The Houston Independent School District offers two primary bilingual programs (transitional and dual language) for Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs). The relative amount of instruction in each language depends on both program and grade level. Students in the transitional bilingual program have the option of entering a "pre-exit…

There has been much debate by and among federal and state education agencies, state legislatures, courts, and educators regarding the identification of school district expenditures that best facilitate effective and efficient schools. The issue of equitable funding is far from being resolved (Education Week, 2017). Contradictory studies associated…

Idaho uses the English Language Arts and Mathematics tests from the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) for the Idaho Standard Achievement Tests. ISAT results have been reported almost exclusively as "percent proficient or above" statistics (i.e., the percentage of Idaho students who performed at the "A" level). This…

Purpose: Although language samples and standardized tests are regularly used in assessment, few studies provide clinical guidance on how to synthesize information from these testing tools. This study extends previous work on the relations between tests and language samples to a new population--school-age bilingual speakers with primary language…

Physical activity stimulates the nervous system and subsequently increases cognition, neural functioning, and information processing in the human brain (Colcombe, Kramer, Erickson, Scalf, & McAuley, 2004; Erickson, Voss, Prakash, Basak, & Szabo, 2011). Students who include athletic pursuits in their daily schedules tend to perform better…

The Classroom Learning Activities Checklist (CLAC) is a brief classroom observation measure that assesses task-oriented and self-regulated learning in early childhood environments. We assessed the tool's dimensionality and validity in predicting prekindergarten (PreK) learning gains. The study sample is from the Midwest Child-Parent Center (MCPC)…

This study presents longitudinal data analysis of 6 years of reading scores on a large-scale statewide performance-based alternate assessment for 214 students who are deaf/hard of hearing and have an additional cognitive disability. Assessment scores were examined by complexity level, within grade-level bands, and individually over time. Results…

This paper studies the impact of PROBEMS, a scholarship program in Mexico aimed at improving graduation rates and test scores among upper secondary school students from poor backgrounds. The identification strategy is the random allocation into the program, which took place in 2009. The strategy allows measurement of the effects of PROBEMS on test…

In many schools in America, reading and writing are taught as separate entities within the course of an academic day (Grabe & Zhang, 2013; Parodi, 2007). Instead, research indicates that "Teachers should exploit the potentiality of teaching and practicing reading and writing together, starting from local cohesion resources to different…

Few standardized language assessments are adapted to different cultural and linguistic contexts to assess children's first language (L1) abilities. We introduce the Ivorian Children's Language Assessment Toolkit for measuring phonological awareness, vocabulary, oral comprehension, and tone awareness in the Abidji, Attié, and Baoulé languages of…

This report demonstrates the impact of a two-way multilingual family engagement communication platform, TalkingPoints, on student outcomes at a large, urban, K-12 school district. The study used a difference-in-differences model to examine how the introduction of TalkingPoints influenced attendance, behavior, course proficiency, and state…

Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) programs are school-based preventive interventions that aim to improve children's social-emotional skills and behaviors. Although meta-analytic research has shown that SEL programs implemented in early childhood can improve academic and behavioral outcomes in the short-term, there is limited work examining program…

This publication marks the fourth edition of the Context and Performance (CAP) Report Card for Michigan elementary and middle schools, published every two years since 2013. The goal is to compare Michigan schools' relative performance by factoring in the role student poverty plays in affecting academic achievement. The CAP Report Card uses…

The Every Student Succeeds Act requires that English Learners (ELs) are included in annual state testing (grades 3-8 and once in high school) and included in each state's accountability system disaggregated by subgroup to ensure that they receive the support they need to learn English, participate fully in their education experience, and graduate…

Enacting equitable teaching practices and sustaining those practices continue to be challenges in most high schools (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2018), particularly in an era of high-stakes testing. Just one year after Boaler and Staples (2008) reported on the successes of "Railside High," where equitable teaching…