Field trips to see theater performances are a long-standing educational practice; however, there is little systematic evidence demonstrating educational benefits. This article describes the results of five random assignment experiments spanning 2 years where school groups were assigned by lottery to attend a live theater performance or, for some…

Policymakers, experts and advocates have promoted many different types of education reform over the past few decades, but what is the evidence about the efficacy of these programs? EdChoice partnered with Hanover Research to find out what research has been conducted in nine major education reform areas focusing on outcomes related to student…

Taking a college entrance exam such as the ACT™ or SAT™ can be an important step in the college-going process. Although overall, 1 out of 10 students who register for the ACT on a national test date are absent on their registered test day, the absentee rate (at 21%) for students who registered with a fee waiver is substantially higher than the…

This report summarizes the results of a cluster-randomized field trial that estimated the effect of "BURST[R]: Reading" on primary grades students' early literacy achievement. BURST is a widely adopted supplemental reading program designed for use with students struggling to acquire early literacy skills and is meant to provide…

The current study employed a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the use of peer tutoring and fluency-based instruction to increase mathematics fluency with addition and subtraction computation skills. Forty-one elementary school students between the ages of eight and 12 years participated in the 8-week study using cross-age peer tutoring, Say…

Home visitation has the potential to improve parent, child, and maternal outcomes and has become a widely implemented prevention program across the United States. The purpose of this research was to use a randomized controlled trial to assess the short-term effectiveness of the Arizona Healthy Families program across a range of outcomes. Two…

Improving academic, behavioural, and social outcomes of students through empirical research has been a firm commitment among researchers, policy-makers, and other professionals in education across Europe and the United States (U.S.). To assist in building scientific evidences, executive bodies such as the European Commission and the Institute for…

Purpose: This multiyear experimental study was designed to examine (1) the causal impact of McREL International's Balanced Leadership® Professional Development (BLPD) program on school principals' learning, beliefs, and behaviors and (2) whether there were differences in the types of outcomes the professional development influenced. Outcomes…

We present main effects of treatment and moderating effects of student background on science and engineering outcomes for grades 3-5 children participating in an engineering intervention. Data is from a large-scale randomized-controlled trial of two matched pairs (intervention and comparison) of engineering units. The intervention curriculum…

The study purpose was to examine the impact of the Harvest of the Month (HOTM) program on fruit and vegetable (FV) consumption, FV preferences, other eating behaviors, physical activity and other variables related to healthy eating. A clustered randomized controlled trial was employed in 28 elementary schools. After parental consent was obtained,…

Muralidharan and Sundararaman report a randomised controlled trial of a school voucher experiment in Andhra Pradesh, India. The headline findings are that there are no significant academic differences between voucher winners and losers in Telugu, mathematics, English, and science/social studies, although because the private schools appear to use…

The purpose of this replication study was to examine the impact of the Teacher Study Group (TSG) professional development in vocabulary on first-grade teachers' knowledge of vocabulary instruction and observed teaching practice, and on students' vocabulary knowledge. Sixty-two schools from 16 districts in four states were randomly assigned to…

This study explores preliminary results from a pedagogical intervention designed to improve instruction for all students, particularly emergent bilinguals in the United States (or English language learners). The study is part of a larger efficacy randomized controlled trial (RCT) of the Instructional Conversation (IC) pedagogy for improving the…

Reading comprehension in the content areas is a challenge for many middle grade students. Text structure-based instruction has yielded positive outcomes in reading comprehension at all grade levels in small and large studies. The text structure strategy delivered via the web, called Intelligent Tutoring System for the Text Structure Strategy…

In 2013-14, the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) launched Achieve3000 as a randomized controlled trial in 16 elementary schools. Achieve3000 is an early literacy program that differentiates non-fiction reading passages based on individual students' Lexile scores. Twoyear results show that Achieve3000 did not have a significant impact on…