The importance of mathematical problem solving (MPS) has been widely recognized. While there has been significant progress in developing and studying interventions to support teaching and learning MPS for students with disabilities, the research on how to accurately and effectively assess the impact of those interventions has lagged, leaving a gap…

This study analyzed the comprehension strategies and visuals in two science textbook series for grades 6, 7, and 8 as means of better understanding a core element of the ecological component of science literacy. The iScience (Biggs, 2015"abc") and Interactive Science (Buckey, 2015abcdef) textbook series were analyzed for the frequency of…

The "remembered success effect" (Finn, 2010) refers to the finding that challenging academic tasks that start or end with extra opportunities for success are preferred to challenging tasks that do not include these opportunities. Work on remembered success has primarily been done with adults. We assessed (in a preregistered study)…

Mathematics anxiety (MA) refers to negative cognition and negative affect that interfere with mathematics performance. We examined the dimensionality of MA, measurement invariance across males and females, and whether the strength of relations between MA and mathematics performance varies by dimension and gender among 245 sixth-grade students.…

Objective: Despite evidence-based interventions for the psychiatric disorders that often precede suicidality, suicide remains a leading cause of death among youth. There has been increased interest in whether preventive interventions targeting early risk factors lead to decreased distal risk for suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STB). We examined…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate Peer Group Connection-Middle School, a cross-age peer mentor program designed to enhance student retention and achievement during the transition from elementary to middle school. We present findings from an individual-level randomized controlled trial that included 1,902 sixth-grade students across three…

Purpose: We examined whether affix type and base word transparency explained variation in third- through sixth-grade students' performance on a number of morphological awareness tasks. Method: Third- through sixth-grade students (n > 500 at each grade) completed morphological awareness tasks from the Morphological Awareness Test for Reading and…

This study explored whether initial skill moderated outcomes of Promoting Algebra Readiness, a Tier 2 sixth grade mathematics intervention targeting conceptual and procedural knowledge of fractions. The study analyzed data from a quasi-experimental pilot study in which at-risk students (n = 198) were assigned to the treatment or control condition…

Scholars and practitioners have called for personalized and widely accessible professional development (PD) for teachers. Yet, a long-standing tension between customizing support and increasing access to such support has hindered the scale-up of high-quality PD for individual teachers. This study addresses this challenge by developing a…

Writing is an essential element of literacy development, and language plays a central role in the composing process, including developing, organizing, and refining ideas. Language and writing are interconnected, making it paramount for educators to attend to the development of deaf students' language skills. In this quasi-experimental study, we…

Solving mathematical problems is cognitively complex, involving strategy formulation, solution development, and the application of learned concepts. However, gaps in students' knowledge or weakly grasped concepts can lead to errors. Teachers play a crucial role in predicting and addressing these difficulties, which directly influence learning…

Prior studies identified effective, but mainly non-digital, homework aids. This research involved 18 middle school students in a lo-fi prototyping study to integrate traditional homework support tools with intelligent tutoring systems (ITS), leveraging rich log data for personalized learning. Feature investigations in standardized diaries, goal…

Despite a marked increase in the volume of research investigating issues about reading interventions for students with ASD (e.g., Bailey and Arciuli, Rev J Autism Dev Disord 7(2):127-150, 2020; Chiang and Lin, Focus Autism Other Dev Disab 22(4):259-267, 2007), very few studies have examined the current reading practices experienced by children…

This paper investigates two specific probabilistic biases which middle graders usually exhibit when reasoning about probability and randomness on assessment items. We discuss how students' reasoning about key probability concepts undergirds statistics literacy related to randomness, independence, and the likelihood of future events based on past…

New educational technologies that utilize students' interaction data and visualizations provide a means to expand our understanding of learning processes. In this study, we apply two advanced and novel data visualization techniques, called the "Indivisualizer" and a "Sankey diagram," to explore how middle school students (N =…