Background: Educational outcomes for language minority (LM) children are of great concern across the nation because these students have lower grades, are rated by their teachers as having lower skills, perform worse on standardized tests, and are more likely to drop out than are non-LM students. Given this context of underperformance, there is a…

Background: The ability to think analogically is central to the process of learning and understanding reality and there is a broad consensus among researchers that we can improve this ability. Immigrants who have emigrated from developing to developed countries tend to experience tremendous challenges in their early years as immigrants. Their…

Background/Context: Researchers, policymakers, and practitioners undoubtedly concur that missing school deteriorates student outcomes. And yet, in evaluating the deleterious effects of missing in-school time, empirical research has almost exclusively focused on absences, and the scant amount of empirical literature on tardiness has focused on…

Background/Context: Little research has directly examined whether principal leadership can increase the degree to which teachers work together regularly in focused ways around content. Prior research has shown that reform efforts seeking to alter the process of teaching can be successful if teachers collaborate to build capacity and improve…

Background/Context: Past research has examined many factors that contribute to the black-white achievement gap. While researchers have shown that teacher perceptions of students' academic ability is an important contributing factor to the gap, little research has explored the extent to which teacher perceptions of students' academic…

Background: Children's early skills are essential for their later success in school. Recent evidence highlights the importance of early mathematics, relative to reading and socioemotional skills, for elementary school achievement. Key advocacy groups for both early childhood and mathematics education have issued position statements on the…

Background/Context: A number of recent policies have specifically attacked immigrants and English Language Learners (ELLs), including Georgia's HB 87 (2011), Arizona's SB 1070 (2010), and Alabama's HB 56 (2011), among others. The policy focus of this study is Arizona's HB 2064 (2006), which added additional requirements that…

Background: Research findings suggest that there may be some academic benefits for those children whose kindergarten enrollment is delayed, and the risk of underachievement seems to be greater for children who are younger when they first enter kindergarten. Although kindergarten enrollment occurs naturally, certain child, family, and childcare…

Background/Context: This article addresses which school-level factors contribute to school quality. Previous research has focused on assessing the effects of school-level variables on student-level quality (e.g., achievement). However, the field has been limited in not evaluating the effects of school-level factors directly on measured…

Background/Context: More than a century before modern controversies over scripted instruction, the Froebelian kindergarten--the original kindergarten method designed by Friedrich Froebel--and Maria Montessori's pedagogy were criticized for rigidly prescribing how teachers taught and children learned. Today, scripted methods such as Direct…

Background/Context: One important question to educational research is whether teachers can influence student achievement over time. This question is related to the durability of teacher effects on student achievement in successive grades. The research evidence about teacher effects on student achievement has been somewhat mixed. Some education…

Background/Context: Although there is relative agreement on the pattern of the achievement gap, attributing changes in the gap to schooling is less clear. Our study contributes to understanding potential teacher and teaching effects on achievement and inequality. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: We intend our work to contribute…

Background: This investigation was sparked by research findings on secondary education showing school segregation to be closely associated with homogeneous grouping practices, such as tracking and between-class ability grouping. Research Design: We conduct secondary analyses of national data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten…

Background/Context: Seasonal researchers have developed a theory and hypotheses regarding the importance of neighborhood and school contexts for early childhood learning but have not possessed nationally representative data and precise contextual measures with which to examine their hypotheses. Purpose/Research Questions: This empirical study…

Background: Policy discussion to change the nature of teaching practices overshadows how social and economic inequalities contribute to unequal education outcomes. Research on how teaching practices contribute to the variance in test scores on a broad scale or on whether the relation of instruction to test scores is moderated by social and…