We Learn Together is a 20-week, low-cost infant/toddler school-readiness intervention developed to provide instructional content and supportive tools for teachers to be more explicit and intentional in interactions with children to support early development. Short-term effects were established in a previously published real-world effectiveness…

This study investigates the impact of the Imagine Math program, a digital supplemental learning solution, on math achievement. The research compares the performance of students who used the program with those who did not. Results indicate that users experienced, on average, a statistically significant improvement in their math performance.…

Many novice teachers learn to teach "on the job," leading to burnout and attrition among teachers and negative outcomes for students in the long term. Preservice teacher education is tasked with optimizing teacher readiness, but there is a lack of causal evidence regarding effective ways to prepare new teachers. In this paper, we use a…

Given growing awareness of the high prevalence of food insecurity among college students, higher education leaders are implementing various food interventions on their campuses. However, there is little research on the efficacy and impact of these initiatives. Using data from a field randomized control trial, we find that a relatively modest…

A substantial number of randomized trials of educational interventions that have been conducted over the past two decades have produced null results, with either no impact or an unreliable estimate of impact on student achievement or other outcomes of interest. The investment of time and money spent implementing such trials warrants more useful…

In the current article, we examine the long-run school selection patterns of children randomly assigned to the Chicago School Readiness Project, an early childhood educational (ECE) intervention that aimed to improve the quality of Head Start classrooms serving low-income communities. Analyses suggest that adolescents who participated in the…

Why, when so many educational interventions demonstrate positive impact in tightly controlled efficacy trials, are null results common in follow-up effectiveness trials? Using case studies from literacy, this article suggests that replication failure can surface hidden moderators--contextual differences between an efficacy and an effectiveness…

Grit is a construct that is widely studied by educational researchers and that has generally been enthusiastically received by educational practitioners. This essay highlights that many of the core claims about grit have either been unexamined or are directly contradicted by the accumulated empirical evidence. Specifically, there appears to be no…

Poor program implementation constitutes one explanation for null results in trials of educational interventions. For this reason, researchers often collect data about implementation fidelity when conducting such trials. In this article, we document whether and how researchers report and measure program fidelity in recent cluster-randomized trials.…

Many states mandate districts or schools notify parents when students have missed multiple unexcused days of school. We report a randomized experiment (N = 131,312) evaluating the impact of sending parents truancy notifications modified to target behavioral barriers that can hinder effective parental engagement. Modified truancy notifications that…

The increased use of smartphones and tablets sets the stage for new mobile-based educational programs that seek to increase student learning and engagement in school and at home. This study examines the effectiveness of Escribo Play, a game-enhanced educational program, on preschool students' phonological awareness, word reading, and writing…

This study adds to the limited literature base on extracurricular debate by using doubly robust inverse probability treatment weighting to estimate the average treatment effect for the treated of preadolescent debate participation on a variety of academic and engagement outcomes among a 10-year longitudinal sample of Baltimore City Public School…

Education decision makers routinely make choices among programs and strategies to implement. Policy demands increasingly require that such decisions are based on evidence regarding program effectiveness at improving student outcomes. However, research evidence is but one of the considerations that practitioners must juggle, along with local…

Although the promise of universal social-emotional learning (SEL) programs enhancing student academic outcomes has captured public attention, there has been limited research regarding such programs' impact on students' state test scores. We used multilevel modeling of follow-up data from a multiyear, multisite cluster-randomized efficacy trial to…

One commonly used strategy used in attempts to decrease racial disproportionality in school discipline across the country is sharing data with school administrators that discipline disparities are a problem in their schools with the assumption that it will increase attention to equity and improve outcomes. The purpose of this study was to assess…