Project ENGAGE was an Education Innovation and Research federal grant awarded to the Osage County Interlocal Cooperative in October of 2017. This study addressed the effect of a combination of literacy and behavioral supports on the academic outcomes of elementary students in rural public schools. The five-year multi-element study included a…

"The Upstart Great Plains TASK Force: Taking All to Success in Kindergarten" was a five-year Education, Innovation and Research (EIR) expansion grant (U411A180001) funded through the US Department of Education Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. Four research studies were conducted during the grant period of 2018 to 2023: a…

The goal of the Maximize Program is to collaborate with educators to develop resources and procedures to facilitate teachers' use of equity-focused behavioral supports. In this study, we describe teachers' responses to the first iteration of the interactive Maximize Technology Platform. Ninety elementary school teachers from three schools were…

Recent work has demonstrated that having students study worked examples and answer self-explanation prompts as part of their problem-solving practice improves learning on researcher-developed measures of mathematical proficiency. However, little work has been done to date to investigate whether these benefits translate to improvements on the types…

Early adolescence is a time of increased stress and risk for poorer psychosocial functioning, but few studies have explored the relationship between stress and psychosocial functioning in the context of teacher-student relationships during early adolescence. This study used a two-wave longitudinal design to investigate the unique and interactive…

Learning coding during early childhood is an effective way for children to practice computational thinking. Aspects of children's motivation can increase the likelihood that children approach computational thinking activities with enthusiasm and deep engagement. Gender inequities may interfere with children's readiness to take advantage of…

Writing teachers play an extraordinarily important role in their students' writing development. Teachers' motivational beliefs, such as attitudes toward writing, perceptions of their efficacy to teach writing, or preparation to use evidence-based instructional practices, impact their writing instruction, which directly affects the advancement of…

Is under-representation of Black, Latinx, English learners (EL), and students from economically challenging communities in gifted programs due to inequality in early academic achievement or bias in the gifted identification process? Using three-level multilevel logistic models, we examine the degree to which the disparities in gifted…

The present study examined parents' and teachers' perceptions of student learning in Spanish-English Dual Language Education (DLE) programs during the COVID-19 pandemic. The participants included 72 parents of students from kindergarten to second grade and eight teachers in two schools in the southeastern U.S. Parents retrospectively reported…

Pre-kindergarten (pre-k) is thought to have both direct and indirect effects on children's outcomes in early elementary school. Direct pre-k effects consistently include moderate to large gains in academic skills and sometimes include increases in problem behaviors that affect acquisition of skills in school. Indirect pre-k effects assume that…

Mathematics anxiety (MA) refers to negative cognition and negative affect that interfere with mathematics performance. We examined the dimensionality of MA, measurement invariance across males and females, and whether the strength of relations between MA and mathematics performance varies by dimension and gender among 245 sixth-grade students.…

Research Findings: The present study examines the unique and joint effects of individual teacher-child relationships and overall quality of teacher-childinteractions on the motivation of 2,745 kindergarten children (51% girls; ages 5--6) from an ethnically and linguistically diverse county. Teachers reported the closeness and conflict in their…

Learning environments can support the development of foundational knowledge and promote children's attitudes toward learning and school. This study explores the relation between school enjoyment and general knowledge from preschool (2016-2017) to kindergarten (2017-2018) in 1359 children (M[subscript age] = 55, 61 months, female = 50%; 58.5%…

Special education teacher attrition is a significant and chronic problem that has worsened since the pandemic. A longitudinal survey of burnout was conducted with rural special education teachers (n = 48) over four timepoints through the school year just prior to COVID-19. Both school and intrapersonal predictors of burnout obtained at the…

The cross-sectional study ascertained prevalence rates of stress-related outcomes of 490 special educators (i.e., major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder) and examined the relative importance of variables hypothesized as predictive of stress outcomes (i.e., psychosocial model of stress, school/teacher variables). Over 60% scored at…