What works to help community college students progress academically? This brief synthesizes 20 years of rigorous research by MDRC, presenting new evidence about key attributes of community college interventions that are positively related to larger impacts on students' academic progress. Findings: Findings are based on a synthesis of evidence from…

This study reports on the results of students' perceptions of Digital Storytelling (DS) in online classes enhanced with synchronous Zoom meetings. Two main problems were identified with remote English as a Foreign Language (EFL) courses conducted primarily as asynchronous classes in spring 2020. Firstly, seven of the 64 participating students…

Adults who provide care and education to young children have a great responsibility, as children's early environment and relationships have profound and lifelong effects. The Early Head Start conceptual framework recognizes that the characteristics of teachers and home visitors who deliver core Early Head Start services to children and families…

These are the appendices for the report "The Effects of an Academic Language Program on Student Reading Outcomes." This study investigated WordGen Elementary, a program designed to improve fourth- and fifth-grade students' ability to understand and communicate academic language and their general reading skill. The program provider…

Educational policies and practices have had a long-standing emphasis of conducting incoming literacy screenings to determine who is at risk for school failure. Response to intervention (RTI) is an intervention program designed to deliver educational resources to students who fall below what is deemed an acceptable level of proficiency as viewed…

Despite the U.S. having one of the highest college access and participation rates in the world, equity gaps exist that impact access and success for first-generation, low-income, underrepresented students in higher education (Cahalan et al., 2020). The goal of going to college is often imperiled for first-generation, low-income, transfer students…

The problem addressed in this study is that the low reading proficiency levels of marginalized elementary students significantly affect their future academic achievement and life outcomes. The purpose of this quantitative comparative study was to investigate the differences in the reading proficiency levels of marginalized Grade 3-5 students in a…

The college enrollment and graduation rates of Black and Latino males continues to be a persistent higher education problem. Furthermore, institutions of higher education fail the interests and educational advancement of Black and Latino men by many measures such as retention and college completion rates. More specifically, institutionalized…

The primary purpose of this study was to determine the differences in the academic outcomes of first-year academically underprepared TN Promise-eligible college freshmen who participated in a college bridge program. A comparative research design was applied to existing data, including first-semester GPA, first-semester credit completion rate,…

This study presents a novel video recommendation system for an algebra virtual learning environment (VLE) that leverages ideas and methods from engagement measurement, item response theory, and reinforcement learning. Following Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) theory, but considering low affect and high affect students separately, we…

This study reports the effects of a distributed professional development model emphasizing reading comprehension and vocabulary practices in social studies on the content knowledge, vocabulary, and reading comprehension outcomes of upper elementary students identified as English learners (ELs). Schools were randomly assigned to one of three…

A growing body of research documents the positive impacts of teacher coaching, but research contrasting the effectiveness of different coaching approaches is limited. This study contrasted paired coaching -- delivered to two teachers simultaneously -- with traditional coaching for individual in-service teachers. We examined the effects of these…

The connection between school success and the quality of the student-teacher relationship (STR) is especially salient for students with or at-risk for emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD; Zolkoski, 2019). However, the STR is typically poor for these students (Breeman et al., 2018; Crum et al., 2016) and little work has been done to understand…

This study reports the effects of a distributed professional development model emphasizing reading comprehension and vocabulary practices in social studies on the content knowledge, vocabulary, and reading comprehension outcomes of upper elementary students identified as English learners (ELs). Schools were randomly assigned to one of three…

The Empowering Children with Hope and Opportunity (ECHO) program has collected data for 20 years. The ECHO staff has fallen short in using this data to clearly demonstrate any impacts and to engage in continuous improvement of the ECHO organization. Thus, the purpose of the current research project is to demonstrate how effective the counseling,…