Students in Puerto Rico need better education options, and the recurring problems in the government school system have made traditional public schools unreliable places for parents to send their children. While federal officials and policymakers in the commonwealth must continue to clean up waste, fraud, and abuse, they should also lift the caps…

This study explored the relationship between rural young adolescents' expectancy-value beliefs in reading and their reading performance. Based upon a theoretical framework in expectancy-value theory, a theory of achievement motivation, this study examined the nature and strengths of the relationships between young adolescents' expectancy and value…

Students who struggle to read at an early age are likely to continue struggling for not only the rest of their schooling, but the rest of their lives. Schools need to begin adopting research-based reading programs and measuring their effectiveness formatively throughout the school year. Research suggests that effective reading programs need to…

This study was designed to explore the effectiveness of balanced literacy instruction in two pre-kindergarten programs in a North Eastern suburban school district. The researcher used a mixed-methods design which included classroom observations, student performance data, and teacher interviews to determine if the language arts program produced…

In this article we examined predictive validity of Student Risk Screening Scale for Internalizing and Externalizing (SRSS-IE) scores for use with elementary-age students (N = 4,465) from 14 elementary schools. Results indicated elementary school students with high levels of risk according to fall SRSS-IE scores -- especially those with…

We leverage an obscure set of rules in Texas's school funding formula granting some districts additional revenue as a function of size and sparsity. We use variation from kinks and discontinuities in this formula to ask how districts spend additional discretionary funds, and whether these improve student outcomes. A $1,000 annual increase in…

The study investigates to what extent a commitment to and a self-evaluation of a specific self-directed learning activity explain Korean college students' EFL proficiency (using TOEIC reading scores). Of the Korean college students who participated, 52 completed log writing of self-directed learning activities, and 44 completed a self-evaluating…

The present study examined gender gap in Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) Reading and mediators of the gender gap in a Finnish sample (n = 1,309). We examined whether the gender gap in PISA Reading performance can be understood via the effects of reading fluency, achievement behaviour (mastery orientation and task-avoidant…

Climate strength was first conceptualised in the organisational psychology literature as the within-group agreement on the perceptions of climate. In contrast to the deep study of climate level, climate strength has not been clarified by school climate research. The purpose of this cross-cultural study is to identify the main effect of…

Background: The goal of this study was to examine the effect of cognates on Spanish-English bilingual children's English reading fluency. Because cognates lead to higher levels of non-target language activation, we hypothesised that the presence of cognates would result in reduced reading fluency for bilingual children. Methods: Monolingual…

Using National Assessment of Educational Progress data from 2003 to 2015, this brief describes changes in the reading and mathematics performance of multilingual students--defined as students who report a primary home language or languages other than English. Although all students' scores improved, multilingual students' scores improved two to…

Self-regulatory interventions have demonstrated numerous benefits for helping improve the academic performance of students. The purpose of this review was to report on the effectiveness and focus of academic self-regulation interventions for children and adolescents with emotional and behavioural disorders. Thirty-six studies published in 35…

Reading skills assessments have demonstrated that middle-grade Mississippi school children are on average two full grade levels or more below grade reading levels. This qualitative case study in one urban county Mississippi school district with decreasing literacy scores examined teachers' perceptions of evidence-based literacy instruction…

We exploit within-teacher variation in the years that teachers host an apprentice ("student teacher") in Washington State to estimate the causal effect of these apprenticeships on student achievement, both during the apprenticeship and afterwards. The average causal effect of hosting a student teacher on student performance in the year…

Efforts to understand growth and disparities in science achievement have mainly been focused on the middle and high school grades in studies of K-12 science education, leaving a gap in the research about the early elementary years. This study used a nationally-representative sample of students in Grades K-2 to examine science achievement and…