This quantitative study aimed to research factors that influence third-graders' reading performance on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, a standardized test used to measure the proficiency of students in various subjects. The independent variables of this study were student attendance, teacher's professional background, and…

Research shows that third-grade reading proficiency is the most significant predictor of future success, including graduation rates, earning potential, crime, and health. Mastery of foundational literacy skills during preschool bolsters students' ability to learn to read before fourth grade when the transition from learning to read to reading to…

There is no final consensus regarding which covariates should be used (in addition to prior achievement) when estimating value-added (VA) scores to evaluate a school's effectiveness. Therefore, we examined the sensitivity of evaluations of schools' effectiveness in math and language achievement to covariate selection in the applied VA model. Four…

The United States educational system has historically struggled to improve the student outcomes for African American and economically disadvantaged students (Meatto, 2019). This doctoral study analyzed the underlying factors that affected schools' performances in a central Louisiana school system over a five year period. Specifically, this study…

The purpose of this Action Research study was to examine and improve the instructional practices and social-emotional learning for multilingual learners in third-grade, urban public school classrooms. Participants and data collected in Cycle 1 consisted of six interviews with third-grade classroom and special education teachers, three classroom…

This study examined the effect of attending Pre-K 4 SA on students' educational achievement in third and fourth grades. Pre-K 4 SA is a high-quality pre-kindergarten (pre-K) program in San Antonio that meets all quality standards defined by the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER). The results showed that distance to Pre-K 4 SA…

The topic for this dissertation was the effects arts have on standardized test scores of math. The research problem compared the students who had fine arts integrated into the curriculum and those that did not. This study included six target schools that have primarily African American students. The six-city schools studied were the third through…

Regional Educational Laboratory Appalachia (REL AP) supported Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) staff with training, coaching, and technical support to execute quantitative analyses aimed at two research questions: (1) which schools performed better, worse, or about the same as predicted with respect to grade 3 students' mathematics…

Individual characteristics of neighborhood context, like concentrated socioeconomic disadvantage, are associated with children's cognitive development, including their academic skill development and executive functions. However, questions remain regarding how neighborhood structural, process, and physical features uniquely predict children's…

Because high-stakes testing for school accountability does not begin until third grade, accountability ratings for elementary schools do not directly measure students' academic progress in grades K through 2. While it is possible that children's test scores in grades 3 and above are highly correlated with children's outcomes in the untested…

Effect sizes in the Cohen's d family are often used in education to compare estimates across studies, measures, and sample sizes. For example, effect sizes are used to compare gains in achievement students make over time, either in pre- and post-treatment studies or in the absence of intervention, such as when estimating achievement gaps. However,…

School Improvement Grants (SIGs) exemplify a capacity-building investment to spur sustainable changes in America's persistently lowest-performing schools and stimulate the economy. This study examines both short- and longer-term effects of the first two cohorts of SIG schools from four locations across the country. Dynamic…

In this study, we examined students' access to text, defined as the number of texts freely available to children in their classrooms. From 60 elementary classrooms across five states, we catalogued the books in first, third and fifth grades in both high- and low-achieving schools (based on state-wide reading test scores) to create a database of…

Much research has evaluated teacher- or school-level variance in students' achievement as a proxy for teacher or school effects. These effects have almost exclusively been estimated across years with state-level testing data. In this paper, interim assessment data, collected across 9 time points in the fall, winter, and spring of Grades 3 to 5…

Montessori programs are expanding in public schools, serving a large proportion of African American students. Although recent Montessori research has focused on diverse public school populations, few studies have examined outcomes for African American students at the lower elementary level. This quasi-experimental study compares reading and math…