This report is part of a long-term collaboration of the Quality Teaching for English Learners initiative at WestEd with the Fort Worth Independent School District. The objective of this report is to explore how ninth grade data can predict the graduation outcomes of newcomers. Based upon predictor variables, binary indicators can identify students…

This report is part of a long-term collaboration of the Quality Teaching for English Learners initiative at WestEd with the Fort Worth Independent School District. The focus of this report is on comparisons between ninth grade newcomers and other groups of English language learners (ELLs). Analyses compare newcomers to 1) long-term ELLs who were…

This policy brief focuses on a specific subgroup of ELL students: newcomers who enter a school district in the ninth grade knowing little or no English. Many of these immigrant students also have interrupted or limited formal education. In this brief we address two issues within the control of local school districts: 1) how to define and track…

Exploring Longitudinal Outcomes and Trajectories of English Language Learners (ELOTE) is a Researcher-Practitioner Partnership between WestEd and the Fort Worth Independent School District (FWISD). ELOTE addresses a key gap in knowledge about the outcomes and trajectories of immigrant newcomers who enroll in the ninth grade. The purpose of the…

Based on the analysis of 620 think-aloud verbal protocols from students in grades 7, 9, and 11, we examined students' conscious engagement in inference generation, paraphrasing, verbatim text repetition, and monitoring while reading narrative or informational texts that were either at or above the students' current reading levels. Students were…

The study applied the Multi-Dimensional analysis used by Biber (1988) to examine the functional parameters of essays. Co-occurrence patterns were identified within an essay corpus (n=1529) using a linguistic indices provided by Co-Metrix. These patterns were used to identify essay groups that shared features based upon situational parameters.…

Little is known about how specific components of working memory, namely, attentional processes including response inhibition, sustained attention, and cognitive inhibition, are related to reading decoding and comprehension. The current study evaluated the relations of reading comprehension, decoding, working memory, and attentional control in…

For English learners (ELs), reclassifying to fluent English proficient (RFEP) signifies reaching a milestone indicating the ability to function in mainstream classes without support. Little is known about the discrepancy between the number of ELs who meet reclassification criteria and the number who are reclassified as fluent English proficient,…

Linguistic properties of writing prompts have been shown to influence the writing patterns contained in student essays. The majority of previous research on these prompt-based effects has focused on the lexical and syntactic properties of writing prompts and essays. The current study expands this research by investigating the effects of prompt…

We introduce a cognitive framework for measuring reading comprehension that includes the use of novel summary-writing tasks. We derive NLP features from the holistic rubric used to score the summaries written by students for such tasks and use them to design a preliminary, automated scoring system. Our results show that the automated approach…

This synthesis extends a report of research on extensive interventions in kindergarten through third grade (Wanzek & Vaughn, 2007) to students in Grades 4 through 12, recognizing that many of the same questions about the effectiveness of reading interventions with younger students are important to address with older students, including (a) how…

Introduction: The Maui Hawaii Educational consortium (the Maui School District and Maui Community College) sought scientifically based evidence for the effectiveness of the Cognitive Tutor (CT) Algebra I Curriculum to inform adoption decisions. Decision makers were particularly interested in whether the use of the CT program affects achievement of…