Educators commonly use school climate survey scores to inform and evaluate interventions for equitably improving learning and reducing educational disparities. Unfortunately, validity evidence to support these (and other) score uses often falls short. In response, Whitehouse et al. proposed a collaborative, two-part validity testing framework for…

Past research suggests that a sense of belonging to a community is developmentally important for adolescents and affects their engagement in school, especially during the transition to high school. However, little research examines the teaching practices that simultaneously foster classroom belonging and behavioral engagement to create a classroom…

Empirical studies have demonstrated that students who are taught in a group of students with higher average achievement benefit in terms of their achievement. However, there is also evidence showing that being surrounded by high-achieving students has a negative effect on students' academic self-concept, also known as the big-fish--little-pond…

Many young readers fail to construct a proper mental text representation, often due to a lack of higher-order skills such as making integrative and inferential links. In an eye-tracking experiment among 141 Dutch eighth graders, we tested whether coherence markers (moreover, after, because) improve students' online processing and their off-line…

In educational measurement, responses of students on items are used not only to measure the ability of students, but also to evaluate and compare the performance of schools. Analysis should ideally account for the multilevel structure of the data, and school-level processes not related to ability, such as working climate and administration…

Teachers make a difference for the outcome of their students in science classrooms. One focus in this context lies on teachers' professional knowledge. We describe this knowledge according to three domains, namely (1) content knowledge (CK), (2) pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), and (3) curricular knowledge (CuK). We hypothesise a positive…

Using Hierarchical Linear Modelling (HLM), this study aimed to identify factors such as ESL/ELL/EAL status that would predict students' reading performance in an English language arts exam taken across Canada. Using data from the 2007 administration of the Pan-Canadian Assessment Program (PCAP) along with the accompanying surveys for students and…

This experimental study evaluated the effectiveness of a research-based intervention, schema-based instruction (SBI), on students' proportional problem solving. SBI emphasizes the underlying mathematical structure of problems, uses schematic diagrams to represent information in the problem text, provides explicit problem solving and metacognitive…

A multi-cohort cluster randomized trial was conducted to estimate effects of rich vocabulary classroom instruction on vocabulary and reading comprehension. A total of 1,232 fourth- and fifth-grade students from 61 classrooms in 24 schools completed the study. Students received instruction in 140 Tier Two vocabulary words featured in two…

The purpose of this study is to evaluate, using a randomized experimental design, the efficacy of TERC's "Using Data" program to change teacher behavior and improve student learning outcomes. The "Using Data" intervention provides professional development and technical assistance to teachers to help them use data…

In this study, a hierarchical linear model (HLM) was used within a cluster random assignment design to test the impact of "Criterion"? on students' writing skill when "Criterion" was used as a supplementary instructional tool in ninth grade English classrooms over a 4 week period. The study was conducted in three states:…