The randomized control trial (RCT) is the primary experimental design in education research due to its strong internal validity for causal inference. However, in situations where RCTs are not feasible or ethical, quasi-experiments are alternatives to establish causal inference. This paper serves as an introduction to several quasi-experimental…

Beginning in the 2017-2018 school year, appraisal systems in Texas, whether the state-recommended system or a locally developed system, will need to include a measure of student growth at the individual teacher level. Student growth measures how much a student progresses academically during his or her time with a particular teacher. It takes into…

Helping faculty develop high-quality instruction that positively affects student learning can be complicated by time limitations, a lack of resources, and inexperience using student data to make iterative improvements. We describe a community of 16 faculty from five institutions who overcame these challenges and collaboratively designed, taught,…

The national focus on teacher accountability and the resulting emphasis on raising the bar for teacher evaluations challenge teachers of students with learning disabilities (LD) to rethink instructional design and delivery. In response to these challenges, this article introduces a two-part protocol for planning and teaching strategy instruction…

All students should have opportunities to develop their ability to reason mathematically. Gersten and Chard (1999) support this stance with respect to students with learning disabilities: "Even if students are not automatic with basic facts, they still should be engaged in activities that promote the development of number sense and…

Research suggests that connecting the visible (macroscopic) world of chemical phenomena to the invisible (particulate) world of atoms and molecules enhances student understanding in chemistry. This approach aligns with the science standards and is fundamental to the redesigned AP Chemistry curriculum. However, chemistry is usually taught at the…

Traditional methods for teaching the Lewis dot structure model emphasize rule-based learning and often neglect the purpose and function of the model. Thus, many students are unable to extend their understanding of molecular structures in new contexts. The assignment described here addresses this issue by asking students to read and write about the…

This report summarizes the complex research literature on quantitative methods for assessing how impacts of educational interventions on instructional practices and student learning differ across students, educators, and schools. It also provides technical guidance about the use and interpretation of these methods. The research topics addressed…

Herein, we describe an effective and tested model of a week-long summer science intensive program for high school students that aimed to elaborate on concepts covered in a high school chemistry or biology course, and to provide high school students an opportunity to learn about studying and pursuing careers in the sciences. The program was…

Learning a more distributed representation of the input feature space is a powerful method to boost the performance of a given predictor. Often this is accomplished by partitioning the data into homogeneous groups by clustering so that separate models could be trained on each cluster. Intuitively each such predictor is a better representative of…

The authors propose a method to compare the influence of a treatment on different properties within subjects. The properties are measured by several Likert-type-scaled items. The results show that many existing approaches, such as repeated measurement analysis of variance on sum and mean scores, a linear partial credit model, and a graded response…

In this article, we describe a conceptual framework for in-service professional development--the Whole Teacher approach. A significant departure from the traditional approach to professional development that speaks primarily to teachers' acquisition of knowledge and skills, the Whole Teacher framework emphasizes promoting all aspects of a…

The purpose of this article is to present Convergent Evidence Scaling (CES) as an emergent method for combining data from multiple assessment indicators. The CES method combines single-case assessment data by converging data gathered across multiple persons, settings, or measures, thereby providing an overall criterion-referenced outcome on which…

Action research (AR) is defined by Macintyre to be: "an investigation, where, as a result of rigorous self-appraisal of current practice, the researcher focuses on a problem,or a topic or an issue which needs to be explained, and on the basis of information, plans, implements, then evaluates an action then draws conclusions on the basis of…

Perhaps the greatest value of response to intervention (RTI) as a decision framework is that it brings attention to variables (e.g., mastery of prerequisite skills, frequency of instructional corrective feedback, reinforcement schedules for correct responding) that if changed might make a meaningful difference for students (e.g., child rate of…