This paper investigates the impact of effective schooling in the 1st year of elementary school on later academic outcomes and equal educational opportunity. A large longitudinal dataset from England was used to estimate the importance of the 1st year of elementary school for academic outcomes up to age 16. Multilevel models, controlling for…

Recent shifts in policy and practice have brought an increasingly more academic focus to the early grades, evidenced in rising standards and the now widely accepted notion that kindergarten is the new first grade. These views however are mostly supported by teacher and parent self-reports and not by an analysis of literacy achievement data. We…

The purpose of this paper is to showcase new research that seeks to provide guidance on the heterogeneity of treatment effects by utilizing the variance of demographic differences in state assessments. This study is focused on a simple randomized block design where students are nested within schools, and within each school students are randomized…

School psychologists will likely become more involved in supporting the reading achievement of English language learners (ELLs). This requires evidence-based interventions that are validated for ELL students. Incremental rehearsal (IR) is an evidence-based intervention for teaching words, but the resource intensity often precludes its use. Using…

This article presents 3 standardized effect size measures to use when sharing results of an analysis of mediation of treatment effects for cluster-randomized trials. The authors discuss 3 examples of mediation analysis (upper-level mediation, cross-level mediation, and cross-level mediation with a contextual effect) with demonstration of the…

Reading Recovery is one of the most researched literacy programs worldwide. Although there have been at least 4 quantitative reviews of its effectiveness, none have considered all rigorous group-comparison studies from all implementing nations from the late 1970s to 2015. Using a hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) v-known analysis, we examined if…

Purpose: This research note explores the potential role of attention in mediating previously reported associations between language outcomes and prematurity. Method: As a follow-up investigation to Mahurin Smith, DeThorne, Logan, Channell, and Petrill (2014), we employed multilevel modeling to analyze longitudinal data on language and attention…

This present study reports the impact of a research-practice partnership among nine collaborating schools and researchers in Auckland, New Zealand. The goals of the partnership were to refine digital instruction in ways that would result in improved learning processes and achievement. The partners employed a design-based research approach to…

This European project investigates the impact of the school factors included in the dynamic model of educational effectiveness on student achievement. In each participating country (Belgium/Flanders, Cyprus, Germany, Greece, Ireland and Slovenia), a sample of at least 50 schools was drawn and tests in mathematics and science were administered to…

Using a "naïve" specification, this paper estimates the relationship between 36 high school characteristics and 24 student outcomes controlling for students' pre-high school characteristics. The goal of this exploration is not to generate casual estimates, but rather to: (a) compare the size of the relationships to determine which inputs…

Guided by the theoretical framework of curriculum as a platform for talent development, this quasi-experimental field study investigated an intervention focused on engineering curriculum and curriculum based on a biography of a scientist through a comparative design implemented in low-income schools. Student outcome measures included science…

This study focused on the extrinsic and intrinsic motivation levels of eighth grade students and its relationship with their mathematical achievement. The participants of the study included 6,829 students who took TIMSS in 2011 and 239 mathematics teachers. The data obtained from the student and teacher questionnaires that are included in the…

This randomized control study compares the efficacy of two response-to-intervention (RTI) models: (1) Dynamic RTI, which immediately refers grade 1 students with the weakest skills to the most intensive intervention supports (Tier 2 or Tier 3); and (2) Typical RTI, which starts all students in Tier 1 and after 8 weeks, decides whether students who…

Using data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 1,364) and 2-level hierarchical linear models with site fixed effects, we examined between- and within-child associations between teacher-child relationship closeness and conflict and standardized measures of children's…

Background/Context: Most reforms in elementary education rely on teacher learning and improved instruction to increase student learning. This study increases our understanding of which types of professional development effectively change teaching practice in ways that boost student achievement. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study:…