The Effective Pre-school Provision in Northern Ireland (EPPNI) project is a longitudinal study of child development from 3 to 11 years. It is one of the first large-scale UK projects to investigate the effects of different kinds of preschool provision, and to relate experience in preschool to child development. In EPPNI, 683 children were randomly…

Competency in society's lingua franca plays a major role in the emergence of social disparities within education. Therefore, the present longitudinal study investigates vocabulary development and its predictors in preschool years. We focus on whether internal (phonological working memory) and external variables (preschool and home learning…

Few studies have investigated how preschool and primary school interact to influence children's cognitive development. The present investigation explores German children's numeracy skills between age 3 (1st year of preschool) and age 7 (1st year of primary school). We first identified the influence of preschool experience on development while…

In this study, longitudinal cohort-sequential latent growth modeling was used to determine the effects of (a) socioeconomically mixed preschool and kindergarten classrooms, (b) the implementation of an education program aiming to accelerate socioeconomically disadvantaged children's emergent academic skills, and (c) the amount of teacher-managed…

Whether or not more effective schools can successfully mitigate the impacts of early disadvantage upon educational attainment remains uncertain. We investigated 2,664 children aged 6-11 years and measured their academic skills in English and maths along with self-regulation at 6, 7, and 11. Experiencing multiple disadvantages before age 5 strongly…

Shortcomings of educational quality in rural schools remain a key focus in the literature related to developing countries. This paper studies whether rural primary schools in Malaysia, an upper middle-income developing country, are still experiencing lower levels of educational resources, school climate, school leadership, and parental involvement…

In 2004, the pattern in academic pathways for high school students in the USA showed that students were completing more demanding mathematics courses. Despite the upward pattern in advanced-level mathematics course-taking, disparities among racial/ethnic groups persisted between 1982 and 2004. Using data from the Education Longitudinal Study of…

Educational effectiveness research often appeals to "value-added models (VAM)" to gauge the impact of schooling on student learning net of the effect of student background variables. A huge amount of cross-sectional studies do not, however, meet VAM's requirement for longitudinal data. "Contextualised attainment models (CAM)" measure the influence…

Given the commonly accepted view that having a mathematically well-educated populace is strategically important, there is considerable international interest in raising attainment, and increasing participation, in post-compulsory mathematics education. In this article, multilevel models are developed with the use of datasets from the UK Department…

From an international review of 109 school effectiveness research studies, only 6 could be seen as theory driven. As the border between substantive conceptual models of educational effectiveness and theory-based models is not always very sharp, this number might be increased to 11 by including those studies that are based on models that make…

This article summarises findings from systematic reviews of research on primary and secondary mathematics, primary and secondary reading, and programmes for struggling readers. All reviews used a common set of procedures, requiring comparisons with control groups and duration of at least 12 weeks. Across hundreds of qualifying studies, a clear…

This article addresses an issue that has not been well explored in empirical research, namely whether local education agencies (districts) have an impact on student learning. We assumed that local district effects on learning would be largely indirect, mediated by how teachers work together in schools (in professional communities) and the quality…

In the United States, effective data use is proving to be a vexing problem. In response, scholars have recently begun viewing this as a systemic problem, believing there are actions a school district may take to make data use more efficient and tenable throughout the organization. In this article, we add to the knowledge of how school…

At the end of secondary education in The Netherlands, students have to pass a final examination, consisting of an internal school-based assessment and an external national assessment. According to the Dutch inspectorate, to ensure the quality of final examinations, the discrepancy between both assessments must be less than 0.5 points (on a scale…

School inspections are expected to have an impact on data use and improvement of schools. Schools are expected to generate data (e.g., self-evaluation reports and student achievement results) as part of the inspection process. This process, in turn, also generates data (e.g., inspection reports) for school improvement. The high-stakes context in…