Providing parents access to their child's grades, missing assignment information, or personalized teacher suggestions has been shown to improve parental engagement and increase student achievement for low-income, minority students. This project aims to test an automated, scalable text-message system designed to improve outcomes for low-income…

The goal of this paper is to provide guidance for applied education researchers in using multi-level data to study the effects of interventions implemented at the school level. Two primary approaches are currently employed in observational studies of the effect of school-level interventions. One approach employs intact school matching: matching…

Given the different possibilities of matching in the context of multilevel data and the lack of research on corresponding matching strategies, the author investigates two main research questions. The first research question investigates the advantages and disadvantages of different matching strategies that can be pursued with multilevel data…

In this study the authors test whether matching using intact local groups improves causal estimates over those produced using propensity score matching at the student level. Like the recent analysis of Wilde and Hollister (2007), they draw on data from Project STAR to estimate the effect of small class sizes on student achievement. They propose a…

This study looks at the question of whether charter schools are more innovative in their provision of extended time policies than a matched set of traditional public schools. Data for this study was collected from a sample of traditional public and charter schools that partner with the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) for interim…

Due to the lack of effectiveness of the punitive school approach toward challenging behaviors (Luiselli, Putnam, Handler, & Feinberg, 2005; Reynolds, Skiba, Graham, Sheras, Conoley, & Garcia-Vazquez, 2006), public schools have searched for an innovative approach to better serve students who are at risk for academic failure and dropout/expulsion. A…

There are several goals guiding this study. First, the authors use an experimental design to examine the causal effects of giving children 10 self-selected books over two summers. Second, they examine whether treatment effects are moderated by children's family income (i.e., eligibility for free- and reduced-price lunch). As a result, they examine…

The purpose of this research was to investigate the impact of tier 2 instruction on the comprehension and vocabulary of first grade students identified with low language and vocabulary skills. Specifically, the authors conducted a pilot study within the context of federally funded efficacy research to examine whether students participating in…

The main objective of the overall Targeted Reading Intervention (TRI) was to help the classroom teacher acquire the key reading diagnostic strategies (e.g., Cooter, 2003; Desimone, 2009; Garet et al., 2001; Timperley & Phillips, 2003) relevant to K-1 struggling readers (e.g., Desimone, 2009; Garet et al., 2001; Guskey, 2002; Joyce &…