The academic achievement gap is a persistent and pernicious educational challenge confounded with race and socioeconomic status. The achievement gap persists despite over three decades of interventions and federal, state, and local policies and initiatives meant to close it. We examine the achievement gap in one of the most diverse states in the…

Employing a social capital framework, this study investigates teachers' role in influencing the peer dynamics between English learners (ELs) and their non-EL peers. Participants include 713 students (211 EL students). Observed teacher-student interaction quality and teacher self-reports of their peer network management were used to operationalize…

Spanning the course of two decades, educational leaders have invested government finances into the social-emotional needs of adolescents. Government programs provide student questionnaires to survey the scholastic climate from students' perceptions. Previous research discusses the correlation between students' perception and their success in…

Prior work has shown that levels of self-reported student social-emotional learning (SEL) predict student achievement levels--as well as student achievement gains--but little has been done to understand if within-student changes in student reports of SEL are predictive of changes in theoretically related academic and behavioral outcomes. We use…

In this multi-year study, we taught English/Language Arts teachers of students with Learning Disabilities in middle school to incorporate 15 minutes of daily vocabulary activities with students in their intact special education English/Language Arts classes. During Year 1, teachers taught 48 words to their sixth grade students, who learned and…

A decade ago, states across the nation adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in an effort to raise the academic bar for their students. This has provoked countless political battles since then--including an especially intense one in Florida. That fight culminated in Governor Ron DeSantis vowing to eliminate and replace the Common Core,…

Arts integration in school-based curriculum has been an area of interest in the United States since formal schooling began in the 1800s. Arts integration uses art forms such as, visual arts, music, drama, or dance with a language arts, math, science, and/or social studies curriculum. This article examines nine studies that assessed the effects of…

Prior research suggests that males outperform females, on average, on multiple-choice items compared to their relative performance on constructed-response items. This paper characterizes the extent to which gender achievement gaps on state accountability tests across the United States are associated with those tests' item formats. Using roughly 8…

To better understand the impacts of participatory design in English language arts teacher education, this critical case study focuses on the National Writing Project's Connected Learning Massive, Open, Online Collaboration (CLMOOC) that engaged educators in playing with the connected learning framework. The authors draw from 5 years of interaction…

This article is about language corrections in Israeli Hebrew-speaking primary classrooms. The ideological significance of language corrections, particularly within the highly contested context of Israeli society and Modern Hebrew, underlies the current study. Teachers in Israeli, Hebrew-speaking classes were found to frequently correct not only…

This article examines how elementary public school teachers in South Texas are implementing a balanced literacy approach in light of the expectations of accountability for student performance. For more than three decades, Texas schools have felt, and continue to feel, the pressure of accountability. Therefore, it becomes essential to investigate…

This paper examines the impact of the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program on student achievement for low-income students in upper elementary and middle school who used a voucher to transfer from public to private schools during the first four years of the program. We analyzed student-level longitudinal data from public and private schools taking…

A Substantial body of research on "struggling" or "at-risk" readers has mostly focused on identifying children and developing and testing interventions aimed at remediating children's perceived deficiencies. Research has generally assumed that a reading (dis)ability is an intrinsic and hereditary condition that children embody.…

Higher order thinking skills have been embedded into state teaching standards, including Standard 9 of the New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards (NJCCCS) for 21st Century Life and Careers. These standards aim to encourage problem solving, critical thinking, reasoning, and real-world application in order to prepare students for the workplace…

In this paper, the authors present qualitative data -- vignettes -- that describe how the professional learning systems and structures have changed for some of California's educators in recent years: organization of teachers within schools as professional learning hubs, management by school principals of the instructional mission, navigation by…