. Investigating these trends requires long-term analysis, as substantial…

This study is aimed at exploring how different formulations of the same mathematical item may influence students' answers, and whether or not boys and girls are equally affected by differences in presentation. An experimental design was employed: the same stem-items (i.e., items with the same mathematical content and question intent) were…

This study provides a comparison of the results of latent class analysis (LCA) and mixture Rasch model (MRM) analysis using data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study -- 2011 (TIMSS-2011) with a focus on the 8th-grade mathematics section. The research study focuses on the comparison of LCA and MRM to determine if results…

Prior research in mathematical assessments has indicated varying results of predictive variables and further research has been recommended to support students, parents, teachers, and school administration. The purpose of this research was to determine how well a student's performance on a mathematics domain at the state level may be predicted…

General cognitive and specific numerical abilities that underlay mathematical performance have been heavily investigated among hearing students; however, the inquiry has rarely been applied to students who are deaf or hard-of-hearing (d/Dhh). We examined whether general cognitive abilities (i.e. nonverbal IQ, processing speed, and spatial ability)…

Modelling ability is one of the essential elements of the latest educational reforms, and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is a curriculum-based assessment which allows educational systems worldwide to inspect the curricular influences. The aims of this study were to examine the role of modelling ability in the…

Without a conceptual understanding of fraction magnitude, students have difficulties understanding more advanced mathematics in high school and beyond. The purpose of this study is to highlight 4th and 8th grade students' misconceptions in fraction magnitude using the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study 2015 data. The study is…

Introduction: Increasing evidence has shown that student mobility is negatively correlated with individual students' and schools' academic performance (Hanushek, Kain, & Rivkin, 2004; Lara, Mizala, & Repetto, 2011; Sun & Pan, 2014). However, the negative impact may be due to the switching behavior or it could be only a side effect of…

This "ex post facto," causal-comparative quantitative study assessed the math and English language arts (ELA) 7th to 8th-grade academic growth among Black students enrolled in Philadelphia's black-operated public charter schools, non-black operated charter schools, and traditional public schools while controlling for 6th-grade exam…