This quantitative study investigated whether teachers' perceptions on principal leadership, teacher leadership, student discipline, and teacher retention exhibited significant differences based on two school conditions: school growth status and school performance grade in low-performing elementary schools across North Carolina. The study analyzed…

This paper investigates the differential effectiveness of teachers across student populations, with a focus on gifted and talented (GT) students. Using data from Los Angeles, we estimate teacher effectiveness (proxied by value-added measures (VAMs) of teachers' contributions to student achievement growth) for GT students and examine how they are…

There is no final consensus regarding which covariates should be used (in addition to prior achievement) when estimating value-added (VA) scores to evaluate a school's effectiveness. Therefore, we examined the sensitivity of evaluations of schools' effectiveness in math and language achievement to covariate selection in the applied VA model. Four…

Background: Since the COVID-19 pandemic, American students have demonstrated substantial losses in achievement (Amplify, 2021; Domingue et al., 2021; Dorn et al., 2020; Storey & Zhang, 2023), while chronic absenteeism doubled after the pandemic, with the largest increase among low-income students (Chang et al., 2022; Dorn et al., 2021). Among…

Writing proficiency is a global educational challenge, particularly in diverse student populations. This study examined the effectiveness of a multi-component intervention based on the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) framework, incorporating graphic organizers, storytelling, and positive reinforcement. Peer tutoring was later integrated…

Helping students engage with complex texts has been a longstanding challenge, though teachers have received little guidance about practices that help students in engaging with texts. This paper provides a range of empirical evidence about a tool designed to provide formative insight into text-focused teaching, which we used to reliably score more…

As students' reading proficiency gaps persist across the United States, educational leaders have turned to alternative methods to foster effective instructional literacy practices. One approach to combat this dilemma is the implementation of scripted reading programs. The purpose of the study was to investigate the impact of scripted reading…

This study introduces the signal weighted teacher value-added model (SW VAM), a value-added model that weights student-level observations based on each student's capacity to signal their assigned teacher's quality. Specifically, the model leverages the repeated appearance of a given student to estimate student reliability and sensitivity…

Panel or grouped data are often used to allow for unobserved individual heterogeneity in econometric models via fixed effects. In this paper, we discuss identification of a panel data model in which the unobserved heterogeneity both enters additively and interacts with treatment variables. We present identification and estimation methods for…

Low-socioeconomic status (SES), minority, and male students perform worse than their high-SES, non-minority, and female peers on standardized tests. This paper investigates how within-school differences in school quality contribute to these educational achievement gaps. Using individual-level data on the universe of public-school students in…

Typically, more primary students qualify for mathematics intervention support than schools have the capacity to assist. This highlights the importance of every primary mathematics teacher having the expertise to design inclusive and responsive curricula and instruction for students who may experience difficulty. Our study addresses this issue…

Background: Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is a European innovative interdisciplinary educational convergence that intends to promote multilingual competence among students through the learning of the subjects in a second/foreign language. This approach is considered one of the significant developments in the field of education.…

We examine the relationship between absenteeism and achievement since the onset of COVID-19. Applying first-differences models to North Carolina administrative data, we estimate that each absence was associated with a 0.0032 standard deviation (SD) decline in math achievement in 2022-23. As students averaged 3.3 more absences in 2022-23 than…

Does student-teacher match quality exist? Prior work has documented large disparities in teachers' impacts across student types but has not distinguished between sorting and causal effects as the drivers of these disparities. I propose a disparate value-added model and derive a novel measure of teacher quality--revealed comparative advantage--that…