There is considerable variability in the literacy assessments taken in Kindergarten through second grade, across schools and between multilingual learners and other students, and within students over time. This makes it difficult to study changes in students' acquisition of ELA skills in these formative years, or to evaluate policies and practices…

Complex research questions often need large samples to obtain accurate estimates of parameters and adequate power. Combining extant data sets into a large, pooled data set is one way this can be accomplished without expending resources. Measurement invariance (MI) modeling is an established approach to ensure participant scores are on the same…

Connections is one of the Process Standards set forth by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM 2000), whereby teachers provide students with learning opportunities to "recognize and apply mathematics in contexts outside of mathematics." Similarly, the Standards for Mathematical Practice (NGA Center and CCSSO 2010) call…

Grade retention, the practice of holding a student back in the same grade, has been a controversial topic in the United States for decades. English learners, a growing population in US schools, are consistently identified for grade retention more often than their English-only counterparts. The purpose of this study is to test the impact of grade…

In a randomized trial that collects text as an outcome, traditional approaches for assessing treatment impact require that each document first be manually coded for constructs of interest by human raters. An impact analysis can then be conducted to compare treatment and control groups, using the hand-coded scores as a measured outcome. This…

A significant number of U.S. students are unable to read proficiently by fourth grade, and over two billion dollars are spent each year on students who repeat a grade due to reading problems. The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to examine novice elementary teachers' perspectives of their self-efficacy in using adaptive instructional…

In an effort to reduce viral transmission, many schools are planning to reduce class size if they have not reduced it already. Yet the effect of class size on transmission is unknown. To determine whether smaller classes reduce school absence, especially when community disease prevalence is high, we merge data from the Project STAR randomized…

With developing technology statistical information and data sources become a very important issues and from primary school it has become necessary to gain the skills for making interpreting and making sense of data. These skills consist of collecting information, arrangement and analysis of collected data and the interpretation of the results. The…

One of the challenges many learning scientists face is the laborious task of coding large amounts of video data and consistently identifying social actions, which is time consuming and difficult to accomplish in a systematic and consistent manner. It is easier to catalog observable behaviours (e.g., body motions or gaze) without explicitly…

This study reports on the statistical content of five U.S. textbook series written for elementary students in grades 1-5. The researchers examined 17,688 pages and coded 7445 statistical tasks to determine (1) the distribution of statistical topics within textbooks, and (2) the relative emphasis on the phases of the statistical problem solving…

This study was undertaken to design, evaluate and refine an eBook-feature that supports students' decoding of unfamiliar text. The feature supports students' independent reading of eBooks with text-to-speech, graded support in the form of syllabification and rhyme analogy, and by dividing the word material into different categories based on the…

The purpose of this study is to contribute to efforts to improve methods for gathering and analyzing data from classroom observations in early literacy. The methodological approach addresses current problems of reliability and validity of classroom observations by taking into account differences in teachers' uses of instructional actions (e.g.,…

During the semester break, 36 second-grade students accessed a set of resources and completed a series of online math activities focused on the application of the model method for arithmetic in two contexts 1) addition/subtraction and 2) multiplication/division. The learning environment first modeled and then supported the use of a scripted series…

This paper introduces a revised model for the development of basic computation skills. The model draws on four key phases, which have proven to be important for the development of calculation strategies and stresses the use of gestures and the verbalisation of concrete and mental images. This seems to be of crucial importance for children with…

Although many studies have focused on the importance of school composition for student achievement, there is still no consensus on "whether" school composition matters to student achievement, and, if so, "why". Therefore, the present study investigates the association between school composition and mathematics achievement at…