This report summarizes Austin Independent School District (AISD) English language learner (ELL) students' performance on the Evaluación del Desarrollo de la Lectura, an assessment of Spanish reading ability, over three consecutive school years. It includes only ELLs who joined AISD in kindergarten in 2012.

It is well-documented that academic achievement is associated with students' self-perceptions of their academic abilities, that is, their academic self-concepts. However, low-achieving students may apply self-protective strategies to maintain a favorable academic self-concept when evaluating their academic abilities. Consequently, the relation…

How much face time do students and teachers need to keep pace with expectations for learning? It is an urgent question during a pandemic that has kept many students out of school buildings for more than a year. The importance of school attendance has divided communities across the country, as they weigh the potential risks of in-person instruction…

The Houston Independent School District (HISD) offers two English as a second language (ESL) programs for students whose native language is not English and who need to develop and enhance their English language skills (English Learners, or ELs). The Content-Based ESL model (CB-ESL) consists of an intensive program of English instruction in all…

Due in part to parent advocacy, Texas passed legislation and released guidelines to support identification and instruction for students with dyslexia, and their families. In alignment with state guidelines, since January 2020, the Houston Independent School District (HISD) implemented an additional instructional intervention using Reading by…

District leaders in a large urban school district in central Florida wanted to examine the efficacy of a new curriculum designed to enhance the word knowledge of grade 5 students so as to improve reading achievement. The new curriculum, called Word Knowledge Instruction (WKI), consists of 15-minute lessons 4 days a week for 20 weeks. The lessons…

Parental text messaging interventions are growing in popularity to encourage at-home reading, school-attendance, and other educational behaviors. These interventions, which often combine multiple components, frequently demonstrate varying amounts of effectiveness, and researchers often cannot determine how individual components work alone or in…

When identifying parental socialization processes influencing children's reading achievement, building self-regulation is a potential underlying mechanism. Yet socialization (i.e., warmth, stress) of self-regulation may vary based on the sociocultural context of ethnic minority families. Using the ECLS-K: 2011 (N = 17,020; M[subscript Age] = 73.43…

Study objectives were to clarify children's gender-based implicit and explicit mathematics and reading stereotypes, and to determine if implicit and explicit measures were related or represented distinct constructs. One hundred and fifty-six boys and girls (mean age 11.3 years) from six elementary schools completed math or reading stereotype…

Current standards and assessments emphasize the importance of a variety of genres in students' literacy diets, which has placed increased attention on informational texts. Unfortunately, young students' current exposure to and experiences with informational texts are often limited by the texts' availability, quality, and relevance to children's…

We examined the idea that leaner schedules of progress monitoring (PM) can lighten assessment demands without undermining decision-making accuracy. Using curriculum-based measurement of reading, we compared effects on decision accuracy of 5 intermittent PM schedules relative to that of every-week PM. For participating students with high-incidence…

This study examined the effects of small group teaching styles on the achievement of elementary students as they progress from first to second grade. The principle objective of this study was to make known the existence of any correlation between reading comprehension and strategy instruction. Reading comprehension includes prior knowledge,…

Research has indicated that reading aloud to young students can enhance their foundational reading skills and their reading motivation, but such research has been lacking in African contexts. In this study, we assessed the efficacy of story read-aloud lessons in improving students' foundational reading skills in Nigeria. The experiment took place…

For the past three academic years, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted learning and the relationships between teachers, students, families, and communities that are at the heart of education. Even as school buildings reopened to in-person instruction, periodic quarantines, social distancing, and canceled events had a profound impact on students'…

The development of beginning decoding and encoding skills is influenced by linguistic skills as well as executive functions (EFs). These higher-level cognitive processes include working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility, and individual differences in these EFs have been shown to contribute to early academic learning. The present study…