Background/Context: Math education remains a critical focus for national education improvement. As a solution, districts in the U.S. are investing in math education technologies. Research has demonstrated the potential of these technologies to close achievement gaps (e.g., Pape et al., 2012; Roschelle et al., 2016). Student math achievement is…

Social and Emotional Learning and Its Measurement: The ability to understand and effectively interact with others is a critical determinant of academic, social, and life success (DiPerna & Elliott, 2002). This fact is increasingly recognized in educational policy and practice. For example, an influential report by the National Academy of…

Introduction: Increasing evidence has shown that student mobility is negatively correlated with individual students' and schools' academic performance (Hanushek, Kain, & Rivkin, 2004; Lara, Mizala, & Repetto, 2011; Sun & Pan, 2014). However, the negative impact may be due to the switching behavior or it could be only a side effect of…

Background: The importance of high school completion for jobs and postsecondary opportunities is well- documented. Combined with federal laws where high school graduation rate is a core performance indicator, school systems and states face pressure to actively monitor and assess high school completion. This proposal employs machine learning…

Background/Context: State-funded prekindergarten has expanded rapidly in the U.S., and there are expectations that it will have longer-term positive effects on later academic and nonacademic outcomes (e.g., Phillips et al., 2017). There is strong evidence of pre-k effects on measures of kindergarten readiness (e.g., Gormley et al., 2005; Weiland…

Background/Context: Many states, school districts, and third-party platforms report measures of school performance. Such school ratings are widely consulted by parents and educators alike. The ratings appear to affect families' choices of where to live and where to enroll students (Bergman and Hill, 2018; Hasan and Kumar, 2019), as well as…

Background/Context: Increasing evidence suggests a connection between racial differences in rates of exclusionary discipline (suspensions/expulsions) and academic achievement by (Losen & Martinez, 2020; Reardon et al., 2018). Black students receive out-of-school suspensions and expulsions at disproportionately higher rates, which is associated…

The Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) has seen the number of English learner students in grades K-12 increase in recent years, even as overall enrollment has decreased. In addition, the English learner student population has grown more diverse in race/ethnicity, country of origin, and native language. The increasingly diverse English…

Ethnoracial inequality in educational achievement and attainment is a long-standing feature of the American education system. For example, national reading assessments show that White fourth graders scored nearly a standard deviation higher than Black or Hispanic students on average in 2015 (NCES, 2015). The measurement and analysis of differences…

The purpose of this paper is to showcase new research that seeks to provide guidance on the heterogeneity of treatment effects by utilizing the variance of demographic differences in state assessments. This study is focused on a simple randomized block design where students are nested within schools, and within each school students are randomized…

Research on the effectiveness of educational interventions usually is based on samples of students who remain in the same school over time. In contrast, most students transfer schools at least once during their K-12 school career, not including normative transfers such as those from elementary to middle school (Rumberger, 2002). Even when looking…

The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) is a national network of public charter schools whose stated mission is to help underserved students enroll in and graduate from college. As of 2014-2015 the network included 162 elementary, middle, and high schools serving 59,495 students. Questions remain, however, about the ability of charter school…

Word Generation (WG) is a research-based vocabulary program for middle school students designed to teach words through language arts, math, science, and social studies classes. The program consists of weekly units that introduce 5 high-utility target words through brief passages designed to spark active examination and discussion of contemporary…

Researchers are increasingly using comparative interrupted time series (CITS) designs to estimate the effects of programs and policies when randomized controlled trials are not feasible. In a simple interrupted time series design, researchers compare the pre-treatment values of a treatment group time series to post-treatment values in order to…

The Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) in North Carolina recently addressed the issue of advancement in and equitable access to advanced mathematics. Under a recent policy, WCPSS uses a SAS-generated predicted probabilities of students' success in obtaining a passing score on the NC Algebra I End-of-Course (EOC) exam, to determine…