A small subset of education studies analyzes school data collected seasonally (separating the summer from the school year). At first, this work was primarily known for documenting learning loss in the summers, but scholars have since recognized that observing how inequality changes between summer and school periods provides leverage for…

Identifying schools that are beating the odds--schools that are exceeding academic performance expectations, given the composition of their student body--can lead to promising practices that other schools serving similar populations can implement. Regional Educational Laboratory Northeast & Islands used data on high-poverty high schools in…

This study investigated the complexity of leveled passages used in four classroom reading assessments. A total of 167 passages leveled for Grades 1-6 from these assessments were analyzed using four analytical tools of text complexity. More traditional, two-factor measures of text complexity found a general trend of fairly consistent across-grade…

The Regional Educational Laboratory Northeast and Islands conducted this study using data on public high schools in Puerto Rico from national and territory databases to compare methods for identifying beating-the-odds schools. Schools were identified by two methods, a status method that ranked high-poverty schools based on their current observed…

There is no comprehensive database of U.S. district-level test scores that is comparable across states. We describe and evaluate a method for constructing such a database. First, we estimate linear, reliability-adjusted linking transformations from state test score scales to the scale of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). We…

Policy-makers are frequently interested in understanding how effective a particular intervention may be for a specific (and often broad) population. In many fields, particularly education and social welfare, the ideal form of these evaluations is a large-scale randomized experiment. Recent research has highlighted that sites in these large-scale…

The Belgian educational field includes separate educational systems reflecting the division of the country into linguistic communities. Even if the French-speaking and the Dutch-speaking communities keep sharing important similarities in terms of funding rules and structures, they present a huge gap between their respective pupils' achievement.…

Some form of a short interrupted time series (ITS) is often used to evaluate state and national programs. An ITS design with a single treatment group assumes that the pretest functional form can be validly estimated and extrapolated into the postintervention period where it provides a valid counterfactual. This assumption is problematic. Ambiguous…

This study, through multilevel analyses of the data of four English-speaking nations (i.e., Canada, England, New Zealand and the United States) from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2001 database, investigated the relationship between teachers' uses of various types of classroom assessments and their fourth-graders'…

This study examined the academic performance and preference of students with disabilities for two types of test administration conditions, computer-based testing (CBT) and pencil-and-paper testing (PPT). Data from a large-scale assessment program were used to examine differences between CBT and PPT academic performance for third to eleventh grade…

By using latent profile analysis eight stable and interpretable subgroups of readers were identified. The basis for subgrouping was different performance measures with four aspects of reading in focus: reading of continuous texts, reading of document texts, word reading and reading speed. Participants were 9-year-old Swedish students included in…

The purpose of this study was to determine (a) if the reading program adopted by Sally D. Meadows enhanced the achievement of students placed in the Early Intervention Program (EIP); (b) if the students' reading achievement scores increased more after the second year of implementation than they did after the first year of implementation; and (c)…

A meta-analysis of the relationship between attitudes in reading and achievement in reading was conducted to provide a statistical summary to the observed variability in the magnitude of previously reported effect sizes. A total of 32 studies, with a total sample size of 224,615 were used, and included a total of 118 effect sizes. A multi-level…

As schools implement response to intervention to identify and serve students with learning difficulties, it is critical for educators to know how to evaluate screening measures. In the present study, "Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills" Oral Reading Fluency was used to compare the differential decisions that might occur in…

Performance-based accountability along with budget tightening has increased pressure on publicly funded organizations to develop and deliver programs that produce meaningful social benefits. As a result, there is increasing need to undertake formative evaluations that estimate preliminary program outcomes and identify promising program components…