Out-of-school, community demographic and family-level variables have an important influence on student achievement as measured by large-scale standardized tests. Studies described here demonstrated that about half of the test score is accounted for by variables outside the control of teachers and school administrators. The results from these…

The primary purpose of this study was to determine significant relationships between growth in student learning in mathematics and characteristics of effective teacher professional development and teacher demographics. The goal was to determine whether certain characteristics of professional development, as measured by the Characteristics of…

The authors identified trajectories of teacher-child relationship conflict and closeness from Grades 1 to 6, and associations between these trajectories and externalizing and internalizing behaviors at 11 years old among low-income, urban boys (N = 262). There were three main findings. Nagin cluster analyses indicated five trajectories for…

Computer-based multimedia presentations employing animated agents (avatars) can positively impact perceptions about engineering; the current research advances our understanding of this effect to pre-college populations, the main target for engineering outreach. The study examines the effectiveness of a brief computer-based intervention with…

Actual school dropout among immigrant youth has been addressed in a number of studies, but research on hidden school dropout among immigrant students is rare. Thus, the objective of this paper is to analyze hidden school dropout among primary school students with an immigrant background. The analyses were performed using survey data of 1186…

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between student performance on Reading Curriculum-based Measures (R-CBM) and student performance on the Alaska's standards based assessment (SBA) administered to students in Studied School District (SSD) Grade 3 through Grade 5 students in the Studied School District as required by…

Background: Educational outcomes for language minority (LM) children are of great concern across the nation because these students have lower grades, are rated by their teachers as having lower skills, perform worse on standardized tests, and are more likely to drop out than are non-LM students. Given this context of underperformance, there is a…

This study examined the relationships between teacher leadership, science teacher self-efficacy, and fifth-grade science student achievement in diverse schools in a San Antonio, Texas, metropolitan school district. Teachers completed a modified version of the "Leadership Behavior Description Question" (LBDQ) Form XII by Stogdill (1969),…

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of selected academic, demographic, and instructional program related factors on the retention rates of elementary school students. More specifically, this study was concerned with the relationship and predictability of the reading and mathematics variables scores, gender, ethnicity, program…

Research conclusions concerning predictors of academic success have been, at best, less than convincing. In fact, these conclusions are more conflicting or mixed when emotional constructs are used. As a result, modern curriculum developers as well as classroom instructors seem to deemphasize, if not ignore, the role of the affective domain in…

This study investigated the effects of two types of bilingual programs (two-way and transitional) on the academic performance and attitudes of fifth-grade students who entered kindergarten or first grade with different levels of English proficiency. A mixed methods design with both quantitative and qualitative data collection and analyses phases…

Background: The Hawaii Department of Education (HDOE) launched its Hawaii State Assessment (HSA) in spring, 2002, within the context of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) Act of 2001 and its mandates to close the "achievement gaps" between subgroups of students. Thus, it is important to investigate the extent to which student…

Background: The overall goal of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001 is to close, by the end of the 2013-2014 academic year, "the achievement gap between high- and low- performing students, especially the achievement gap between minority and non-minority students and, between disadvantaged children and their more advantaged peers"…