The relevance of academic self-efficacy for educational outcomes is well documented. Pre-academic self-efficacy has hardly been studied, and only one study was found to include an assessment of the measurement invariance of the scale used. The aims were to validate the Pre-Academic Learning Self-Efficacy (PAL-SE) scale in a non-university higher…

Achieving fluency in sightreading--particularly rhythm reading--is cited by researchers as a universally problematic component of formal music education. This study employed an experimental design to examine the efficacy of focused practice on rhythm reading with targeted feedback. College music majors (n = 28) were sent a novel, challenging piece…

Research Findings: Reading e-books is becoming common even among toddlers, but we have limited understanding of how parents-toddlers reading e-books together compares to print books. To address the gap, we investigated interactions of 30 mother-toddler (12 months) dyads, in particular, mothers' language use, while reading both electronic and print…

Item response theory (IRT) is a popular method to infer student abilities and item difficulties from observed test responses. However, IRT struggles with two challenges: How to map items to skills if multiple skills are present? And how to infer the ability of new students that have not been part of the training data? Inspired by recent advances…

In this paper, we show that the election of a new school board member causes home values in their neighborhood to rise. This increase is identified using narrowly-decided contests and is driven by non-Democratic members, whose neighborhoods appreciate about 4% on average relative to those of losing candidates. We find that student test scores in…

This research attempts to add to the existing literature of language learning strategy uses by advancing our understanding of what language learning strategies (LLS) are preferred by learners who were given a one-year English education at two state universities and to find out whether strategy uses were directly related to being successful in…

This comparative case study explored the implementation of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) at two of North Carolina's Global Ready elementary schools. The following research questions guided the study: 1) How do educators and affiliates of Global Ready elementary schools perceive global education, specifically Education for Sustainable…

The problem addressed through this study was the low levels of reading comprehension of literary and informational texts among fourth-grade students statewide. The reading workshop model and the guided reading approach are two different instructional methods used to teach reading to fourth-grade students at two school districts in Texas. The…

This paper presents a summary of Dr. Clinton Lee (Andy) Anderson's 40+ years Military (US Army) Educator Service implementing Dr. Malcolm S. Knowles' perspective on andragogy. Some specifics of Anderson's implementation include five Adult Basic Education (ABE) characteristics of facilitating Knowles' andragogy, six differences between teaching and…

Emergent bilingual (EB) students are a growing population in the U.S. school system currently comprising over 10% of the total population. U.S. school districts have educated EB students using a myriad of practices, including dual language immersion (DLI). Many studies have looked at the academic achievement of native-Spanish speaking EB students,…

We examined the influences of pre-solving pause time, algebraic knowledge, mathematics self-efficacy, and mathematics anxiety on middle-schoolers' strategy efficiency in an algebra learning game. We measured strategy efficiency using (a) the number of steps taken to complete a problem; (b) the proportion of problems completed on the initial…

School disciplinary practices affect student academic and life outcomes. Many schools have recently shifted towards the prevention of behavioral disorders rather than the punishment of such disorders, but disciplinary actions are still disproportionately meted out to Black students. We took advantage of a natural experiment in a large school…

Despite the growing awareness of the role that families play in the experience of student borrowing, debt is still understood as a private experience. As student debt becomes more widespread, individuals are increasingly likely to know others with student loans, yet questions remain about how others--friends, acquaintances, and colleagues--may…

It is often assumed that cross-linguistically more prevalent distinctions are easier to learn potentially due to their conceptual naturalness. Prior work supports this hypothesis in phonology, morphology and syntax but has not addressed semantics. This work aims to unravel the potential factors that contribute to the learnability and the…

School and district leaders make annual decisions about investing their budgets in a multitude of educational programs. Policy directives set expectations for investing in programs that show evidence of improving student outcomes. However, evaluating many simultaneously-implemented programs under typical school operating conditions is challenging.…