This article examines the impact of within-class age differences on educational outcomes, using students' birth months in Madrid's primary schools as a natural experiment. Employing a regression discontinuity design, we analyze third-grade students to investigate these age-related effects. Additionally, we explore whether early childhood education…

Testing students and using test information to hold schools and, in some cases, teachers accountable for student achievement has arguably been the primary national strategy for school improvement over the past decade and a half. Tests are also intended to be used as a diagnostic tool to identify individual student needs, so that students can be…

Providing feedback to students in a sustainable way represents a perennial challenge for secondary teachers of writing. Employing artificial intelligence (AI) tools to give students personalized and immediate feedback holds great promise. Project Topeka offered middle school teachers pre-curated teaching materials, foundational texts and videos,…

The School Improvement Division of the Texas Education Agency (TEA) identifies, monitors, and supports low-performing schools. To identify low-performing schools, TEA assigns annual academic accountability ratings to its districts and schools, but these ratings are provided only once per year and are vulnerable to disruptions in the assessment…

In this paper we analyze the extent to which a mandated kindergarten assessment predicts 3rd grade outcomes, and the academic progression for students from 3rd grade to high school. We find that the kindergarten assessment strongly predicts 3rd grade outcomes, with the math skills assessment being especially predictive of 3rd grade academic…

The purpose of this study was to examine associations between attendance in Georgia's Pre-K Program and children's academic and social outcomes through third grade. This report includes a sub-study that incorporates a comparison group of children who did not attend any pre-k program. This report focuses on third grade outcomes, but it also…

These are the appendices for "Transitioning to College and Work. Part 2: A Study of Potential Enrollment Indicators," which examined potential indicators of college enrollment school and district staff might use to identify and support students at risk of not attending college. The study used administrative data from the Houston…

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020 was marked by a transition to remote learning in Illinois schools and nationwide. The following school year, schools and families faced difficult decisions about how and when to return to in-person learning. School leaders, parents and caregivers, and students considered how to balance…

The greening of the United States teacher workforce puts a premium on districts and schools hiring effective and persistent beginning teachers. Given the limitations of characteristics currently available at the time of hiring (e.g., academic ability measures, preparation type), we built off previous research in economics and psychology to…

Vocabulary.com is an online adaptive game that teaches students words by systematic exposure to a variety of question types and activities and by understanding all the word meanings and nuances as they are learned. Vocabulary.com teaches 14,000 words using over 208,000 questions. It has been implemented with the Houston Independent School…

This report highlights several trends in Oregon that show the correlation between chronic absenteeism and various academic outcomes. Oregon student patterns follow the national trend in that students with better attendance have better outcomes. Fifth-grade chronic absenteeism is a moderately strong predictor of chronic absenteeism in subsequent…

This report analyzes the effects of the Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) program on outcomes of interest over time. Data are analyzed based on school longevity in SEL. A separate executive summary also was published. [For the executive summary, see ED626964.]

The purpose of this study was to examine the cognitive predictors of calculations and number line estimation with whole numbers and fractions. At-risk 4th-grade students (N = 139) were assessed on 6 domain-general abilities (i.e., working memory, processing speed, concept formation, language, attentive behavior, and nonverbal reasoning) and…

District and state education leaders frequently use screening assessments to identify students who are at risk of performing poorly on end-of-year achievement tests. This study examines the use of a universal screening assessment of reading skills for early identification of students at risk of low achievement on nationally normed tests of reading…

Achieve3000®, a web-based differentiated reading program based on the Lexile® Framework and designed to improve student reading ability and comprehension of increasingly complex texts, was made available to approximately 100,000 secondary students across 98 HISD schools during the 2017-2018 academic year. The present evaluation, using a select…