This paper presents a case study designed to educate students in pre-service teacher education programs about the importance of a comprehensive eye exam. The case study chronicles a family's multi-year search for solutions to their child's reading difficulties. The research supporting the case study explores the connection between vision…

This article assesses the effects of Tulsa, Oklahoma's school-based prekindergarten program on the school readiness of children with special needs using a regression discontinuity design. Participation in the pre-K program was associated with significant gains for children with special needs in early literacy scores, but not in math scores. These…

Researchers studied components of a two-year school-wide Striving Readers intervention aimed at bolstering middle school teachers' use of literacy strategies to raise students' reading achievement. Although students of intervention teachers had significantly higher Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) scores than students of non-participating…

This article examines how a second-grader demonstrates that reading is not about decoding letters and words in linear order but is a more complex activity involving the reader's decisions with respect to several aspects of their knowledge of their language and how comprehension is key to transacting with texts. The paper observes and documents the…

This Striving Readers evaluation examined the impact of a targeted intervention for struggling adolescent readers in participating schools. This study was conducted in nine high schools in nine school districts serving large percentages of at-risk students in Kentucky. The targeted intervention for struggling readers was the Kentucky Cognitive…

The author uses Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital, and habitus to analyze how students, parents, teachers, and administrators are responding to Georgia's test-based grade retention policy in reading at one Georgia elementary school. In this multiple case study, the author interviewed, observed, and collected documents regarding ten fifth…

While the importance of good teaching may be intuitively obvious, only over the past decade has education research begun to quantify the high economic stakes around teacher quality. In a world where the goals of national education systems are being transformed, from a focus on the transmission of facts and memorization to a focus on student…

J.C. Nalle is a Community School located in the Marshall Heights neighborhood of Ward 7 in Washington, D.C. The community in which J.C. Nalle is located, historically one of the more economically disadvantaged areas of the city, has experienced a number of changes in recent years. This report of evaluation findings begins with an introduction to…

ACT has been a leader in measuring college and career readiness trends since 1959. Each August, ACT releases The Condition of College & Career Readiness (www.act.org/newsroom/data/2015), an annual report on the progress of the ACT-tested graduating class relative to college readiness. Nationally, a record 59% of the 2015 graduating class took…

This report focuses on the opening of new school libraries and their impact on schools, teachers and students after two years of implementation of the Baltimore Elementary and Middle School Library Project (Library Project). The findings build on the first report of this project and show that it is not just new facilities, but also the added…

Achievement gaps between immigrant and native students indicate failure to assure educational equity in the majority of countries assessed by the Programme for International Student Assessment in 2009 (PISA, 2009). The present article explains disparate achievement results in Europe, first testing the hypothesis of old and new democracies. In…

At some point in their child's education, many parents have considered whether it would be worth the expense to enrol their child in a private school. For parents, private schools may offer a particular kind of instruction that is not available in public schools. If private schools also attract higher-performing students and better teachers than…

Using quantile regression analyses, this study examines gender gaps in mathematics, science, and reading in Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Jordan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Qatar, Tunisia, and Turkey among 15 year-old students. The analyses show that girls in Azerbaijan achieve as well as boys in mathematics and science and overachieve in reading. In Jordan,…

The release of the latest results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) garnered all the usual headlines about America's lackluster performance and the rise of competitor nations. To be sure, the findings--that America's fifteen-year-olds perform in the middle of the pack in both reading and math--are disconcerting for a…

"PISA 2009 at a Glance" is a companion publication to "PISA 2009 Results", the six-volume report on the 2009 survey conducted by the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). PISA assesses the extent to which students near the end of compulsory education have acquired some of the knowledge and skills that…