E3 Alliance is a regional, data-driven education collaborative based in Austin, Texas. They are helping to build the strongest educational pipeline in the country to drive regional economic prosperity. They are focused on educational systems change, and use data to inform those efforts. Given that their approach to supporting educational…

This Research Brief describes a model developed as an alternative method for making ESOL exit decisions in 2019-2020. Given the cancellation of the 2019-2020 Statewide student assessment, FSA ELA results which are used as one of the two major components for making ESOL exit decisions will not be available, and an alternative method is needed. This…

English Language Learner (EL) students in the district's two main bilingual programs (Transitional and Dual Language) are instructed in both English and Spanish. The relative amount of instruction in each language depends on both program and grade level. In the Transitional bilingual program, students receive primary language instruction for…

Important educational policy decisions, like whether to shorten or extend the school year, often require accurate estimates of how much students learn during the year. Yet, related research relies on a mostly untested assumption: that growth in achievement is linear throughout the entire school year. We examine this assumption using a data set…

It is a commonly held belief among educational practitioners that students in classrooms practicing Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) principles have greater academic growth throughout the school year. This study examined 174 unique classroom settings and correlated the results of 4146 third grade students' responses from a survey about the…

Although strong claims have been made regarding the educational utility of eye tracking, such statements seem somewhat unfounded in the absence of clear evidence regarding the technical adequacy of eye movement (EM) data. Past studies have yielded direct and indirect evidence concerning the utility of EMs as measures of reading, but recent…

Although numerous studies have described the educational attainment of ethnic minorities in the UK, few have focused specifically on children born in the UK to two immigrant parents. First, using ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation, this article examines the cognitive assessment scores of children of immigrants in the 1970 British Cohort Study…

The purpose of the present study was to examine the relationship between reading literacy and age in an adult population aged 25 to 65 in Nordic countries using PIAAC 2012 data. More specifically, the study examined to what extent variations in the literacy proficiency of adults are explained by age and the recentness of qualifications when…

This report highlights the results of Austin ISD 4th- and 8th-grade students on the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation's Report Card.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether teacher-selected informational texts or student-selected informational texts best contribute to literacy achievement and engagement for middle-level males and to examine middle-level males' perception of the relationship between masculine performance and literacy practice. For the purposes of this…

Music education has been shown to be related to a variety of positive outcomes, including student achievement in math. This study was conducted to examine the effect of integrating Hip Hop Literacy songs on fourth grade reading achievement scores. The framework for the study was Miendlarzweska and Trost's model of musical instrument training.…

This action research describes the influence of the research-based program, "Reading Workshop," based on student reading achievement, specifically, in one third-grade South Carolina summer reading camp classroom. Guiding the research, the problem of practice arose from the passing of South Carolina's Act 284, which states that school…

Combining Bachman's (1990) conceptualization of content validity with Messick's (1989) unifying model of construct validity, this study attempted to fill the gap in researching content validation in the context of a university reading achievement test by (a) examining traditional content validity evidence and (b) analyzing the test scores to…

Academic progress monitoring is essential when implementing Individualized Education Programs for students with learning disabilities and more generally in a multi-tiered system of supports framework. Although students' progress is monitored frequently in schools today, these students often are not actively involved in this practice. Research has…

Reading motivation may elucidate discrepancies in reading achievement among multilingual high school students whose first language is Spanish. Utilizing a person-centered approach to investigate underlying reading motivation profiles among N = 174 adolescent native Spanish speakers (NSS), analyses yielded three latent profiles of reading…