Contemporary state math standards emphasize that students must demonstrate an understanding of the mathematical ideas underlying the computations that have typically been the core of the elementary school math curriculum. The standards have put an increased emphasis on the study of fractions in upper elementary grades, which are the years during…

Idaho uses the English Language Arts and Mathematics tests from the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) for the Idaho Standard Achievement Tests. ISAT results have been reported almost exclusively as "percent proficient or above" statistics (i.e., the percentage of Idaho students who performed at the "A" level). This…

The project, "Oxford Improving Numeracy and Literacy Programme," was delivered by Oxford University Department of Education. This evaluation tested two different initiatives with Year 2 children: "Mathematics and Reasoning" and "Literacy and Morphemes." The "Mathematics and Reasoning" programme aimed to…

The purpose of this report was to determine which Mississippi public schools perform better than could be predicted, considering demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. Additionally, this study identified profiles of schools within Mississippi, or groups of schools with similar socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. This study…

Unavoidable sample size issues beset psychological research that involves scarce populations or costly laboratory procedures. When incorporating longitudinal designs these samples are further reduced by traditional modeling techniques, which perform listwise deletion for any instance of missing data. Moreover, these techniques are limited in their…

Idaho uses the English Language Arts and Mathematics tests from the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) for the Idaho Standard Achievement Tests (ISAT). ISAT results have been have been reported almost exclusively as "percent proficient" statistics (i.e., the percentage of Idaho students who performed at the "A" level…

The MIND Research Institute contracted with the Evaluation Research Program at WestEd to conduct an independent assessment of mathematics outcomes in elementary school grades across California that were provided with the ST Math program. Spatial-Temporal (ST) Math is a game-based instructional software designed to boost K-5 and secondary-level…

This report is intended to provide a snapshot of the children in the ECLS-K:2011 cohort who were in kindergarten for the first time in the 2010-11 school year and in fourth grade 4 years later during the spring of 2015. About 88 percent of children enrolled in kindergarten in 2010-11 were in kindergarten for the first time that school year and…

In-service teacher professional development has been used to improve teacher effectiveness. In Kentucky, the National Science Foundation funded a large professional development program called the Appalachian Math and Science Partnership (AMSP) to provide content-based professional development to teachers in rural schools. We show that students…

This paper provides the first population-based evidence on how much standardized test scores vary among public school districts within each state and how segregation explains that variation. Using roughly 300 million standardized test score records in math and ELA for grades 3 through 8 from every U.S. public school district during the 2008-09 to…

While progress to close racial achievement gaps has stagnated and income achievement gaps have grown, recent case studies enthusiastically describe "transformational" schools, which claim to establish conditions that enable students--primarily poor students of color--to achieve at levels far higher than their social background predicts.…

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…

This Fall report is an aggregated statistical analysis of Measures of Academic Progress® (MAP®) data from international schools. The report provides a consistent means of comparisons of specific sub-groups by subject and grade, which allows partners to compare their MAP® results with other schools within their region or membership organization.…

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an important international study of 15-year-olds' academic achievement. Although PISA has traditionally been used to draw comparisons across countries, there is growing interest in the production of regional (i.e. city,state, or provincial level) results. In this paper we present the…

In preparation for online administration of the ACT® test, ACT conducted studies to examine the comparability of scores between online and paper administrations, including a timing study in fall 2013, a mode comparability study in spring 2014, and a second mode comparability study in spring 2015. This report presents major findings from these…