This REL West study explores the prevalence of students repeating Algebra I, who is most likely to repeat the course, and the level of improvement for students who repeat. Using six years of data from a cohort of 3,400 first-time seventh grade students in a California school district, authors found that 44 percent of students repeated algebra I.…

"The Daily 5, Second Edition" retains the core literacy components that made the first edition one of the most widely read books in education and enhances these practices based on years of further experience in classrooms and compelling new brain research. The Daily 5 system provides a way for any teacher to structure literacy (and now…

Family educational involvement is consistently and positively associated with child achievement, but little work has closely examined the involvement practices of families of color, particularly immigrant families. Utilizing data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort 1998-99 (ECLS-K), this study used Hierarchical Linear…

Given the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, California's history of math acceleration in the middle grades, and the concern for correct math course placement for all students, this brief examines patterns from the past to shed light on considerations for the future. The brief, written by WestEd's Tony Fong and Neal Finkelstein, presents…

The MIND Research Institute contracted with the Evaluation Research Program at WestEd to conduct an independent assessment of mathematics outcomes in elementary school grades across California that were provided with the ST Math program. Spatial-Temporal (ST) Math is a game-based instructional software designed to boost K-5 and secondary-level…

This study focuses on assessing the contribution of ELL services to Spanish-speaking students' mathematics learning in elementary schools. ELL students tend to have lower average math achievement at school entry and throughout elementary school. The term "ELL services" encompasses English-as-a-second-language (ESL) programs, bilingual…

In this paper, three elements of primary pre-service teachers' relationships with mathematics are explored: mathematical achievement, feelings about the subject, and confidence to teach mathematics. At the beginning of their programme, under half of the pre-service teachers did not meet the numeracy requirements and took part in a support…

States across the country are developing systems for evaluating school principals on the basis of student achievement growth. A common approach is to hold principals accountable for the value added of their schools--that is, schools' contributions to student achievement growth. In theory, school value added can reflect not only principals'…

Low performance of African American male students in high school math is an ongoing concern of Maryland's public schools. Because disproportionately large numbers of African American male students enroll in Algebra 2 in Grade 11, the use of early academic counseling to promote enrollment in Algebra 2 in Grade 9 and to increase self-regulation may…

In 2010-2011, the Houston Independent School District (HISD) launched the Apollo 20 Program in four high schools and five middle schools in the district as a "turnaround" initiative with an emphasis on improving student performance in math. The key strategies of the turnaround initiative included having effective principals and effective…

This report discusses the second year of Austin Independent School District's (AISD) High Dosage Tutoring Program: students' progress, program summaries, and participant survey results.

Stories about the importance of teacher effectiveness for student achievement are currently ubiquitous in the media (Gladwell 2008; Kristoff 2009; Felch et al 2010). Teacher quality is also the focus of significant national efforts and investments. A growing body of quantitative research supports the focus on teacher and teacher effectiveness.…

The main purpose of this research is to determine whether the attainment of the number concept by children aged between 4-7 differs depending on age variant as well as receiving preschool education or not. Attainment of the number concept has been examined by means of One-to-One Matching Test consisting of Piaget's experiments. The test was…

This study examines the views of people involved in mathematics education regarding the commonly stated goal of using mathematics learning to develop deductive reasoning that is usable outside of mathematical contexts. The data source includes 21 individual semi-structured interviews. The findings of the study show that the interviewees ascribed…

In an 8-month teaching experiment, I investigated how 4 sixth-grade students reasoned with reversible multiplicative relationships. One type of problem involved a known quantity that was a whole number multiple of an unknown quantity, and students were asked to determine the value of the unknown quantity. To solve these problems, students needed…