Colleges throughout the United States are evaluating the effectiveness of the strategies used to decide whether to place students into college-level or developmental education courses. Developmental, or remedial, courses are designed to develop the reading, writing, or math skills of students deemed underprepared for college-level courses, a…

Structural behavioral assessment (SBA) involves a series of heuristic approaches similar to those used with functional behavioral assessment (FBA). It involves assessing contextual variables that precede the occurrence of a behavior. These variables have also been termed antecedents, setting events, or establishing operations. Once these variables…

We examined the efficacy of 20 weeks of individual supplemental phonics-based instruction for language minority (LM) and non-LM first graders. Students were designated LM if the primary home language was not English (otherwise non-LM). Those performing in the bottom half of their classroom LM/non-LM group in letter knowledge and phonological…

This study employed a cluster randomized trial design to evaluate the effectiveness of a research-based intervention for improving the mathematics education of very young children. This intervention includes the "Building Blocks" mathematics curriculum, which is structured in research-based learning trajectories, and congruous…

The Carnegie Learning Cognitive Tutor curricula are based on cognitive models, which include a representation of the learner's thinking, strategies, and misconceptions. The Cognitive Tutor curricula typically speed up learning and yield greater learning as compared to traditional math curricula (Morgan & Ritter, 2002; Sarkis, 2004; Koedinger,…

The goal of this study was to assess the effectiveness of an intervention--Quality English and Science Teaching (QuEST)--designed to develop the science knowledge and academic language of middle grades English language learners studying science in their second language and their English-proficient classmates. Both English language learners and…

Improving reading rate can be difficult for poor readers. In this experiment, we investigated the impact of improvement in reading rate on other aspects of reading, including word recognition, decoding, vocabulary, and comprehension. Poor readers in Grades 2 or 4 (N = 123) were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 conditions: practice reading text at their…

This chapter examines how a particular strategy for analyzing evaluation data, intent-to-treat (ITT) analyses, may underestimate the true effects of interventions. Such underestimation of intervention effects can profoundly influence policies for prevention and treatment of children's mental health problems, which can in turn lead to negative…