As part of its Partnership for Pre-K Improvement (PPI) initiative, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation sponsored the RAND Corporation to study the cost of high-quality pre-K programming. The RAND study included three states--Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington--that were partnering with the foundation under PPI. The objective of the study was to…

With the aim to provide teachers with more specific, frequent, and actionable feedback about their teaching, we explore how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to estimate "Instructional Support" domain scores of the CLassroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), a widely used observation protocol. We design a machine learning…

There is strong evidence that children who attend high-quality pre-kindergarten (pre-K) programs learn skills that benefit them in school and life. The price tag of most private programs puts them out of reach for some families, however. In response, many states and school districts fund pre-K programs to expand opportunities for their youngest…

States and localities throughout the United States are expanding their investments in pre-kindergarten (pre-K) programs. Although spending on publicly funded pre-K programs is well documented, relatively less is known about the true cost to deliver the programs, especially considering varying quality standards and accounting for the resources used…

The premier Tier 3 intervention for the Pyramid Model, Prevent-Teach-Reinforce for Young Children (PTR-YC) is a research-proven, family-centered approach used in preschool settings nationwide to resolve persistent challenging behaviors. Now this bestselling PTR-YC guidebook is in a thoughtfully revised second edition, with enhancements and…

Classroom quality measures, such as the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale, Revised (ECERS-R), are widely used in research, practice, and policy. Increasingly, these uses have been for purposes not originally intended, such as contributing to consequential policy decisions. The current study adds to recent evidence of problems with the…

Australian early childhood education still labours with the achievement of universal access and the production of comprehensive and consistent data to underpin a national evidence base. In this article, we attend to the processes led by numbers whereby new practices of quantification, rationalization and reporting are introduced and mastered in a…

This chapter reviews actionable data use--both as an umbrella term and as a specific concept--developed in three different traditions that data/information can inform and guide P-20 educational practice toward better outcomes. The literatures reviewed are known as data-driven decision making (DDDM), education data mining (EDM), and learning…

School nurses collect data to report to their school district and state agencies. However, there is no national requirement or standard to collect specific data, and each state determines its own set of questions. This study resulted from a joint resolution between the National Association of State School Nurse Consultants and the National…

The Center on Enhancing Early Learning Outcomes (CEELO) was asked to review current information on how states are preparing principals to supervise and support early childhood teachers in schools and districts. This document summarizes what is known about principal licensing requirements and professional development in early childhood pedagogy and…

In an effort to bring rigorous research into the education and social sciences field, the past decade had seen an increase in the advocacy of randomized controlled trials. The argument in favor of using randomized controlled trial is that one can evaluate the impact of an intervention in comparison to a control group with confidence during a…

The growth in the availability of longitudinal data--data collected over time on the same individuals--as part of program evaluations has opened up exciting possibilities for evaluators to ask more nuanced questions about how individuals' outcomes change over time. However, in order to leverage longitudinal data to glean these important insights,…

Lamon ("Teaching fractions and ratios for understanding. Essential content knowledge and instructional strategies for teachers," 2nd edn. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, 2005) claimed that the development of proportional reasoning relies on various kinds of understanding and thinking processes. The critical components suggested were…

Colleagues at a midwestern university implemented a multi-semester co-teaching pilot for student teaching, and based on the data collected, are moving toward full implementation in the spring of 2015 for all pre-service teachers in the College of Education (COE). Part of the study replicated work conducted by St. Cloud University (Bacharach &…

This paper describes the confirmatory factor analysis, validity, and reliability data collection stage of the development of a scale to measure mainstream teachers' self-efficacy beliefs for teaching ELL (English Language Learner) students. Data were collected from 708 K through 12 teachers and pre-service teachers with varying degrees of…