This study examines what forms of data school leaders use, how they matter for students' learning, and which school contexts matter for such leadership practices to succeed. Utilizing hierarchical linear modeling, we analyzed survey responses from 1,381 school leaders and administrative data from 269 Florida schools. We find that although school…

Accurate and efficient universal screening is a foundational component of multi-tiered systems of support for reading. By the time students reach middle school, educators often have extant data available to inform screening decisions. Therefore, the decision to collect additional data to inform screening should be considered carefully. The…

This study investigated the process of instructional change required to translate data on student progress along learning trajectories (LTs) into relevant instructional modifications. Researchers conducted a professional development session on ratio LTs, which included analyzing 3 years of district-level data from Math-Mapper 6-8, a digital…

Literacy is an essential life skill, and adolescents need strong literacy skills to succeed in secondary schools and beyond. Low literacy achievement in the middle grades puts students, particularly students with disabilities (SWD), at a disadvantage heading into high school and can lead to negative outcomes such as dropping out. The intention of…

Rubrics can be used to give students targeted feedback on their writing and, therefore, teachers should be able to use them as a type of formative assessment to guide writing instruction. This article describes an exploratory study of how three teachers provided instruction for fourth, fifth, and seventh graders with learning disabilities and…

The College and Career Readiness Expansion project was a five-year, federally funded effort to implement early college strategies in comprehensive high schools. This report presents the results from a quasi-experimental impact study of the project and a mixed methods examination of its implementation. Results showed that the program increased the…

This playbook draws from the findings of "Gaining Ground in the Middle Grades," the largest empirical study of this grade level conducted to date. The "Gaining Ground in the Middle Grades" study was designed to find out what higher-performing schools do differently. The result is a compelling set of specific, actionable…