The purpose of this study was to determine if there has been a change to the scores on the Texas State Peace Officer Licensing Examination over a given time, and if been a so, identify subjects where scores improved or declined. By recognizing stagnation or declination in test scores, interventions can be designed to enhance the adult learning…

One of the greatest challenges for schools is to identify effective and ineffective teachers in a classroom. Teacher evaluation is an expensive process in both time and resources. It is important that evaluations provide data to improve teaching and learning. Therefore, each evaluation needs to communicate opportunities for growth. This…

Education reform in the United States is heavily regulated and has undergone various iterations in the past several decades. With each passing legislation, government mandates and educational initiatives become the focus of reform. School districts must constantly find ways to keep up with increasing state and federal accountability standards.…

Perceived failure in academic performance can lead to differing outcomes for students. Depending on the coping strategies that they choose, students may improve or worsen their performance. This study examined the relationship between affective components and coping strategies in college students' responses to perceived academic failure and their…

This Brief Report presents an example of assessment validation using an argument-based approach. The instrument we developed is a Brief Assessment of Students' Mature Number Sense, which measures a central goal in mathematics education. We chose to develop this assessment to provide an efficient way to measure the effect of instructional practices…

The purpose of this mixed methods study was to determine the effects of a tutorial program on first-grade children's reading skills and their tutors' (also preservice teachers) knowledge of reading instruction. Participants consisted of a group of 30 first-grade children served in the program and a control group of 30 children. Literacy…

This paper studies the causal impacts of public universities on the outcomes of their marginally admitted students. I use administrative admission records spanning all 35 public universities in Texas, which collectively enroll 10 percent of American public university students, to systematically identify and employ decentralized cutoffs in SAT/ACT…

Districts spend thousands of dollars on computerized teacher screeners without knowing if they are identifying the most effective teacher. Hiring quality staff is one of the most important job functions of a principal, and many times a teacher screener score may eliminate an effective teacher. The current study examined the value of teacher…

Middle school is one of the most important times during which students gain knowledge. However, a large proportion of adolescents have continued to complete middle school without mastering essential knowledge of, and skills in, vocabulary and reading comprehension. Adolescents who miss school in the 30-60 days leading up to high-stakes exams…

This study is the first statewide analysis of the effectiveness of the Texas Teacher Incentive Allotment (TIA) program. Introduced in 2019, TIA is the most significant and unprecedented teacher merit-pay system in the U.S. Leveraging the Synthetic Control Method (SCM), we construct a counterfactual scenario to assess the causal impact of TIA on…

In this quasi-experimental study, we examined STEMscopes program impacts on science achievement in Longhorn ISD. The report specifically analyzed STEMscopes impacts on STAAR and MAP Growth scores. The present study used a school-level quasi-experimental design, where 8 STEMscopes schools were selected for inclusion and 8 comparison schools (using…

School accountability has been a focus for state and federal legislators for over 50 years. In 2017, Texas passed House Bill 22 to align their accountability system with the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015. This piece of legislation gives every Texas public school a letter grade based on state assessment scores, attendance, and other factors.…

We use administrative panel data from seven states covering nearly 3 million students to document and explore variation in "academic mobility," a term we use to describe the extent to which students' ranks in the distribution of academic performance change during their public schooling careers. On average, we show that student ranks are…

Natural phenomena and scientific issues are intrinsically interdisciplinary. Students need to study a variety of academic disciplines in the natural sciences to explain a phenomenon or its related problems. Our goal in the current study was to examine the epistemological foundation of students' interdisciplinary understanding of carbon cycling…

This study investigates the impact of various types of absenteeism--excused, unexcused, and suspensions--on 2024 English I and II EOC scores among 9th and 10th graders at a suburban North Texas high school. This quantitative analysis aimed to understand whether different absence types influence academic achievement when controlling for ethnicity…