The shortage of highly qualified special educators is most pronounced in rural schools serving populations characterized by poverty, low achievement, disability, and cultural diversity. The result is often untrained teachers serving students with the greatest education needs. This article describes efforts by a university in rural middle Georgia…

This study explored learning competency based on the Indonesian National Examination focusing especially on chemistry performance and the circumstances of senior high school students and teachers in rural areas of Simeulue Island, Indonesia. The National Examination total score and chemistry score for students in rural areas were consistently…

This study compares school-related associations in depressive symptoms among children aged between 9-13 years from four schools in Finland and Norway. A total of 523 pupils participated in the cross-sectional survey. The connections between depressive symptoms and school factors were analysed using hierarchical regression analyses. School…

Explanations of the marked individual differences in elementary school mathematical achievement and mathematical learning disability (MLD or dyscalculia) have involved domain-general factors (working memory, reasoning, processing speed, and oral language) and numerical factors that include single-digit processing efficiency and multidigit skills…

The Discover Summer School was a four-week programme which aimed to improve the reading and writing skills of children during the summer between Year 6 and Year 7. The programme was targeted at pupils who had been predicted to achieve below Level 4b in English by the end of Key Stage 2. Pupils meeting the eligibility criteria for the study, and…

Amargosa Valley School in Nevada could be considered representative of almost any preK-8 school that serves a large proportion of socioeconomically disadvantaged students and is focused on turning around persistently low achievement. Like other schools supported by federal School Improvement Grants, Amargosa is beginning to implement a reform plan…

This brief reports on the early stages and initial successes of turnaround efforts in a California school district. With administrators and educators in the midst of implementing a robust reform agenda, there are clear signs that the district is on the rise. The reform initiatives have stopped a downward slide in student attendance, behavior, and…

This report focused on the extent to which students who are academically far off track in preparing for college can catch up in four years. We studied multiple cohorts of students in eighth grade whose EXPLORE[R] scores were more than one standard deviation below the EXPLORE benchmark scores associated with being on track. We found that 10 percent…

Current curriculum and assessment reform for schooling in Australia is based on ideas and practices associated with the setting of standards. Detailed descriptions of levels of achievement for each year of schooling are being ascribed the dual role of measuring the effectiveness of school systems and helping teachers to ensure all students are…

Data from the 1986 Northern Finland Birth Cohort Study (n = 4,645) were used to examine the influence of mid-adolescent (age 15) school outcomes on late-adolescent (ages 17-19) risk of criminal conviction. Consistent with social-developmental theories of offending, we found that poor academic performance and reduced school attachment increase the…

State lawmakers and community activists are making a new push for "parent trigger" laws, measures that let parents vote to convert academically struggling schools to charters or to radically restructure them in other ways. But proponents and critics of the often-controversial, citizen-led efforts are divided on just how profound an…

This study examines the effect of the Family Check Up (FCU) intervention on the probability of arrests from age 12 to 17 years for youth following heterogeneous developmental trajectories of antisocial behavior. Latent Growth Mixture Modeling results supported the presence of three developmental trajectories of arrests, including a large group of…

Time log data (time-spent and adjective evaluations), a six question survey about time management attitudes, and the Adult Self Expression Scale (behavioral and situational subscales), were examined regarding how well each predict GPA. This paper contains two studies. The first study uses canonical correlations to examine the natural relationships…

The study examined the effectiveness of Philadelphia's Renaissance Schools Initiative after one year of implementation. The Renaissance Schools Initiative, which began in the 2010-11 school year, aimed at improving low-performing schools by providing new management, additional resources, and new educational strategies. The study reported that…

Identifying proper measure to monitor students' growth and understanding characteristics of growth patterns between different achieving groups are critical issues in terms of screening students at risk. To deal with this, we explored relationships of slopes and intercepts between word identification (ID) and passage reading fluency (reading aloud)…