High-quality early childhood programs aim to foster children's learning through developmentally appropriate practices and environments. Early childhood assessments, when well designed and well implemented, can support developmentally appropriate early learning experiences by providing information to guide instruction and support whole child…

We study a California policy that loosened constraints on some local governments by lowering the share of votes required to pass school capital improvement bond referendums. We show that the policy change yielded larger tax proposals that received less support from voters, yet led to a doubling of approved spending. We show that this effect is…

In 2021, California committed to providing universal prekindergarten (UPK) for all 4-year-olds and expanding access for income-eligible 3-year-olds by 2025-2026. California UPK includes several early learning programs, including transitional kindergarten (TK), the California State Preschool Program (CSPP), Head Start, and locally funded early…

Measures of student disadvantage--or risk--are critical components of equity-focused education policies. However, the risk measures used in contemporary policies have significant limitations, and despite continued advances in data infrastructure and analytic capacity, there has been little innovation in these measures for decades. We develop a new…

A huge portion of what we know about how humans develop, learn, behave, and interact is based on survey data. Researchers use longitudinal growth modeling to understand the development of students on psychological and social-emotional learning constructs across elementary and middle school. In these designs, students are typically administered a…

Educators aim to equip students with learning strategies they can apply when approaching new problems on their own. Teaching design-thinking strategies may support this goal. A first test would show that the strategies are good for learning and that students spontaneously transfer them beyond classroom instruction. To examine this, we introduce…

This ethnographic case investigates the relationship between the daily organizing work of one education technology "intermediary organization" (IO) in Silicon Valley, California and federal education technology policies. I argue that the IO constructed policy knowledge that reified discourses of "digital meritocracy": a belief…

This commentary on the article titled "Examining the Internal Structure Evidence for the Performance Assessment for California Teachers: A Validation Study of the Elementary Literacy Teaching Event for Tier 1 Teacher Licensure" provides an overview of Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT), its relationship to edTPA and…

Math in Common® (MiC) is a five-year initiative that supports a formal network of 10 California school districts as they implement the Common Core State Standards in mathematics (CCSS-M) across grades K-8. As the MiC initiative moves into its second year, one of the central activities that each of the districts is undergoing to support CCSS…

In this article, we examine classroom observations from a 3-year large-scale randomized trial in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to investigate the extent to which a professional development initiative in inquiry science influenced teaching practices in in 4th and 5th grade classrooms in 73 schools. During the course of the study,…

This study applies a diagnostic errors framework to identify and classify mistakes that were made in a psychoeducational assessment of a bilingual student who was misidentified as a person with autism. Findings of diagnostic errors were categorized under four domains--faulty knowledge, faulty data gathering, faulty data processing, and faulty…

If teacher value-added estimates (VAEs) are to be used as indicators of individual teacher performance in teacher evaluation and accountability systems, it is important to understand how much VAEs are affected by the data and model specifications used to estimate them. In this study we explored the effects of three conditions on the stability of…

The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to describe the perceptions of elementary teachers from an urban school district in Southern California regarding their inquiry-based science instructional practices, assessment methods and professional development. The district's inquiry professional development called the California Mathematics and…

Digital games have become a major part of the twenty-first-century learning environment, but little attention has been paid to understanding what young learners already know about games and how this understanding can be used as a bridge to academic literacy. In this study, the authors analyze second-grade students' efforts at critiquing digital…

This study was undertaken to explore how classroom management is currently being used by teachers in classrooms and to examine if classroom management practices have any effect on student academic success. The study took place in two Fresno County school districts. The study consisted of a 15 minute voluntary survey being sent out to fourth and…