This study focuses on assessing the contribution of ELL services to Spanish-speaking students' mathematics learning in elementary schools. ELL students tend to have lower average math achievement at school entry and throughout elementary school. The term "ELL services" encompasses English-as-a-second-language (ESL) programs, bilingual…

As special education inclusion policies become more widespread, classroom compositions are changing in ways that affect all students. The present study fills a critical gap in the literature by documenting the extent to which having a classmate with an emotional disturbance (ED) is linked to kindergarteners' absences. Because having a classmate…

In 2002, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) called for "highly qualified" teachers in every classroom in order to increase student outcome and provide equitable learning opportunities to all students including poor and minority students. content and pedagogical knowledge before they come into the classrooms. However, research evidence…

This paper is based on previous studies in applying propensity score methods to study multiple treatment variables to examine the causal moderator effect. The propensity score methods will be demonstrated in a case study to examine the causal moderator effect, where the moderators are categorical and continuous variables. Moderation analysis is an…

Many educational Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) collect baseline versions of outcome measures (pretests) to be used in the estimation of impacts at posttest. Although pretest measures are not necessary for unbiased impact estimates in well executed experimental studies, using them increases the precision of impact estimates and reduces sample…

The growing availability of data linking students to classroom teachers has made it possible to estimate the contribution teachers make to student achievement. While there is a growing consensus that teacher quality is important and current evaluation systems are inadequate, many have expressed concerns over the use of value-added measures (VAMs)…

Scholars have identified mathematics gender gaps favoring males as early as kindergarten or first grade, particularly at the top of the achievement distribution (Penner & Paret, 2008; Rathbun, West & Germino-Hausken, 2004; Robinson & Lubienski, 2011). These relatively small achievement disparities precede larger differences in…

This study, sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) in the U.S. Department of Education, examines whether some early elementary school math curricula are more effective than others at improving student math achievement in disadvantaged schools. A small number of curricula, which are based on different approaches for developing…

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether small group instruction in kindergarten widens or closes the achievement gap in mathematics between EL students and non-EL students. The first objective is to examine whether the impacts of small group instruction on math learning differ between EL kindergartners and their non-EL peers. For…

This study describes children's early math skills and the kindergarten mathematics content to which they are exposed. The authors focus specifically on teacher survey responses to items about content coverage that align most closely with the content covered on the ECLS-K kindergarten mathematics achievement test. They examine the influence…