The purpose of this research study is to determine how successful teachers allocate class time between the need for students to meet high-stakes testing and creating a constructivist learning environment that prepares students for real-world careers. In this study, I used an explanatory sequential mixed method design to explore how much class time…

Over the past two decades, efforts to support school improvement have transitioned from top-down prescriptive approaches to more collaborative and flexible approaches. A number of studies have investigated the effects of these newer "turnaround programs" on student and school outcomes. In Colorado, two recently implemented turnaround…

The focus of this study was to explore my leadership practices to improve teachers' acumen and use of research-based Tier 1 strategies to propel student engagement, thereby increasing student achievement. More specifically, the problem addressed was the decline of student performance for students with disabilities in English Language Arts and the…

In light of an increased focus on the importance of soft skills to academic achievement and success later in life, educators are looking towards social-emotional learning (SEL) as a means for addressing the diverse needs of students. This qualitative study was aimed at understanding how secondary English Language Arts (ELA) teachers use literary…

In 2022-23, Round Rock Independent School District in Texas rebranded the Response to Intervention (RTI) as Multi-tiered Support System (MTSS). The purpose of this report is to assess the effect of MTSS on staff data literacy, MTSS implementation, and elementary school student achievement. We used a mixed-method approach, including analysis of…

Purpose: Spelling is a critical component of literacy and language arts that can negatively influence other aspects of written composition. This clinical focus article describes a spelling error classification system that can be used to identify underlying linguistic deficits that contribute to students' spelling errors. The system is designed to…

A review of literature suggests students make meaning using different modes while reading a graphic novel (Connors, 2010; Dallacqua, 2010; Hammond, 2009; Jimenez, 2013; Pantaleo, 2013; Rogers, 2014). This case study ran for six weeks. Twenty students were involved. Grounded in the theoretical framework of social constructivism, this qualitative…

Background: Recent decades have seen an increased number of literacy education researchers attending to LGBTQ people and texts in secondary schools, frequently documenting tensions that emerge, such as conflict. However, this research tends to be limited in scope with respect to time, texts, and identities. Moreover, it shows that students tend to…

The purpose of this investigation is to examine how teacher candidates create and teach lesson plans that include trade books and the 5E model of inquiry science. Specifically, this study examines how elementary school teacher candidates, enrolled in a science methods course, intended to use trade books to teach interdisciplinary science and…

Public schools use standardized testing to measure students' academic achievement at the conclusion of each school year. Students with severe cognitive disabilities are evaluated through the Georgia Alternate Assessment (GAA). The purpose of this descriptive study was to describe the demographic characteristics of students who took the Georgia…

This quantitative causal-comparative study, based on secondary data analysis, measured the differences between neighboring Title I traditional elementary schools and Title 1 charter elementary schools in Florida in terms of (a) ELA performance and (b) math performance. More specifically, the study examined the third grade ELA and math scores of 60…

The author describes a literacy activity that took place in an 11th-grade English language arts classroom: student-created role-play. Through a discussion of two such role-plays, the author explores how these performances illustrate students' engagement with raciolinguistic ideologies that marginalize certain speakers through the simultaneous…

The aim of this study was to compare the use of coherence relations in the school textbooks of four primary school subjects. A corpus of 1,882 texts, corresponding to the genres used to teach in the school textbooks of Science, Language, Mathematics, and History, was analyzed. The analysis was performed manually using a taxonomy that incorporates…

This article describes a class room activity introduced at Unionville High School in Kennett Square, PA. Humanities teacher Daniel Lipowitz partnered with engineering teacher Michael Berkeihiser and other STEM teachers to put the humanities (H) in "SHTEM." Sophomore English students were asked to re-engineer the conflict in common works…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impacts of English language learners (ELL) and socioeconomic status (SES) on Matthew effect or compensatory trajectory by analyzing students' English language arts (ELA) test scores. This study applied the concept of the Matthew effect or the compensatory trajectory in the ELA proficiency tests with…