The purpose of this study was to explore the experiences and perceptions of early childhood preservice teachers in a southeastern university as they worked for mastery of phonemic awareness, phonics, and morphemic awareness. Mastery was set at 90% accuracy in a series of tests, which required them to perform different tasks related to the said…

Home shared book reading during the preschool years is a strong predictor of students' reading achievement in primary school, and, according to Sénéchal (2012), it can benefit more children from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. This study examines the association between frequency of book reading before the start of compulsory education…

Children from low-income families are at risk of learning outcome difficulties, particularly in literacy. Various studies link poor literacy results with performance later in primary and secondary school, and suggest that poverty, literacy skills and weak instructional methods combine to drastically limit the educational opportunities for many…

Data on students' perceptions of teacher social support, academic functioning, and social-emotional functioning were collected from a sample of 796 7th and 8th grade middle school students using the Child and Adolescent Social Support Scale (CASSS; Malecki, Demaray, & Elliott, 2000), Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) and school records, and…

There is little research in the developing countries of South East Asia on the effectiveness of bilingual education programmes that use first language instruction for ethnic minority children. This study investigated the effectiveness of a bilingual education programme involving ethnic minority children in Cambodia by comparing their performance…

According to the big-fish-little-pond (BFLP) model, the self-concept is not only influenced in a positive way by one's own achievement, but also in a negative way by one's relative achievement in comparison with one's immediate peers. This study investigates whether the BFLP effect also holds for second language acquisition. A random sample of…

The Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR) Reading Assessment (FRA) consists of computer-adaptive reading comprehension and oral language screening tasks that provide measures to track growth over time, as well as a Probability of Literacy Success (PLS) linked to grade-level performance (i.e., the 50th percentile) on the reading comprehension…

This study examines the roles played by student characteristics, school resources and practices, peer effects, and province fixed effects in accounting for differences in the academic outcomes of private and public high school students. Private high school students score significantly higher than public high school students on reading,…

This report includes a high-level overview of student outcome data and how Kansas measures up to the other 49 states. It is meant to complement the other reporting that the Kansas Association of School Boards has released and will be releasing related to improving student outcomes for all Kansas public schools. The following are key findings…

"No Child Left Behind" has highlighted the need for new types of assessments that not only provide high-quality evidence about what students know and can do, but also help to move learning forward. This paper describes a linked set of formative and summative reading assessments designed to address the tradeoffs inherent in these two…

Estimation of parameters of random effects models from samples collected via complex multistage designs is considered. One way to reduce estimation bias due to unequal probabilities of selection is to incorporate sampling weights. Many researchers have been proposed various weighting methods (Korn, & Graubard, 2003; Pfeffermann, Skinner,…

Colleges rely on the ACT exam in their admission decisions to increase their ability to differentiate between students likely to succeed and those that have a high risk of under-performing and dropping out. We show that two of the four sub tests of the ACT, English and Mathematics, are highly predictive of positive college outcomes while the other…

This paper presents an application of a jackknifing approach to variance estimation of ability inferences for groups of students, using a multidimensional discrete model for item response data. The data utilized to demonstrate the approach come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). In contrast to the operational approach…

Children's needs differ so vastly that a single program designed to support numerous students can only do so much. More than anything else, students need to use professional expertise to unravel their needs and to plan instruction that is directly responsive. This book makes exemplary RTI possible in every reading classroom. The author gives you…

The aim of this study was to determine if phonological processing deficits in specific reading disability (SRD) and specific language impairment (SLI) are the same or different. In four separate analyses, a different combination of reading and spoken language measures was used to divide 73 children into three subgroups: poor readers with average…