Students often have difficulty comprehending informational text. Results from a meta-analysis by Hebert, Bohaty, Nelson and Brown (2016) indicated that text structure instruction is effective for improving reading comprehension of expository text. This article presents evidence-based practices for teaching informational text structures to improve…

Teacher leaders are positioned to help other teachers reflect on their practice, try new pedagogical approaches, and work through instruction-related struggles--ultimately, leading to a change in instructional practice. In order to be effective in their new leadership roles, however, teacher leaders need support in developing leadership skills and…

The purpose of this brief is to support stakeholders in their efforts to influence how states use the mandatory 7 percent Title I school improvement set-aside in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)--an allocation that could total more than $5 billion nationwide over the next five years. First, the authors provide an overview of the ESSA's school…

To improve struggling schools, Louisiana school systems are required to develop an evidence-based improvement plan for each struggling school and engage families and local stakeholders in the development of the plan. To create a strong plan for the upcoming school year, school systems should analyze their results and prioritize their needs, plan…

One of the broad intents of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) as amended by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) is to encourage evidence-based decision-making as a way of doing business. Nonregulatory guidance issued in September 2016 by the U.S. Department of Education (ED) clarifies and expands on both the nature of…

This report is drafted with state leaders and policy makers in mind, including those who work with or support these education leaders. The information shared in this report will likely be most relevant to states that have either not yet considered a new data system on teacher preparation providers, are only now starting to consider the idea, or…

The landscape of teacher leadership in school improvement is a changing landscape that is getting more complex over time. As teachers are expected to take on more roles school improvement efforts, there is a particular need to know if and how they are prepared to meet the increasing demands of their jobs. This paper discusses the role of teacher…

The purpose of this evaluation was to assess the impact of the Houston Independent School District's (HISD) Read Houston Read (RHR) on the reading levels of first-grade students. Students were assessed using Benchmark Reading Record (BRR) that was aligned to leveled books and Fountas and Pinnell Reading Levels. Descriptive statistics were used to…

Staff and students coming together to enhance learning is a key educational challenge facing the higher education sector. Literature proposes different ways of achieving this through co-creation, partnership, and collaboration. This paper focuses solely on staff perspectives of a staff-student partnership project aimed at improving feedback…

This paper argues that the dynamic model of educational effectiveness can be used to establish stronger links between educational effectiveness research (EER) and school improvement. It provides research evidence to support the validity of the model. Thus, the importance of using the dynamic model to establish an evidence-based and theory-driven…

The process of building a culture of evidence involves using data to understand where students are experiencing problems, designing strategies for remedying those problems, implementing them, and then evaluating the effectiveness of those implemented strategies. This case study is about two programs that were implemented within the last two years…

The challenge in education field these days rises as the cause of society's expectation for higher education. This increasingly complex expectation demands that higher education prepares the students to gain integrity. Higher education provides not only hard skills for the student, but also soft skills. By observing the hard skills side, in the…

Stimulus equivalence procedures have been used to teach course material in higher education in the laboratory and in the classroom. The current study was a systematic replication of Walker, Rehfeldt, and Ninness (2010), who used a stimulus equivalence procedure to train information pertaining to 12 disorders. Specifically, we conducted (a) a…

This study investigated the extent of problems of strategic plans implementation for secondary schools' improvement in Anambra State, Nigeria for quality education provision. The study used a descriptive survey design paradigm. Respondents comprised 217 principals. There was no sampling. All the principals were used. Data were collected using…

In October 2014, the US Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights issued a clarion call to school districts and states to review their policies and practices in order to ensure they are equitably providing educational resources to their schools. The quality of classroom instruction and the quality of the organizational systems supporting…