We examined student reading achievement in rural and non-rural school districts in Texas. Our research questions probed the improvement in student performance over time, differences in the number of students achieving at different performance levels, and the impact of district-level characteristics on reading achievement. Through quantitative…

Purpose: Collective efficacy (CE)--a group's belief in its capabilities to organize and execute courses of action required to reach a goal--is an important organizational property because it facilitates goal attainment. The purpose of this sequential explanatory mixed-methods study was: (1) to affirm the link between CE and student achievement;…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the 3-year trajectory of students' interest in learning physical activity (PA) knowledge during middle school and the effects of gender and prior knowledge on the trajectory. Methods: Using a repeated-measures design, a cohort of 447 sixth-grade students' interest in learning PA knowledge was…

In an era of social media, and amid the coronavirus pandemic, teachers' curation of instructional resources stands as an opportunity to observe teachers' planning and conceptualization of their practice in real time. This work explores the resources teachers curate, their rigor, and the effects on students' learning across years. Merging big data…

This study examined the factors that determined the science achievement of fourth-grade students on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2019 in the USA. The data were retrieved from the TIMSS international database and imported to the R program for manipulation. The EdSurvey package was used to conduct multilevel…

Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) has become an increasingly popular multilevel method of analyzing data among nested datasets, in particular, the effect of specialized academic programming within schools. The purpose of this methodological study is to demonstrate the use of HLM to determine the effectiveness of STEM programming in an Ohio middle…

Based upon the ecological perspective and the social cognitive theory, this study examined the role of reading self-efficacy in the associations of contextual factors with reading achievement by establishing an educational ecology of reading. The model included student factors, student/home factors, student/school factors, and school factors of…

Research has shown that racial/ethnic diversity in elementary schools and classrooms benefits children's academic achievement and feelings of safety and belonging. The current study aimed to expand on existing research by examining associations between classroom racial/ethnic composition and upper elementary children's social-emotional development…

The Reading and Me Survey (R&MS) measures reading self-perceptions and enjoyment of reading of intermediate elementary students and parallels the Math & Me Survey (M&MS). We examined its psychometric properties through content validation, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and reliability and…

School-average achievement is often reported to have positive effects on individual achievement (peer spillover effect). However, it is well established that school-average achievement has negative effects on academic self-concept (big-fish-little-pond effect [BFLPE]) and that academic self-concept and achievement are positively correlated and…

This article proposes a latent variable regression four-level hierarchical model (LVR-HM4) that uses a fully Bayesian approach. Using multisite multiple-cohort longitudinal data, for example, annual assessment scores over grades for students who are nested within cohorts within schools, the LVR-HM4 attempts to simultaneously model two types of…

School districts are a focus of education reform efforts in the United States, but there is very little existing research about how important they are to student achievement. We fill this gap in the literature using 10 years of student-level, statewide data on fourth- and fifth-grade students in Florida and North Carolina. A variance decomposition…

Social schemas can influence the perception and recollection of others' behavior and may create biases in the reporting of social events. This study investigated young adolescents' (N = 317) gender-, ethnicity-, and popularity-based social schemas of overtly and relationally aggressive behavior. Results indicated that participants associated overt…

We examined the effects of peer preference and teacher preference for students, students' perceived relationship with their teacher and student ethnicity on peer victimization in late elementary school. Participants were students in the third through fifth grades in four public elementary schools in a southern state. Using hierarchical linear…

Item response theory (IRT) models are the main psychometric approach for the development, evaluation, and refinement of multi-item instruments and scaling of latent traits, whereas multilevel models are the primary statistical method when considering the dependence between person responses when primary units (e.g., students) are nested within…