Children in Florida who will be 4 years old on or before September 1st of the school year are eligible to attend a Voluntary Prekindergarten Education Program (VPK), provided by either the public school districts or other private providers, regardless of family income. There are several different VPK programs, including Head Start, Title I, and…

Transitional Kindergarten (TK) is a relatively recent entrant into the U.S. early education landscape, combining features of public pre-K and regular kindergarten. We provide the first estimates of the impact of Michigan's TK program on 3rd grade test scores. Using an augmented regression discontinuity design, we find that TK improves 3rd grade…

Concerns about low mathematics achievement have created a push to increase national mathematics proficiency levels through research and policy. Efforts have largely focused on early mathematics interventions for students with or at risk for mathematics learning difficulties implemented within multi-tiered response to intervention (RTI) frameworks.…

The purpose of this study was to analyze the impact on student performance due to participation in the Catapult Learning Intervention program in the Mathematics and Reading services offered in a religious non-public school system in the Northeastern United States from grades K-2. Scaled scores from the NWEA MAP assessments administered at the…

Understanding how to intensify an intervention is critical to implementing response-to-intervention (RtI), a tiered, problem-solving framework to deliver evidence-based interventions per student needs. Research and practice guidelines provide conflicting recommendations for delivering math interventions (i.e., treatment intensity) within RtI. The…

This study aims to examine whether a maths-unrelated reading intervention can improve children's mathematical performance and to compare the effects of maths-related and maths-unrelated reading interventions. Furthermore, this study examines whether the effects of reading interventions are moderated by individual differences, including gender,…

Early mathematics achievement sets the stage for a range of important academic and career outcomes. As efforts to improve elementary mathematics instruction have increased, efforts to better understand how students develop mathematics knowledge and why students respond to mathematics instruction have also emerged. Given known correlations between…

This paper presents evidence of the effects of dual language immersion (DLI) programs on the academic outcomes of students in elementary grades. Leveraging enrollment lotteries from four cohorts of DLI applicants across 10 oversubscribed programs, analyses estimate the intent-to-treat effect of access to bilingual education on reading and math…

This report focuses on Harlingen Consolidated Independent School District's 2022-2023 implementation of "My Math Academy" with Kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grade students across its 17 elementary schools. Students' program usage has been associated with significant improvements on CIRCLE Progress Monitoring Assessment System (pre-K) and on…

This brief highlights Harlingen Consolidated Independent School District's 2021-2022 implementation of "My Math Academy" with kindergarteners across 16 elementary schools. The district started using the program with pre-kindergarteners in school year 2020-2021, and upon seeing 98 percent of pre-kindergarteners end the school year on…

With over two decades of research showing a close association between working memory (WM) and maths performance, WM training has been suggested as one way to supplement conventional remedial instructions. Although initial findings were promising, recent reviews have found that training typically resulted in WM improvement but no transfer to maths…

We conducted a randomized control trial assessing the effects of two variants of word-problem intervention with third graders (n = 304) experiencing mathematics difficulty. Students were assigned to a business-as-usual condition (BaU) or one of two variants of word-problem intervention. One variant included a pre-algebraic reasoning component…

Transitional Kindergarten (TK) is a relatively new model of early childhood education, with little evidence on whether and how it affects children's development. This study provides new evidence using data from Michigan, which has the nation's second-largest TK program. Using survey data (N=171) from administrators in 2021-2022, the paper…

Fidget spinners have become popular worldwide, due not only to their popularity with children but also to the mental health claims made by those who advertise them. While a small number of previous research studies indicate that fidget spinners reduce on-task behavior, no research to date has evaluated their effect on student performance. The…

This report focuses on the 2023-2024 implementation of "My Math Academy" at Epic Charter Schools in Oklahoma. "My Math Academy" was first used with a small pilot group of students and educators at the charter school network in school year 2022-2023, and based on the initial positive results, the implementation of the program…