This small scale study examined gender differences in self-efficacy. 24 girls and 28 boys aged between 10 and 12 years completed self-efficacy questionnaires and attainment tests. The study was conducted in two primary school classrooms in England and the results indicated that gender differences in self-efficacy were significant with boys holding…

Despite the prevalence of charter schools in the United States, few experimental studies evaluate the impact of charter school attendance on students in the early elementary grades. Using data from a randomized lottery in which kindergarten students and their parents applied to two oversubscribed and well-established charter schools in Denver,…

Background: Most psychologists who study children's reading assume that their hypotheses are relevant to children's success at school. This assumption is rarely tested. Aims: The study's aims were to see whether two successful measures of the processes underlying children's learning to read and write are related to their…

The authors examined the impact of a supplemental reading course on 462 sixth-grade students' reading engagement and performance as compared with 389 students in a control group. They further explored students' cognitive strategy use through think aloud processes with a subset of students who participated in the intervention.…

Reading literacy is the main focus of the international comparative study of PISA 2009 (OECD, "PISA 2009 results: What students know and can do: Student performance in reading, mathematics and science," 2010a) based on the results of which 65 economies were arranged in a league table. PISA also gathers background information which…

Class size and student achievement have been debated for decades. The vast amount of research on this topic is either conflicting or inconclusive. There are large and small scale studies that support both sides of this dilemma (Achilles, Nye, Boyd-Zaharias, Fulton, & Cain, 1994; Glass & Smith, 1979; Slavin, 1989). Class size reduction is a…

Known as "the Nation's Report Card," the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the U. S. Government assessment used since the late 1960s to measure student achievement in many subject areas, including mathematics, reading, science, and United States history. Different subject areas are assessed each year, and data have…

Middle school students who struggle in reading are likely to also experience difficulty in their other subjects in school. A variety of reading intervention programs exist for schools to utilize to increase reading comprehension. The Scholastic READ 180 program is used as part of this study. This small, focused study of 160 students examined the…

The purpose of this two-phase mixed-methods study was to describe the relationship of the ratio of the number of minutes of instructional classroom time to the number of minutes of scheduled unstructured recess time and the reading scores of fourth- and fifth-grade students in Title I schools in the state of Texas. Further, the beliefs of teachers…

Striving adolescent readers often find themselves with little or no support once they enter high school. The success of independent reading programs that target students' reading levels and accommodate student interest at the elementary level is well-documented. As students progress throughout their school years, such freedom is traditionally…

This interim report from the RAND Corporation is the first in what will be a series of research reports based on an ongoing long-term study of foundation-funded schools that are using a variety of approaches to personalized learning. Although the early results are encouraging, the study does not attempt to make claims about which aspects of these…

There has been a rapid increase in the emergence of minority groups during the past few decades in the United States. Hispanics are the largest minority group that has people who speak English as a second language. The increasing proportion of English Language Learning (ELL) students has made it more difficult to maintain high learning standards.…

While faking bad, or the intentional distortion of assessment results, has been studied extensively with self-report measures (Lim & Butcher, 1996; Roskes, 2009), the possible presence of this behavior on direct measures has only just begun to be examined. Previous studies of faking bad on academic measures have been limited to students at the…

Countless policy makers and researchers have flocked to observe the education systems of Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore, which are among the top five performers in the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) 2009 reading assessment. Many visitors have been particularly impressed by the fact that these education systems succeed in…

The purpose of this study was to explore the academic achievement for students with learning disabilities in reading and how to determine if their rate of progress was different from non-disabled students in a sixth-grade language arts inclusion class. The data for this research was gathered from one school district with one middle school. The…