Efforts to support children in schools require addressing not only academic issues, but also out-of-school factors that can affect students' ability to succeed. This study examined academic achievement of students participating in City Connects, a student support intervention operating in high-poverty elementary schools. The sample included 7,948…

When the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP) began working with Boston Public Schools (BPS) in 2005, the most pressing need articulated by the district was research and development in the area of middle school literacy. Thus SERP researchers undertook to specify more precisely what the middle school literacy problem in BPS was by…

The Massachusetts Expanded Learning Time (ELT) initiative provides grants to selected schools to redesign their schedules by adding 300-plus instructional hours to the school year to improve outcomes, broaden enrichment opportunities, and provide teachers with more planning and professional development time. The Massachusetts Department of…

This brief describes a quasi-experimental study of Word Generation, conducted in public middle schools in Boston. Word Generation is a robust vocabulary intervention that is implemented across key subject areas. The purpose of the program is to enhance students' vocabulary in support of improved reading comprehension. The brief outlines the…

A quasi-experimental study of a novel, cross-content area vocabulary intervention program called "Word Generation" showed significantly greater growth among 6th- to 8th-grade students in schools implementing the program than in comparison schools, on a curriculum-specific test. Furthermore, the language-minority students in the…

The Massachusetts Expanded Learning Time (ELT) initiative was launched in 2005, and it provides grants to selected schools across multiple districts to increase instructional time by at least 300 hours per academic year. Participating schools receive an additional $1,300 per student to lengthen the day and/or year. Schools are expected to use the…

This paper examines the educational impacts of the Berkshire Wireless Learning Initiative (BWLI), a pilot program that provided 1:1 technology access to all students and teachers across five public and private middle schools in western Massachusetts. Using a pre/post comparative study design, the current study explores a wide range of program…