The purpose of this quantitative methods study was to determine a relationship between instructional reading strategies and standardized test performance for third-grade students in Phoenix, Arizona, and counties in Arizona school districts. The passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015…

The Inquiry and Research strand of the 2017 ELAR TEKS for sixth through twelfth grade includes vertically aligned standards for teaching students critical media skills by questioning the reliability and credibility of sources, evaluating bias, and recognizing logical fallacies. This article describes how increased media saturation has led to…

The problem addressed in this study was that in response to low standardized test scores, instructional strategies were required to be implemented in English Language Arts (ELA), but teachers in Grades 1 through 5 in the study site experienced challenges using these strategies to meet student learning needs. The explored teachers' experiences and…

The present study investigates the correlation between teachers' implementation of Universal or Learning (UDL) in Mathematics and English/language arts (ELA) instruction and students' performance as measured by the state-wide standardised tests. Teacher participants included ELA and Mathematics teachers in grades 3-8 from a district in the United…

National, state, and local governmental authorities have researched and reported the impacts of poverty on academic performance for multiple decades, providing guidance, legislation, accountability, equal access initiatives, and continuous monitoring for educators to address the ongoing dilemma. However, poverty performance achievement gaps are…

Pioneer Valley Books (PVB) contracted McREL International to investigate the effects of the third grade Literacy Footprints (LFP) guided reading system on English language arts (ELA) performance on state assessments. LFP is a research-based, comprehensive, small-group literacy tool that facilitates explicit and systematic guided reading…

Within the past two decades, federal and state governments have increased the frequency, number, and importance of standardized tests in elementary and secondary American schools. These tests are characterized by recognition-based frameworks that privilege "best" or "correct" answers, processes, and understandings which remain…

The current study reports on a large-scale quantitative analysis of classroom talk practices and links to different measures of reading achievement within upper elementary classrooms. Data involving 745 fourth- and fifth-grade teachers and 18,844 students from the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) study were used. Talk was quantified via…

This article begins with a historical exploration of the U.S.'s implementations and usages of K-12 standardized testing, including efforts at and failures to promote educational equity. Then, centering teachers' voices, the authors use a dialogic narrative format to put two long-time friends and educators in conversation with one another and their…

Resilience, as defined by the literature, deals with the relationship between individuals and their environment. This capstone project followed elementary students over a three-year period to investigate and determine the impact a co-teaching intervention model has on resilience, grade-point average (GPA), state testing scores in English language…

This article examines how elementary public school teachers in South Texas are implementing a balanced literacy approach in light of the expectations of accountability for student performance. For more than three decades, Texas schools have felt, and continue to feel, the pressure of accountability. Therefore, it becomes essential to investigate…

Students living in poverty are now the majority of the K-12 student population in the United States. Growing up in poverty results in lower self-regulation, executive function, and readiness to learn. Researchers suggest that mindfulness practices, such as yoga, can enhance student self-regulation and executive function, thereby increasing student…

A fundamental claim for Common Core State Standards (CCSS)-aligned assessments is that they will lead to better teaching practices. The purpose of this study is to seek evidence in support of this claim by surveying teachers about their instructional practices, test preparation strategies, and test score use both before and after the introduction…

Main idea and summary are essential elements of reading comprehension. We report results from Grades 4 and 5 student performance on two years of state-mandated standardized reading testing which indicate that students perform statistically significantly lower on main idea and summary questions on the tests than any other question category. In this…

In this mixed-methods research study, the researcher investigated the impact of professional development training using the University of Notre Dame's "English as a New Language (ENL) Online Professional Development Modules" (Lichon, Dees, & Roach, 2017) on teacher and administrator efficacy in teaching English language learners…