The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) cites evolution as a core concept of biology, yet studies have found that biology students often exhibit low acceptance of evolution. As such, much of evolution education research aims to identify the causes of evolution rejection and develop instructional strategies to increase…

Worked examples, which present an explained code for solving typical programming problems are among the most popular types of learning content in programming classes. Most approaches and tools for presenting these examples to students are based on line-by-line explanations of the example code. However, instructors rarely have time to provide…

Greater financial literacy is critically needed among young adults in the United States, but many financial literacy education courses have been less effective than hoped for by educators and researchers. Additionally, many have not been designed around established curricula or learning science principles, rendering findings difficult for…

When results of descriptive functional behavior assessments (FBAs) are inconclusive, experimental analysis methods can be used to directly test hypotheses about when or why a student engages in challenging behavior. Despite growing research on practical variations of hypothesis testing in schools, these methods are rarely incorporated in FBAs in…

Instruction in most STEM domains uses visuals to illustrate complex problems. During problem solving, students often manipulate and construct visuals. Traditionally, students draw visuals on paper and receive delayed feedback from an instructor. Educational technologies have the advantage that they can provide immediate feedback on students'…

This study evaluated the feasibility of the Knowledge, Language, and Inquiry (K.L.I.) intervention, designed to support Grades 3-5 multilingual students classified as English learners (ML-ELs) in building content knowledge, language skills, and reading comprehension through inquiry-based small-group instruction. Feasibility was examined across…

Expanding on the extant body of research on content validity, this study applied the tenets of content validity research to the development of an expository book reading intervention focused on science for preschool students with language impairment. This example case explains how, guided by content validity research in healthcare interventions,…

Exclusionary discipline practices differentially harm young children of color. As early childhood education systems seek to close these gaps to ensure all young children have access to high quality early learning experiences, the field requires more evidence-based approaches that can be scaled and replicated. Infant and early childhood mental…

Students on the autism spectrum who complete a regular high school diploma are a growing population; little is known about how these students are currently supported. A large sample of special education administrators, special education and general education teachers, and related school personnel completed an online survey that documented levels…

Objective: To develop novel, scalable, and valid literacy profiles for identifying limited health literacy patients by harnessing natural language processing. Data Source: With respect to the linguistic content, we analyzed 283 216 secure messages sent by 6941 diabetes patients to physicians within an integrated system's electronic portal.…

This study examines how system-wide (i.e., region, district, and school) mechanisms such as leadership support, training requirements, structure, collaboration, and education affect the use of evidence-based practices (EBPs) in schools and how this affects the outcomes for students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Despite growing evidence for…

This brief documents the expansion of instructional specialist staffing in U.S. public school districts. We use data from the National Center of Education Statistics' annual Common Core of Data to chart staffing trends in public school districts between 1997-98 and 2012-13. The number of instructional specialists per 1,000 U.S students doubled…

We present a dynamic systems perspective for the intensification of interventions for students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD). With this framework, we suggest behavior involves the contributions of multiple factors and reflects the interplay between the characteristics of the student and the ecologies in which he or she is embedded.…

Research Findings: The Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale, Revised (ECERS-R) is widely used, often to evaluate whether preschool programs are of sufficient quality to improve children's school readiness. We examined the validity of the measure for this purpose. Item response theory (IRT) analyses revealed that many items did not fit together…

The Oakland Accelerates Program, funded by an Investing in Innovation (i3) development FY2011 grant, was a collaborative process for increasing the Oakland Unified School District's (California) capacity to support each and every student to graduate from high school with the knowledge and skills to be successful in college and postsecondary…