This article reports two experiments in which the artificial orthography paradigm was used to investigate the mechanisms underlying learning to read. In each experiment, participants were taught the meanings and pronunications of words written in an unfamiliar orthography, and the statistical structure of the mapping between written and spoken…

Vocabulary knowledge is essential to educational progress. High quality vocabulary instruction requires supportive contextual examples to teach word meaning and proper usage. Identifying such contexts by hand for a large number of words can be difficult. In this work, we take a statistical learning approach to engineer a system that predicts…

Vocabulary knowledge is essential to educational progress. High quality vocabulary instruction requires supportive contextual examples to teach word meaning and proper usage. Identifying such contexts by hand for a large number of words can be difficult. In this work, we take a statistical learning approach to engineer a system that predicts…

This study is to investigate whether "My Class Activities" (MCA; Gentry & Gable, 2001a), an instrument developed to measure students' perceptions of their classroom activities, yields valid data when used with elementary students in China after translation into Chinese. The four factors measured by the instrument (Interest,…

Though early childhood literature defines kindergarten readiness in the context of the whole child across multiple domains, there is little research to demonstrate the relative influence of these domains on success in the kindergarten year. In this study, we use teacher judgments of students at the start of the kindergarten year across multiple…

Professional development is an important part of creating a culture of continuous school improvement to maximize student learning. Rarely do we measure the impact of professional development on teacher learning, implementation and student outcomes. This study describes a professional development strategy for elementary teachers to promote…

Analyzing data that possess some form of nesting is often challenging for applied researchers or district staff who are involved in or in charge of conducting data analyses. This report provides a description of the challenges for analyzing nested data and provides a primer of how multilevel regression modeling may be used to resolve these…

In 2009, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) published a technical report titled "Indirect County and State Estimates of the Percentage of Adults at the Lowest Literacy Level for 1992 and 2003," (ED503830). NCES also published a corresponding online tool (http://nces.ed.gov/naal/estimates/index.aspx) that allows users to…

The educational achievement and attainment of young people in the United States has been a long-standing issue of concern. While analyses of long-term trend data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show that students in the United States have made gains in reading and mathematics over the past few decades, a sizeable…

The author argues that the effect of tax capitalization on the value of property has been neglected in the judicial and legislative discussion of school finance reform, even though this phenomena may weigh heavily on an equitable solution to the current funding dilemma. He examines theoretical and empirical support for the thesis that if, because…