There is a burgeoning body of evidence on the average impacts of educational programs. Yet, for many local decision makers, because impacts can vary across sites, the question of whether a certain program will work in their particular district or school remains. This article addresses the question of the generalizability of large-scale average…

The "Examining Implementation and Outcomes of the Project On-Track High-Dosage Literacy Tutoring Program" study describes the characteristics of students who participated in a full year of Project On-Track, a high-dosage, small-group literacy tutoring program for students in grade 1-3. Its online adaptive program, Amplify Reading, groups…

Students with autism may struggle to develop the academic skills necessary for success in school and beyond. Understanding and improving academic skills performance requires appropriate measurement approaches. One such option that has been minimally studied with students with autism is curriculum-based measurement (CBM). Coinciding with the need…

The present study investigated the usefulness of a pre-programmed, teleoperated, socially assistive peer robot in dynamic testing of complex problem solving utilising the Tower of Hanoi. The robot, in a 'Wizard of Oz' setting, provided instructions and prompts during dynamic testing to children when they had to solve 3 D Tower of Hanoi puzzles.…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine whether different measures of oral reading fluency relate differentially to reading comprehension performance in two samples of second-grade students: (a) students who evidenced difficulties with nonsense-word oral reading fluency, real-word oral reading fluency, and oral reading fluency of…

Considerable research indicates that high-stakes accountability policies have the capacity to influence language arts instruction, particularly in urban, high-needs schools where pressure to increase test scores tends to be most acute. This article utilizes Cultural Historical Activity Theory to critically examine the constraints and affordances…

The authors' goal was to evaluate the potential of Math Recovery (MR), a pullout, one-to-one tutoring program that has been designed to increase mathematics achievement among low-performing first graders, thereby closing the school-entry achievement gap and enabling participants to achieve at the level of their higher-performing peers in the…

This study combined both qualitative and quantitative research to determine the impact of instructional practices on comprehension improvement in second grade Guided Reading groups. Four second grade teachers and their 73 students ages seven through eight years old participated in this study. Additionally, the study examined the effects of Guided…

Since the passage of the first Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, increasing reading achievement for all students has been a focus for our nation. Unfortunately, our country still has over 30 million citizens who are illiterate (Mukherjee, 2007). One of the challenges for schools is to accurately identify students in need of early…

The problem investigated in this research study relates to the referral rate for special education evaluations between students of teachers who were exposed to the professional development and resources associated with the federally funded Reading First program and students of teachers who were not exposed to the program. The purpose of this study…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how multimodal assessment tools enabled Grade 2 students to show knowledge and understanding of wolves. The research design was a case study across three years employing descriptive statistics to portray student knowledge and understanding associated with the use of each tool. The findings indicate that…

An exploratory study was conducted which assessed behaviors that characterize social competence in the second and fifth grades. A contextual approach was used to gather information from second- and fifth-grade children and their parents and teachers regarding the behaviors they perceived to be important for getting along well with peers. Data were…

"Saxon Elementary School Math," published by Harcourt Achieve, is a core curriculum for students in kindergarten through grade 5. A distinguishing feature of "Saxon Elementary School Math" is its use of a distributed approach, as opposed to a chapter-based approach, for instruction and assessment. The program is built on the…

One of the most critical needs in Florida's "Reading First" schools is to improve the effectiveness of interventions for struggling readers. For example, during the 2005-2006 school year, only 17% of first grade students who began the year at some level of risk for reading difficulties finished the year with grade level skills on the…

The results of a study in applied educational psycholinguistics are presented. The project used a theoretical model of communicative competence to develop testing techniques for diagnosing levels of ability in functional language skills, and to develop training techniques to promote the acquisition of speaking and listening skills among elementary…