Math performance continues to be an important focus for improvement. Many districts adopted educational technology programs to support student learning and teacher instruction. The ASSISTments program provides feedback to students as they solve homework problems and automatically prepares reports for teachers about student performance on daily…

This project tested the effects of adding instruction of trios of children in patterning, mathematics, early literacy, or social studies to ongoing instruction in kindergartens. Children were randomly assigned to trios which were randomly assigned to one of four kinds of instruction. A quarter of the trios received patterning instruction with a…

Early education is replete with debates about "academic" versus "play" approaches. We evaluated 2 interventions, the "Building Blocks" (BB) mathematics curriculum and the BB synthesized with scaffolding of play to promote executive function (BBSEF), compared to a business-as-usual (BAU) control using a 3-armed cluster…

This experimental study examined the efficacy of a multicomponent reading intervention compared to a business-as-usual comparison condition on the reading comprehension and content area vocabulary outcomes of adolescent students with low reading comprehension. We randomly assigned 9th-grade students with low reading comprehension to a…

Vocabulary acquisition is central to language learning, and many instructors believe that technology can facilitate this core activity. While numerous websites and apps offer language-learning activities and games, not all provide evidence that their content and techniques are effective. VocabularySpellingCity (VSC), however, commissioned a study…

Most community college students in the U.S. must complete at least one developmental class, such as elementary algebra, before they can enroll in a college-level mathematics course. Increasingly common in such courses is the use of a web-based activity and testing system (WATS). This report presents initial results of a mixed-methods study of…

Students with writing difficulties may have difficulty when writing informational text with source material due to (a) inexperience with such text and (b) difficulties reading and understanding source material. Teaching students to take notes related to informational text using text structures (e.g., description, compare/contrast) may help them…

Studies have shown that math skills in early childhood are uniquely and strongly predictive of later outcomes across a range of domains and well into adulthood, including the likelihood of graduating from high school and college completion. The Making Pre-K Count and High 5s studies were designed to rigorously test the short- and long-term effects…

This paper presents evidence confirming the validity of the RD design in the Reading Recovery study by examining the ability of the RD design to replicate the 1st grade results observed in the original i3 RCT focused on short-term impacts. Over 1,800 schools participated in the RD study over all four cohort years. The RD design used cutoff-based…

The Common Core Mathematics Standards have raised expectations for schools and students in the United States. These standards demand much deeper content knowledge from teachers of mathematics and their students. Given the increasingly diverse student population in today's classrooms and shortage of qualified special education teachers,…

A formative pilot study of a fractions intervention was conducted to address the intervention's potential for improving fifth-grade struggling students' knowledge of fractions, and to identify any logistical or instructional design issues, before scaling up for a randomized control trial. In the first section, we provide details of the formative…

The Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) was created to support teachers in implementing college and career readiness standards in order to teach literacy skills throughout the content areas. Teachers work collaboratively with coaches to further develop their expertise and design standards-driven, literacy-rich writing assignments within their…

The purpose of this study was to determine which of four Response to Intervention (RTI) programs, System 44, Read 180, Lexia Reading Core5, or Read Naturally, was most effective for alleviating phonics and phonemic awareness reading deficits in students struggling to read fluently and comprehensively. The problem related to this research is that…

This study reports the results of a cluster RCT evaluating the impact of Enhanced Core Reading Instruction on reading achievement of grade 1 at-risk readers. Forty-four elementary schools, blocked by district, were randomly assigned to condition. In both conditions, at-risk readers received 90 minutes of whole-group instruction (Tier 1) plus an…

California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB) and the Riverside County Office of Education (RCOE) were awarded an Investing in Innovation (i3) Development grant in 2015 to investigate the impact of an early education mathematics program on English Learner students at two rural school districts in Riverside, CA. Teaching English Learners…