School districts consider many qualifications when deciding whether to hire an individual to teach its students. One qualification is the type of license the applicant holds. The strictness of the eligibility requirements vary across the license types (e.g., level of educational attainment, whether a student teaching experience was completed).…

Future Forward is an early primary literacy program that pairs one-on-one tutoring with family engagement. The approach of Future Forward is informed by both systems theory and a school-family-community partnership model. With its school-family-community partnership approach, schools are not solely responsible for developing student literacy.…

This paper explores a general approach to paraphrase generation using a pre-trained seq2seq model fine-tuned using a back-translated anatomy and physiology textbook. Human ratings indicate that the paraphrase model generally preserved meaning and grammaticality/fluency: 70% of meaning ratings were above 75, and 40% of paraphrases were considered…

Supporting Strategic Writers (SSW) is an instructional approach and curriculum for college developmental English and integrated reading and writing courses. SSW is based on strategy instruction integrated with practices common in college English. Students learn strategies for writing and critical reading of sources based on rhetorical analysis and…

Purpose: There are many aspects of words that can influence our lexical processing, and the words we are exposed to influence our opportunities for language and reading development. The purpose of this study is to establish a more comprehensive understanding of the lexical challenges and opportunities students face. Method: We explore the latent…

Developed by the National Writing Project (NWP), the College, Career, and Community Writers Program (C3WP) seeks to improve students' argument writing by building teachers' understanding of and skill in teaching source-based argument writing. The program features intensive professional development, skill-based instructional resources, and…

There has been a long-standing issue of sparse discussion forums participation in online learning, which can impede students' help seeking practices. Researchers have examined AI techniques such as link prediction with network analysis to connect help seekers with help providers. However, little is known whether these AI systems will treat…

As part of a federally funded grant, we conducted Math for All professional development workshops at elementary schools in the Midwest to support teachers' implementation of high-quality, standards-based mathematics education for a wide range of students, including those with disabilities. Our research included week-long instructional logs…

This paper presents WikiMorph, a tool that automatically breaks down words into morphemes, etymological compounds (morphemes from root languages), and generates contextual definitions for each component. It comes in two flavors: a dataset and a deep-learning-based model. The dataset was extracted from Wiktionary and contains over 450k entries. We…

Numerous approaches have been introduced to automate the process of text summarization, but only few can be easily adapted to multiple languages. This paper introduces a multilingual text processing pipeline integrated in the open-source "ReaderBench" framework, which can be retrofit to cover more than 50 languages. While considering the…

Despite a marked increase in the volume of research investigating issues about reading interventions for students with ASD (e.g., Bailey and Arciuli, Rev J Autism Dev Disord 7(2):127-150, 2020; Chiang and Lin, Focus Autism Other Dev Disab 22(4):259-267, 2007), very few studies have examined the current reading practices experienced by children…

Forty-four elementary grade teachers of deaf and hard of hearing students were surveyed about how they taught writing and their beliefs about writing. Beliefs about writing included their self-efficacy to teach writing, attitude towards writing, and epistemological beliefs about writing. These teachers from 15 different states in the United States…

The Middle-Grades Leadership Development (MLD) Project was designed to develop principal leaders and leadership teams who create high-performing middle-grades schools. Designed by the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, the four-year project was funded from 2013 to 2017 by a U.S. Department of Education Investing in Innovation (i3)…

The Mathematics, 3D Printing, and Computational Thinking Through Work-Based Learning (MPACT) program relies on teacher professional development, specialized curriculum and materials, and STEM industry mentors to provide grades 4-7 students with project-based experiences implemented across three learning modules. This technical report presents…

Autism Focused Intervention Resources and Modules (AFIRM) are a set of self-paced, online learning modules designed to disseminate information about the 27 evidence-based practices identified through a large-scale review of focused intervention practices for individuals with autism. In this study, we used descriptive statistics and an analysis of…