Recent research on statewide voucher programs in Louisiana and Indiana has found that public school students that received vouchers to attend private schools subsequently scored lower on reading and math tests compared to similar students that remained in public schools. The magnitudes of the negative impacts were large. A case to use taxpayer…

Game-based practice within Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) can be optimized by examining how properties of practice activities influence learning outcomes and motivation. In the current study, we manipulated when game-based practice was available to students. All students (n = 149) first completed lesson videos in iSTART-2, an ITS focusing on…

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a system of international assessments that allows countries to compare outcomes of learning as students near the end of compulsory schooling. PISA measures the performance of 15-year-old students in science, reading, and mathematics literacy every 3 years. PISA uses the term…

This study examines the effects of the summer period on value-added assessment (VAA) of teacher and school performance at the early grades. The results indicate that 40-62% of the variance in VAA estimates originates from the summer, depending on the outcome. Furthermore, when summer is omitted from the VAA model, 51-61% of the teachers and 58-61%…

In this study, we examined the role of morphology, an important yet largely understudied source of difficulty, in reading ability among 7th grade students in one junior high school in the southwestern United States. We sought to find out how much variance in reading ability is accounted for by these students' morphological knowledge, and whether…

The purpose of this study was to determine the efficacy of systematic explicit instruction of a questioning strategy for improving the text comprehension of middle school students. Specifically, the reading comprehension of six 8th grade students was investigated to determine whether the questioning strategy, QtA, lead to an increase in the…

Background: Prior research has shown that test anxiety is negatively related to academic buoyancy, but it is not known whether test anxiety is an antecedent or outcome of academic buoyancy. Furthermore, it is not known whether academic buoyancy is related to performance on high-stakes examinations. Aims: To test a model specifying reciprocal…

This study investigated associations among third-grade teachers' (N = 27) symptoms of depression, quality of the classroom-learning environment (CLE), and students' (N = 523, M[subscript age] = 8.6 years) math and literacy performance. teachers' depressive symptoms in the winter negatively predicted students' spring mathematics achievement. This…

The present research aimed to examine young and older adults' comprehension of negated text to determine the locus of older adults' difficulty in understanding this text construction. Participants were asked to read short passages at their own pace, complete a lexical decision task, and answer a comprehension question about what they had read.…

Since No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was enacted into federal law in 2002, states have been required to test students in grades 3 through 8 and again in high school to assess math and reading achievement. The federal law also asks states to establish the performance level students must reach on the exams in order to be identified as…

This column explains three ways that teachers can improve reading test performance. Basically, the idea is that instead of teaching students to respond to particular question types as is typical of test preparation despite the ineffectiveness of this practice, it is better to teach students to read the test passages more effectively. Three…

We use rich longitudinally matched administrative data on students and teachers in North Carolina to examine the patterns of differential effectiveness by teachers' years of experience. The paper contributes to the literature by focusing on middle school teachers and by extending the analysis to student outcomes beyond test scores. Once we control…

During the 2014-2015 school year, the Houston Independent School District (HISD) Family and Community Engagement (FACE) Department implemented a parent engagement program in 24 elementary schools. Most schools began implementation of the program in grades 3 through 5, although some chose to include PK through 5. Grades 3 through 5 students were…

A vertical score scale is needed to measure growth across multiple tests in terms of absolute changes in magnitude. Since the warrant for subsequent growth interpretations depends upon the assumption that the scale has interval properties, the validation of a vertical scale would seem to require methods for distinguishing interval scales from…

Research on the effectiveness of educational interventions usually is based on samples of students who remain in the same school over time. In contrast, most students transfer schools at least once during their K-12 school career, not including normative transfers such as those from elementary to middle school (Rumberger, 2002). Even when looking…