School counselors play critical roles in partnerships with faith-based organizations that provide valuable programs for students with economic challenges. This study evaluated the effects of a counselor-led, faith-based, school-family-community partnership on student reading achievement in a high-poverty elementary school. Results indicated…

Theoretical models of word recognition suggest that knowing what a word means makes it easier to learn how to decode it. We tested this hypothesis with at-risk young students, a group that often responds poorly to conventional decoding instruction in which word meaning is not addressed systematically. A total of 53 first graders received explicit…

This article examines inequality in different dimensions of student academic achievement (math, science, and reading) by family background and school context in three East Asian (Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea) and three Western (United States, Germany, and the Czech Republic) nations. Building on Hauser (2009), we develop a novel…

Enjoyment of reading, diversity of reading and metacognitive awareness of reading strategies are cognitive and affective variables pertaining to three facets of reading engagement for students to read happily, widely and skilfully. These have been found to be related to effectiveness in reading instruction. They together form a focus for this…

A recent movement in teacher education research encompasses working with and through theory. In response to the call from Jackson and Mazzei (2013) to use theory to think with data and use data to think with theory, the author hopes to portray the complexities of teacher learning by avoiding models of teacher learning and development that tend to…

The purpose of this quantitative, non-experimental, descriptive study was to determine if participation in project-based learning developed the understanding students need to transfer their knowledge and skills to achieve higher composite and reading scores, as well as demonstrate the ability to read increasingly complex texts on the ACT Aspire as…

Students with Emotional Behavioral Disorders (EBD) are considered the most challenging students to include in the regular education environment. Self-contained classrooms are typically the preferred classroom for students with EBD in comparison to inclusion programs because of the problematic behaviors that are associated with these students.…

When four forces create shift in the landscape of PK-12 education, change in response to the environment is inevitable and necessary. It is such in the United States, as schools face increased accountability for the growth and attainment of reading skills, rigorous demands of the Common Core State Standards, a rapidly growing population of…

One of the critical issues facing middle level educators is making sure we have the types of support in place for providing equitable learning environments for all students and helping them to feel that they belong in school. Literature suggests that a gender gap exists within middle level education today with respect to achievement scores and the…

Reading comprehension is an essential skill for success in school and post-school life. However, despite the importance of this skill, a considerable number of students in the U.S. have shown difficulties in reading comprehension. According to the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) of the National Center for Education…

Curriculum Associates' i-Ready is an adaptive diagnostic and individualized instructional tool that has been used in M-DCPS in the last few years. In addition, in 2016-2017, Curriculum Associates provided the District with results of their predictive model, which used the outcomes of the Fall and Winter i-Ready diagnostic testing to estimate the…

This report compared the academic achievement of prekindergarten students who were enrolled in Houston Independent School District (HISD) early childhood centers (ECC) during the 2015-2016 school year to their peers who attended school-based programs. Academic achievement was measured on the HISD CIRCLE English and Spanish language, literacy, and…

This evaluation compared mean scores and proficiency levels on the 2016--2017 CIRCLE English and Spanish language, literacy, and mathematics assessments between students enrolled in Early Childhood Centers (EECs) with their School-based Program (SBP) peers. The evaluation helped to determine whether there were observable differences in academic…

This paper evaluates potential benefits of the community schools model. The sample consists of 20 Community Schools and 40 comparison schools. Data were obtained from the 2013 Illinois School Report Cards, including demographics, and grade-level ISAT scores by gender and subject. A matched sampling method was used to control for student…

The purpose of this study is was explore the factors that public school administrators felt promoted or inhibited the reading achievement of elementary children. The participants for this study were administrators who were employed at eleven Title I schools in North Carolina. The study used a qualitative design and collected data by phone…