Rigorous research provides information that will allow other schools and districts to select interventions that have a scientifically based track record of effectiveness. All Striving Reader grants include the mandate to evaluate literacy intervention(s) targeted to adolescents who are reading significantly below grade level. Although all studies…

The authors first examine the effect of failing the 10th grade mathematics examination. They then investigate students who fail their 10th grade test, examining their persistence and success on retests. Finally, they examine the effects of student performance on the 8th grade mathematics test. In all cases, the authors pay particular attention to…

The focus of this research is to develop an initial framework for assessing and interpreting students' level of understanding of mathematical equivalence. Although this topic has been studied for many years, there has been no systematic development or evaluation of a valid measure of equivalence knowledge. A powerful method for accomplishing this…

The two studies presented in this report were designed to test the effectiveness of a new diagnostic-based reading intervention for classroom teachers, called the Targeted Reading Intervention (TRI). This TRI Tier 2 intervention stressed diagnostic teaching as the key to helping struggling readers make rapid progress in reading in the regular…

Conjoint Behavioral Consultation (CBC; Sheridan et al., 1996; Sheridan & Kratochwill, 2008) is an indirect intervention that engages parents, teachers, and a behavioral consultant in collaborative, structured problem solving to address shared academic, behavioral, or social-emotional concerns for a student. The goals of CBC are to (a) enhance…

This study evaluates a curriculum policy that required college preparatory coursework for all students, using data from Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Beginning in 1997, CPS ended remedial coursework and required all students to complete a college-preparatory course sequence for graduation. In this study, the authors constrain their analysis to the…

Over the past three years, the authors' team at Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC) has been researching a professional development program in science, "Foundations of Science Literacy" ("FSL"), for preschool lead and assistant Head Start teachers in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Year 1 was a pilot year, so it is the data from Year 2 on…

The current study will examine possible contextual effects relative to differences in reading comprehension performance in the state of Florida. While the Reading First (RF) Impact study examined such difference using a regression discontinuity design, the authors are primarily interested in other analytic methods that might answer different…

This study was designed to enhance early childhood teachers' efforts to prepare young children for school. Thus, the first objective was to determine if teachers receiving comprehensive professional development (i.e., PD) would show gains in language and literacy instructional practices than teachers randomized to the control condition. Objective…

The goal of the RF program, Part B of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), is to have all children reading at grade level by the end of third grade. There is no legislative precedent for this program, focused as it is on preventing reading failure in the early elementary years (US Department of Education, April 2002). Because the design of…

The primary study objective was to develop a statewide system that made use of information about the pre-kindergarten program in combination with kindergarten reading and social outcome measures in order to inform parents about the ability of early childhood programs to prepare children for formal schooling. In order to carry out this objective,…

This study empirically investigates the effectiveness of Distributed Leadership Teacher Training (DLT) program on improving student's academic achievement. In addition, it both tests the assumption that the year 1 impacts are stable across calendar years and examines the importance of properly accounting for the fact that the standard error of the…

The "MTP-Math/Science" curricula specifically target the teaching and learning of children at risk of early school failure, a population for whom achievement gaps in mathematics and science are visible even in Pre-K years. "MTP-Math" is based on Focal Areas defined by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) (2006) for Pre-K through…

One of the major series of reviews in elementary and secondary education is the Best Evidence Encyclopedia, or the BEE. Up to now, findings for systematic reviews have largely been restricted to the reviews themselves, with few cases in which lessons learned across many reviews using similar methods can be synthesized. The completion of the Best…

The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for conceptualizing and assessing fidelity of implementation (FOI) in the context of a cluster-randomized design study. A research-validated mathematics curriculum for preschool children called Numbers Plus is used as an example to describe the role of curriculum implementation fidelity in the…