There are large gaps in reading skills by family income among school-aged children in the United States. Correlational evidence suggests that reading skills are strongly related to the amount of reading students do outside of school. Experimental evidence testing whether this relationship is causal is lacking. We report the results from a…

New technologies have had a large and transformative impact on education. This study explored the benefits of a comprehensive, computer-adaptive reading program for the literacy skills of young learners. Second grade students enrolled in a public school district used a computer-assisted instruction (CAI) program and were evaluated at the beginning…

School leaders and teachers are confronted with federal, state, and local mandates that must be followed to ensure all students reach their fullest academic potential. To this end, the challenge has been raised to teachers and administrators to have younger students in the lower elementary grades prepared for standardized student testing.…

This study sought to expand the evidence base for the effectiveness of Spanish literacy interventions by examining the effectiveness of Leamos para Avanzar: Un programa de lectura para niños (Let's Read to Advance: A reading program for children; LPA). Participants included three students (2 females, 1 male) who (a) were classified as English…

Little is known about the early educational performance of children in migrant farmworker families. The authors examined the school readiness and early school success of 289 four-year-old preschool children of migrant families attending Redlands Christian Migrant Association centers. Children's school readiness was assessed and public school…

The purpose of this study was to identify an indicator that the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) could use to measure the percentage of entering kindergarteners who are on-track to read on grade level by the end of grade 3. To develop the indicator, this study examined relationships between student scores on SDP's different assessments that…

This study estimates the effects of open-enrollment charter schools on student performance in traditional public schools in Arkansas. The paper examines the change in Iowa Assessment scores for first and second graders across Arkansas school districts between the 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 school years. The ordinary least-squares regression estimates…

This report provides a description of the development process, field testing, and psychometric properties of a student mathematics test designed to assess grades 1 and 2 student abilities. The test was administered to 2,373 participating grade 1 and 2 students in 22 schools located in 2 public school districts in Florida during fall 2013. Focused…

Notwithstanding dramatically low levels of professed religiosity in Western Europe, the religious school sector continues to thrive. One explanation for this paradox is that nowadays parents choose religious schools primarily for their higher academic reputation. Empirical evidence for this presumed denominational advantage is mixed. We examine…

This study examined the use of poetry as a multimodal communicative text to encourage reading engagement in selected African-American learners with mild intellectual disabilities. Framed by critical discourse theory, genre theory, and Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, this investigation presented poetry as an alternative text…

This study compared the standardized reading achievement scores in grades 1, 2 and 3 of two groups of students: one group who participated in Pre-Kindergarten (PK) in a large urban public school district in North Texas, with the assessment results of a group of grade level peers with similar ethnic and socioeconomic characteristics, who did not…

The federal government's Race to the Top competition has promoted the adoption of test-based performance measures as a component of teacher evaluations throughout many states, but the validity of these measures has been controversial among researchers and widely contested by teachers' unions. A key concern is the extent to which nonrandom sorting…

Immigration and migration to New York City (NYC) collectively create a dynamic population of students. In this brief the authors use a decade of detailed, longitudinal data on NYC's 1st-8th graders to explore both the "stock" of students enrolled and the "flow" of new entrants in each academic year. Together, these paint a…

There is continuing controversy about the optimal or appropriate age at which children should start school. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between age and achievement. It is an attempt to evaluate the hypothesis that older students fare better academically than their younger classmates. Findings indicate that on average…