While many factors have been identified as influencing student academic performance, previous studies consistently determined effective teaching as the most significant factor, within the control of educators, leading to improved student achievement. Nonetheless, educational experts, statisticians, and policy-makers alike acknowledged the…

Some children struggle to learn the academic skill of reading. Providing effective assistance to struggling students, especially to English Language Learners (ELLs), can be a challenge for teachers. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of childcare programs on the reading achievement of ELLs in kindergarten and first grade.…

In Africa, approximately 80 million children are working. Africa's 41% child labor rate is nearly twice as high as that in Asia. This study examined whether child labor is a direct result of poverty or of reading and math problems in school. The study analyzed reading and math scores of 62 child laborers and 62 non-child laborers from a farming…

Education is the foundation for the future, and a successful education begins with strong literacy skills. The 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that only 36% of eighth-grade students in the United States were classified as reading on a proficient level, and 22% of eighth-grade students were unable to read and comprehend…

One factor, summer reading loss, exacerbated by students living in rural, poverty areas gave rise to this study. The overall research problem was summer reading loss. The study looked at whether students attending fifth through eighth grades in a rural, poverty district and who participated in an at-home summer reading intervention where texts…

Competency-based education has received growing attention in recent years as a way to address preK-12 learning goals. In competency-based education, students are promoted to the next course of study or grade level in each subject area after demonstrating mastery of identified learning targets aligned to standards. Westminster Public Schools in…

Background: The National Center for Education Statistics in 2009 and 2011 showed that African American and Hispanic students scored relatively lower than their white peers by an average of more than 20 test-score points on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for 4 th and 8th grade mathematics and reading assessments. Resulting…

The purpose of this study was to gather information from the Discovery Education Assessment about reading and mathematics scores for girls and boys at the kindergarten level for the years 2013-2014 and 2014-2015. Data were gathered from 276 kindergarten students attending two Title I schools in the southwest region of Tennessee. The focus was on…

In practice, teacher turnover appears to have negative effects on school quality as measured by student performance. However, some simulations suggest that turnover can instead have large positive effects under a policy regime in which low-performing teachers can be accurately identified and replaced with more effective teachers. This study…

African American male third graders in U.S Title I schools frequently fail to read on grade level. However, in three Title I schools in East Texas, this demographic demonstrated exceptionally high reading ability. This explanatory case study investigated the instructional strategies and practices linked to high reading achievement for these…

In response to the increasing importance of a college education, this study investigates the college access trajectories of targeted racial and linguistic minority students and recommends ways to promote their college access. High school completers drawn from the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics were tracked for eight years, and a…

This study aimed to investigate if a universal 24-week oral language and emergent literacy programme delivered to students in the first year of schooling positively impacts reading performance 2 years post intervention. Eighty-nine participants were second grade students from three primary schools in low socio-economic status areas. Using a…

The goal of this short-term longitudinal study was to examine the functioning of the grit measure; grit's relation to emotional engagement; and grit's prediction of later literacy achievement, above and beyond emotional engagement, among dual language learners. Data were collected at two time points four months apart with dual language learner,…

In the present study, we sought to examine response trajectories to brief (11-week) school-based homework interventions and factors that may help schools predict responses. Participants included 222 middle-school students (72% boys; M[subscript age] = 12.00 years, SD = 1.02) who had been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder…

The purpose of this study was to fit theoretical models of prediction to urban students' decisions to enroll and persist in music ensembles using academic achievement, socioeconomic status (SES), number of parents/guardians at home, mobility, ethnicity, and sex as explanatory variables. Through multinomial logistic regression, I built predictive…