Studies have identified negative effects of cortisol, a stress hormone, on academic performance. Because natural disasters induce community-wide stress, students who experience natural disasters may subsequently perform worse academically. Our study is the first to examine the immediate effects of close exposure to a natural disaster on academic…

All individuals develop new skills over time and one important developmental stage is when individuals can learn in the absence of direct reinforcement. Behavior Analytic theories have stressed the importance of these emergent response repertoires and have consistently studied them across fields (i.e. Incidental Bidirectional Naming, Arbitrarily…

The purpose of the quantitative ex-post facto study was to determine to what extent a predictive relationship exists between students' reading comprehension skills and mastery of conceptualizing mathematical problems for students in the fifth through eighth grades in a metropolitan area in the northeastern United States. The Federal School…

The lack of access to high-quality schools creates an achievement gap that limits students' access to future earnings and longevity, exacerbating equity concerns across the nation where struggling, low-performing schools are disproportionately responsible for educating students living in poverty. Large Urban School District's Accelerating Campus…

Prior to this study, it was not known it was not known if and to what extent the adoption of the Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) predicts fifth-grade academic achievement in math and reading when controlling for baseline achievement in the previous grade for Native American students in rural elementary schools in Northeastern…

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are ushering in a large and rapid technological transformation. Understanding how AI capabilities relate to human skills and how they develop over time is crucial for understanding this process. In 2016, the OECD assessed AI capabilities with the OECD's Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC). The present report…

Assessment and evaluation are at the heart of all functioning systems, as progress can be determined with the information collected by these assessments. The problem addressed in this study is the lack of actionable data to evaluate whether assessments aligned with Montessori benchmarks support the achievement of student outcomes. To address the…

Statewide assessments in reading and math are required every year under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015, at an annual expense of billions of taxpayer dollars. Analyzing 10 years of school-level results from public schools in two states-- Nebraska and Texas--we found that year-to-year correlations of schools' test scores were…

The Content Proximity Project was designed to improve the content validity of the MAP® Growth™ assessments while retaining the ability for the test to adapt off-grade and meet students wherever they are in their learning. Two main features of the project were the development of an enhanced item selection algorithm, and a spring pilot study…

Although there is an abundance of research on the association of school poverty (or socioeconomic status) and test score level, there is very little rigorous longitudinal evidence on the cumulative effects of exposure to differing school contexts. Drawing from methods used first in epidemiology and then in neighborhood effects research, we use…

Measuring educational opportunity is a topic of interest to policymakers and education stakeholders alike. Standardized assessments of student achievement are commonly used to measure educational opportunity in North Carolina and across the nation. This research brief examines two measures of educational opportunity in North Carolina public school…

The purpose of this study is to examine how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the learning of students in public education through the analysis of standardized assessment performance before and during COVID-19. The study also compares virtual learning and face-to-face students' change in performance on the standardized assessments. To answer the…

This study is a journey through the academic lives of 4th-grade Black males in one Central Arkansas school district. This study aimed to investigate certain behavioral variables that may impede the learning and achievement of fourth-grade Black males in Central Arkansas. In the study, groups were established by ethnicity and gender and their test…

This study examines relationships between digital SAT scores and other relevant educational measures, such as high school grade point average (HSGPA), PSAT/NMSQT Total score, and Average AP Exam score, and compares those relationships to current paper and pencil SAT score relationships with the same measures. This information can provide…

Both school and district administrators use the results of standardized, large-scale tests to inform decisions about the need for, or success of, educational programs and interventions. However, test results at the school level are subject to random fluctuations due to changes in cohort, test items, and other factors outside of the school's…