Grade retention is one of the most discussed and controversial educational measures, and yet, it is still widely applied in many countries. Research investigating the effects of grade retention on students' psychosocial variables presents mixed findings, partly due to the variables assessed, methodological issues, and the length of the studies.…

The internal validity of observational study is often subject to debate. In this study, we define the counterfactuals as the unobserved sample and intend to quantify its relationship with the null hypothesis statistical testing (NHST). We propose the probability of a robust inference for internal validity, that is, the PIV, as a robustness index…

Academic failure and school dropout, or early school leaving, are two of the situations that most concern countries and educational institutions worldwide, because of their prevalence and also their economic and social implications. Despite this prominent role that academic failure and school dropout have in societies, there seems to be no…

Despite its advantages, discrete-trial instruction (DTI) has been criticized for producing rote responding. Although there is little research supporting this claim, if true, this may be problematic given the propensity of children with autism to engage in restricted and repetitive behavior. One feature that is common in DTI that may contribute to…

This sequential mixed methods study evaluated the impact of the Chicago Parent Program (CPP) in 12 Baltimore Title I PreK programs on parent engagement and student outcomes from kindergarten through 2nd grade. Phase 1 (quasi-experiment; N = 11,996) compared PreK students whose parents enrolled in CPP with those whose parents did not enroll in CPP…

A project was developed to introduce the core principles of repeated-measures designs. Using the levels of processing approach to memory, students are prompted to engage in either shallow, moderate, or deep processing of 54 common nouns. An unexpected recall task then measures the number of words remembered in each condition. Data from 293…

Grade retention, the practice of holding a student back in the same grade, has been a controversial topic in the United States for decades. English learners, a growing population in US schools, are consistently identified for grade retention more often than their English-only counterparts. The purpose of this study is to test the impact of grade…

Processes of naturalistic reading and writing are based on complex linguistic input, stretch-out over time, and rely on an integrated performance of multiple perceptual, cognitive, and motor processes. Hence, naturalistic reading and writing performance is nonstationary and exhibits fluctuations and transitions. However, instead of being just…

High school graduation rates have increased dramatically in the past two decades. Some skepticism has arisen, however, because of the confluence of the graduation rise and the starts of high-stakes accountability for graduation rates with "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB). In this study we provide some of the first evidence about the role of…

This paper presents new benefit-cost estimates for the Tulsa universal preschool program. These calculations are based on estimated effects from previous papers of Tulsa pre-K on high school graduation rates and college attendance rates of students who were enrolled in kindergarten in Tulsa Public Schools in the fall of 2006. In this paper,…

We use event history analysis on an aggregate dataset from 1997 to 2018 to understand the state-level antecedents associated with the adoption of test-based grade retention policies. Findings indicate that the educational conditions of a state to be more predictive of retention policy adoption than the political, economic, and geographic measures.…

The percentage of students retaking college admissions tests is rising. Researchers and college admissions offices currently use a variety of methods for summarizing these multiple scores. Testing organizations such as ACT and the College Board, interested in validity evidence like correlations with first-year grade point average (FYGPA), often…

Although social-communication difficulties and repetitive behaviors are hallmark features of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and persist across the lifespan, very few studies have compared age-related differences in these behaviors between youth with ASD and same-age typically developing (TD) peers. We examined this issue using SRS-2 (Social…

Purpose: This longitudinal study aims to understand the circumstances of and changes in student enrollment in Honduras by comparing geographically and socioeconomically different areas and students' year of school entrance. Design/methodology/approach: The sample was made up of 4,043 students from seven primary schools in a regional city and the…

Repeated reading (RR) is a common fluency intervention, but recent studies comparing RR to continuous reading (CR; i.e., wide reading) found no significant differences in effects. This prompts the question of whether the mechanism that improves skills is repeatedly reading portions of connected text, or simply reading connected text. The current…