Decades of research conducted worldwide has resulted in a taxonomy for word problems involving additive situations. Research published in the 1980s found that U.S. curricula only exposed first-grade students to a small subset of the easiest types of word problems. Widely adopted curriculum standards in the United States call for first-grade…

Teachers, like the students they serve, never stop learning. In-service teacher professional development (PD) gives educators opportunities to learn more about pedagogy and improve their own instruction methods to boost students' academic and social and emotional outcomes. Districts make a significant financial investment to provide teacher PD,…

Can a school or district improve student achievement simply by switching to a higher quality textbook or curriculum? We conducted the first multi-textbook, multi-state effort to estimate textbook efficacy following widespread adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and associated changes in the textbook market. Pooling textbook adoption…

Cynthia Coburn, in her 2016 article in the "American Journal of Education"--''What's Policy Got to Do With It?''--states that the field of policy implementation suffers from the propensity to learn the same lessons over and over again. This repetition of mistakes, I argue, stems from a failure to account for predictable patterns in how…

Existing literature on the impact of Common Core State Standards in Math has shown little benefit, but has not examined variation in outcomes based on implementation strategies, student subgroups, or outcomes other than test scores. We use a difference-in-differences approach with school fixed effects to compare outcomes in pre- and post-standards…

Instructional interactions that occur between teachers and students around foundational mathematics topics are critical for supporting mathematical proficiency among students with mathematics learning disabilities (MLD). This study investigated whether the initial mathematics skill of 880 kindergarten students at risk for MLD predicted the…

The Common Core State Standards in Mathematics and Next Generation Science Standards encourage substantial shifts in teaching, but how to enact change is not specified. This mixed-methods exploratory study shows how different implementation supports were related to teachers' use of standards-aligned instructional practices in the Chicago Public…

Background: The Common Core Standards for Mathematics and Next Generation Science Standards were adopted by states with the goal of preparing students with knowledge and skills needed for college, careers, and citizenry. Adopting these standards necessitated considerable changes in instructional practice. While teacher leadership is known to be…

Policies that require the use of information about student achievement to evaluate teacher performance are becoming increasingly common across the United States, but there is some question as to how or whether to use student test-based teacher evaluations when student assessments change. We bring empirical evidence to bear on this issue.…

Students who demonstrate mathematics difficulties in the early grades are at risk for poor educational outcomes. Fortunately, strategic early mathematics intervention programs can improve academic outcomes for students with mathematics difficulties, and instructional technology has demonstrated promise in delivering targeted and individualized…

Students often have difficulty comprehending informational text. Results from a meta-analysis by Hebert, Bohaty, Nelson and Brown (2016) indicated that text structure instruction is effective for improving reading comprehension of expository text. This article presents evidence-based practices for teaching informational text structures to improve…

Many students do not meet expected standards of writing performance, despite the need for writing competence in and out of school. As policy instruments, writing content standards have an impact on what is taught and how students perform. This study reports findings from an evaluation of the content of a sample of seven diverse states' current…

This chapter provides an overview of the Interactive Strategy Tutor for Active Reading and Thinking-2 (iSTART-2). iSTART-2 is a game-based tutoring system designed to improve students' reading comprehension skills. It does so by providing them with instruction on how to self-explain using comprehension strategies. In this chapter, we first discuss…

Though writing plays an important role in academic, social, and economic success, typical writing instruction generally does not reflect evidence-based practices (EBPs). One potential reason for this is limited signposting of EBPs in standards. We analyzed the content of writing standards from a representative sample of states and the Common Core…

The 3 purposes of this study were to: (a) describe fraction ordering errors among at-risk 4th-grade students; (b) assess the effect of part-whole understanding and accuracy of fraction magnitude estimation on the probability of committing errors; and (c) examine the effect of students' ability to explain comparing problems on the probability of…