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…

Researchers, educators, and policymakers are focusing more on student engagement as the key to addressing low achievement, student boredom and alienation, and high dropout rates (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, and Paris 2004). As schools and districts seek to increase engagement, it is important for them to understand how it has been defined and to assess…

This study is the first randomized study of the impacts of the vocabulary instruction program Kindergarten PAVEd for Success (K-PAVE) (Hamilton and Schwanenflugel 2011) on low-income students in kindergarten and grade 1. The study has two components. The first component is a test of the impacts of one year of the K-PAVE vocabulary instruction in…

The main aim of this study was to gain a better understanding of why students abandon their studies, or perform less well than expected given their high school grades, and to develop predictive models that can help identify those students most at-risk at the time they enter college. This will allow teachers and those responsible for student…