Empirical Education Inc. is the independent evaluator of WestEd's 2012 i3 Development grant for Internet-based Reading Apprenticeship Improving Science Education (iRAISE). This interim report provides an update on the progress of the randomized control trial (RCT) during the 2014-2015 school year. The RCT measures the impact of iRAISE on student…

The purpose of the study was to determine the efficacy of the Class-Wide Function-Related Intervention Teams (CW-FIT) program for improving students' on-task behavior, and increasing teacher recognition of appropriate behavior. The intervention is a group contingency classroom management program consisting of teaching and reinforcing appropriate…

Schools are increasingly using multi-tiered prevention models to address the academic and behavior needs of students. The foundation of these models is the implementation of universal, or Tier 1, practices designed to support the academic and behavioral needs of the vast majority of students. To support teachers in the use of effective Tier 1…

Major sociocultural contexts of learning such as families, communities and schools are imbued with power, and power favours some more than others. Given that schools are important sites of social and cultural reproduction, one of their major tasks is to teach learners to be literate. However, literacy is often viewed only as schooled literacy in…

School districts across the country are struggling with whether--and how--to incorporate multiple measures into teacher evaluation systems. In the District of Columbia, however, the decision has already been made. The D.C. IMPACT system, originally developed under former Chancellor Michelle Rhee, is a rigid, numerically based teacher evaluation…

School districts, as they work to raise the achievement of all students, must maintain a clear focus on student learning and align district work with that focus. This focus and alignment is referred to as coherence, meaning that the various parts of the district are designed so that they work in sync with one another to achieve district goals.…

What principals think new teachers need and provide, and what new teachers say they need and receive are not necessarily the same. Whether this disconnect is merely a difference in perception or reflects actual discrepancies in program planning and implementation, the core issue is that there can be miscommunication about how building principals…

Until recently, few valid and reliable assessments were available to measure young children's mathematics and science learning in a "comprehensive" way. Now, a number of mathematics assessments have been developed and subjected to testing (Klein, Starkey, & Wakeley, 2000; Ginsburg, 2008; Clements & Sarama, 2008), and progress has…

The purpose of this study was to explore the real-world practice of evaluation capacity building (ECB) in the small-medium sized nonprofit context. The study aimed to map the activities, processes, and outcomes of ECB in these nonprofits in light of the competing external and internal evaluation contexts facing nonprofits in an age of…

This qualitative study focuses on the perceptions of two academic deans and their leadership styles. The leadership Behavior Description Questionnaire is used as a frame for analyzing data. Using qualitative methods, observation and interview data were collected. Two themes emerged, Initiating Structure, and Consideration. The Initiating Structure…

This study distinguishes whether substitute teachers enact coping strategies that mitigate the source of work-related stress (problem-centered) or coping strategies that enable them to adapt to stress created by work-related stressors (avoidance-centered). The author gathered data for this analysis by conducting 37 in-depth interviews with…

Check-in/checkout (CICO) is a behavioral intervention that is used to provide systematic feedback about a student's behavior at the beginning and end of each school day. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effectiveness of CICO on decreasing problem behaviors and the collateral effects on mathematics performance for 4 at-risk…

Children have laser-like attention for everything teachers do and say. They are skillful social scientists, learning about themselves, relationships, and the world by carefully observing the people around them. As keen observers, children notice the smallest details of a teacher's body language, tone of voice, and movements. Teachers' interactions…

Background: Studies of engagement in meaningful activity often focus on a short period during the afternoon. The question arises whether this produces different results from studies covering the whole day. Methods: Data collected for 18 individuals using a 20-s momentary time-sample from 08:00 to 19:00 over a number of days for each person were…

Perceptual decision-making is thought to involve a gradual accrual of noisy evidence. Temporal integration of the evidence reduces the relative contribution of dynamic internal noise to the decision variable, thereby boosting its signal-to-noise ratio. We aimed to estimate the internal evidence guiding perceptual decisions over time, using a novel…