This article presents the journey taken by staff at St. Patrick's Primary School in Kilmore to implement a consistent approach to the teaching of mathematics, using an instructional model to support student learning through structured inquiry pedagogies.

Numerous high-profile efforts have sought to "turn around" low-performing schools. Evidence on the effectiveness of school turnarounds, however, is mixed, and research offers little guidance on which models are more likely to succeed. We present a mixed-methods case study of turnaround efforts led by the Blueprint Schools Network in…

Background/Context: Science is in the midst of reform, shifting away from teaching science and mathematics in isolation from one another, toward a model that prioritizes integration of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning environments. Since teachers are the most important factor in determining the success and…

Governmental attention to bullying in kindergarten through Grade 3 continues to be a challenge in a metropolitan school district in the eastern United States. This has presented a case for school policy reform. The purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to examine how bullying and office discipline related to suspension referrals,…

The present study followed a sample of first-grade (N = 316, M[subscript age] = 7.05 at first test) through fourth-grade students to evaluate dynamic developmental relations between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. Using latent change score modeling, competing models were fit to the repeated measurements of vocabulary knowledge and…

Students' prior knowledge has been identified to play an important role in the learning process through conceptual change. In physical education, positive changes in students' lifestyles may come from changes in their conceptual understanding. In this study 45 third grade students (mean age = 8.54 years) were interviewed during their regular…

This presentation reports on the goals and preliminary outcomes of the Child-Parent Centers (CPC) Expansion Project, which is a PreK to 3rd grade school reform model aimed at improving the short- and long-term outcomes of participating children and families. The model provides continuous education and family support services to schools serving a…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of an Australian health promoting schools (HPS) project to identify key features of the concept of resilience and how it can be used in a school setting to develop and strengthen protective factors in young people, as a mechanism for improving social functioning and reducing involvement in…

Students perform better in school to the extent they are able to engage fully, cope adaptively, and bounce back from obstacles and setbacks in their academic work. These three processes, which studies suggest are positively inter-connected, may comprise a self-sustaining system that enables "motivational resilience." Using…

We update theories of teacher expectancy and cultural capital by linking them to discussions of technology. We argue for broadening the span of culturally important forms of capital by including the digital dimension of cultural capital. Based on data from the third-grade and fifth-grade waves of the Early Childhood Longitudinal…

Previous research has linked inquiry-based science instruction (i.e., science instruction that engages students in doing science rather than just learning about science) with greater gains in student learning than text-book based methods (Vanosdall, Klentschy, Hedges & Weisbaum, 2007; Banilower, 2007; Ferguson 2009; Bredderman, 1983;…

With deliberate system-level reform now being acted upon around the world, both successful and unsuccessful cases provide a rich source of knowledge from which we can learn to improve large-scale reform. Research surrounding the effectiveness of a theory-based system-wide numeracy reform operating in primary schools across Australia is examined to…

This is the second of three reports from MDRC's evaluation of the Success for All (SFA) scale-up demonstration, funded under the U.S. Department of Education's Investing in Innovation (i3) competition. The report presents updated findings on SFA's implementation and impacts in the scale-up sites participating in the evaluation. The i3 evaluation…

Preparing teachers to implement a new curriculum presents a significant but important challenge. While formal professional development programs can assist in this preparation, finding prescribed experiences that meet the needs of all teachers can be formidable and indeed may not always be the best option for promoting change in practice. Decisions…

Which comprehensive school reform programs have evidence of positive effects on elementary school achievement? To find out, this review summarizes evidence on comprehensive school reform (CSR) models in elementary schools, grades K-6. Comprehensive school reform models are programs used schoolwide to improve student achievement. They typically…