Purpose: Writing is an essential skill that secondary students need to establish for success in their further education, careers, and lives. However, most secondary students in the United States do not achieve the level of writing proficiency expected to ensure academic and future success. One approach that is emerging more in the research…

State education agencies are sitting on rich repositories of quantitative and qualitative assessment data. This document is designed to provide a conceptual framework and implementation guidance that can help agency leadership leverage and interrogate student performance data in systematic ways for reporting, outreach, and planning purposes. The…

The racial achievement gap is one of the most persistent and pervasive issues in educational research. Unfortunately, the current research on Black student achievement lacks empirical studies that address the academic strengths and challenges facing Black girls. Specifically, there is a dearth of resources in the form of books, articles, and…

The United States and much of the world is struggling with what "education" and being "educated" mean. Daily media are replete with debates on issues ranging from gender and class rights to the ideological and practical purpose of education. Prominent among these debates are discussions about whether education should be geared…

IES is the primary research, evaluation, and statistics arm of the U.S. Department of Education. Established through the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 (ESRA), the Institute's mission is to expand fundamental knowledge and understanding of education and to provide education leaders and practitioners, parents and students, researchers, and…

The Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education (MBAE) continues its advocacy for Common Core and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), a federally funded testing consortium, with the release of a study concluding that Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) performance is not an indicator of…

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…

For more than four decades the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has tracked the achievement of U.S. students in major academic subjects. This national resource is the only assessment that states and now many urban districts can look to as an objective yardstick of their performance over time, relative to national benchmarks, and…

The 2013 study, "Does Working Memory Moderate the Effects of Fraction Intervention? An Aptitude-Treatment Interaction," examined the impacts of the fluency and conceptual versions of "Fraction Face-Off!," a math instruction program designed to improve knowledge of fractions and decimals in fourth-graders at risk for low…

Despite calls for research-based policies, other types of evidence also influence education policy, including personal experience, professional expertise, and normative values. This article focuses on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) initiative, examining how research use varied over stages of the process and how it was integrated with other…

Assuming that quality science education plays a role in economic growth within a country, it becomes important to understand how education policy might influence science education teaching and learning. This integrative research review draws on Cooper's methodology (Cooper, 1982; Cooper & Hedges, 2009) to synthesize empirical findings on the…

By the upper elementary grades, writing becomes an essential tool both for learning and for showing what you know. Students who struggle significantly with writing are at a terrible disadvantage. Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicate that only 25% of students can be classified as competent writers; students with…

The Coleman report, "Equality of Educational Opportunity," is the fountainhead for those committed to evidence-based education policy. Remarkably, this 737-page tome, prepared 50 years ago by seven authors under the leadership of James S. Coleman, still gets a steady 600 Google Scholar citations per year. But since its publication, views…

Indicators of many kinds are used to monitor critical aspects of national life and inform public policy. These include economic indicators, health indicators, and demographic indicators. For more than a decade, the National Assessment Governing Board has been conducting research to determine the potential of the National Assessment of Educational…

The educational achievement and attainment of young people in the United States has been a long-standing issue of concern. While analyses of long-term trend data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show that students in the United States have made gains in reading and mathematics over the past few decades, a sizeable…