Current educational policy promotes the use of evidence-based practices to maximize children's learning outcomes. With the goal of enhancing a child's ability to learn functional language, the purpose of this study was to focus on involving families through the utilization of evidence-based intervention based upon the Applied Behaviour Analysis…

In this paper, we investigated whether student reading comprehension could be improved with help of a teacher Professional Development (PD) program targeting goals, data use, and instruction. The effect of this PD program on 2nd- and 3rd-grade student achievement was examined using a pretest-posttest control group design. Applying propensity score…

Public education is becoming increasingly privatized as private philanthropic organizations, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and corporations, such as Pearson, dominate the policy-making process, and more students enroll in publicly funded but privately administered charter schools. The privatization of education results from the…

School-based improvement programs represent a core strategy in improving education because they can leverage pre-existing social and organizational structures to promote coordinated and comprehensive change across multiple facets of schooling. School-based programs are generally designed to be implemented by intact schools/districts, frequently…

A teacher that emphasizes reasoning, logic and validity gives their students access to mathematics as an effective way of practicing critical thinking. All students have the ability to enhance and expand their critical thinking when learning mathematics. Students can develop this ability when confronting mathematical problems, identifying possible…

Balanced literacy has been proposed as a compromise or middle ground between philosophical approaches to reading instruction that stress teaching of word recognition and those that stress construction of meaning. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the READ 180 balanced literacy supplementary instruction program on…

This paper describes the effects of a professional development (PD) program--Developing Mathematical Thinking--on student achievement. Six Title I elementary schools with similar demographics, within one school district, were chosen to participate as either a treatment or comparison school. Three schools were chosen to participate in professional…

Despite an increasing research interest in subject-specific teacher knowledge, the scientific understanding regarding teachers' professional knowledge for teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) is very limited. This study therefore applies standardized tests to directly assess content knowledge (CK), pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), and…

This study examined the achievement trends of advanced learners and the relationship between Illinois' school district characteristics and student performance using Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) scores. The 3rd grade students scoring in the Exceeds category in ISAT reading and math within 707 Illinois school districts during the…

In a randomized field trial with 2,850 seventh-grade mathematics students, we evaluated whether an educational technology intervention increased mathematics learning. Assigning homework is common yet sometimes controversial. Building on prior research on formative assessment and adaptive teaching, we predicted that combining an online homework…

A recent report from Michigan's Mackinac Center asserts that there is little or no relationship between student achievement and marginal increases to what the report characterizes as the already "high" levels of spending in that state. Yet the report never substantiates its assertion that present spending levels are high, on average, or…

Montana's definition of a basic system of quality public elementary and secondary schools includes educational programs for at-risk students (20-9-309, MCA). State statute defines an at-risk student as a "student who is affected by environmental conditions that negatively impact the student's educational performance or threaten a student's…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how elementary principals perceive their roles in the context of equity and historical inequality in public education. Three elementary principals of three different socio-economically and culturally diverse elementary school districts responded to interviews and questionnaires. They expressed…

Millions of adults in the United States lack the necessary literacy skills for most living wage jobs. For students from adult learning classes, we used a lexical decision task to measure their knowledge of words and we used a decision-making model (Ratcliff's, 1978, diffusion model) to abstract the mechanisms underlying their performance from…

This research study was conducted to examine the effects of the academic achievement of elementary level general education students in the inclusion classroom setting versus the general education students in the non-inclusion classroom in a large suburban school district in Tennessee as measured by third, fourth, and fifth grade mathematics and…