We conducted a randomized field trial to test an academic vocabulary intervention designed to bolster the language and literacy skills of linguistically diverse sixth-grade students (N = 2,082; n = 1,469 from a home where English is not the primary language), many demonstrating low achievement, enrolled in 14 urban middle schools. The 20-week…

Out-of-wedlock pregnancy among adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa is a major concern, because of its association with health, social, psychological, economic and demographic factors. This article describes the development of the Teenage Mothers Project, a community-based intervention to improve psychological and social well-being of unmarried…

We conducted a randomized field trial to test an academic vocabulary intervention designed to bolster the language and literacy skills of linguistically diverse sixth-grade students (N = 2082; n = 1469 from a home where English is not the primary language), many demonstrating low achievement, enrolled in 14 urban middle schools. The 20-week…

The concept of "implementation fidelity" is broadly used to capture the extent to which an intervention is executed as intended by the designers of the intervention (Century, Rudnick, & Freeman, 2010; Huntley, 2005, McNaught, Tarr, & Sears, 2010, Munter, 2010). Though implementation fidelity instruments are often used to assess…

Change in schools is ever present. This study looks at change in regard to the implementation of Response to Intervention. Response to Intervention is being implemented in schools around the country. With this implementation come many changes to a school--in the administration, the faculty, and the students. Very little research exists concerning…

Response to Intervention (RtI) has been heralded as having significant promise for improving outcomes, reducing disproportional placement in special education, and making education more culturally responsive for culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) youth. This article reviews the major recent empirical and qualitative research findings with…

Background: Effectiveness research is maturing as a field within intervention and prevention science. Effectiveness research involves the implementation and evaluation of the effectiveness of the dissemination of evidence-based interventions in everyday circumstances (i.e., type 2 translational research). Effectiveness research is characterized by…

Children's challenging behaviors can be addressed with effective interventions that can meet children's emotional needs and support their families. Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) value the family involvement in the process of their child treatment. The intention of this study was to use concept mapping as an adjunct to PBIS…

This article describes the initial implementation of an innovative program for elementary-age children involving origami and pop-up paper engineering to promote visuospatial thinking. While spatial ability measures correlate with science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) success, a focus on spatial thinking is all but missing in elementary…

Response to Intervention (RTI) has been one of the most significant developments in the history of educational reform, requiring a renewed focus on evidence-based instruction and data-driven decisions. However, the current use of RTI as a means of identifying students with SLD is highly variable across states, bringing to focus several issues that…

The problems addressed by this study are (a) the significant rise in specific learning disabilities referrals and identification and (b) the inability to identify effective strategies for reducing the number of referrals and identification using Rtl models in fifth and sixth grades. A review of the literature indicated a compelling need to study…

The purpose of this study is to share teachers' perceptions of their and other stakeholders' roles and influence during the implementation of an instructional policy, the Targeted Reading Intervention (TRI), and its success. The TRI is a professional development (PD) program that uses a diagnostic reading model, a suggested set of reading…

Reading Recovery (RR) is a short-term early intervention designed to help the lowest-achieving readers in first grade reach average levels of classroom performance in literacy. Students identified to receive Reading Recovery meet individually with a specially trained Reading Recovery (RR) teacher every school day for 30-minute lessons over a…

The concepts of professional learning communities and organizational disciplines support staff development and leadership that lead to sustainable systems. Little research has examined the ability of rural schools to achieve sustainable systems. This quantitative design study considered the relationships between predictor variables of…

This presentation focuses on an initial evaluation study of Math Recovery (MR), a pullout, one-to-one tutoring program that has been designed to increase mathematics achievement among low-performing first graders, thereby closing the school-entry achievement gap and enabling participants to achieve at the level of their higher-performing peers in…