Despite receiving little to no training in behavior management, paraprofessionals often support young students with or at risk of disruptive behavior disorders in elementary schools. The Behavior Support Coaching for Paraprofessionals (BSC-P) is a new evidence-based data-driven approach for enhancing paraprofessionals' skills in identifying…

Traditional professional development is often characterized as being expensive, time consuming, and lacking impact. In contrast, online professional development provides greater flexibility and is becoming increasingly popular for school personnel. In this article, we report the process and outcomes of gathering feedback to adapt traditional…

Main idea and summary are essential elements of reading comprehension. We report results from Grades 4 and 5 student performance on two years of state-mandated standardized reading testing which indicate that students perform statistically significantly lower on main idea and summary questions on the tests than any other question category. In this…

The purpose of this study was to support the development and initial validation of the Intervention Selection Profile (ISP)-Skills, a brief 14-item teacher rating scale intended to inform the selection and delivery of instructional interventions at Tier 2. Teacher participants (n = 196) rated five students from their classroom across four measures…

Students in the middle grades are expected to read complex texts to acquire content knowledge, particularly in social studies/history and science. Most students with disabilities are included in social studies/history and science classes and yet read below grade level, requiring significant support with accessing text knowledge. Question…

This pilot study evaluated a novel professional development (PD) model designed to prepare K-12 educators in high-need, rural school districts to teach evidence-based argument writing. The PD showed teachers how to engage students in discussions about visual art using Visual Thinking Strategies to enhance students' argumentation writing. Twenty…

A key component of delivering mental health services involves evaluating psychosocial impairments linked to mental health concerns. Youth may experience these impairments in various ways (e.g., dysfunctional family and/or peer relationships, poor school performance). Importantly, youth may display symptoms of mental illness without co-occurring…

In this paper, we consider a minimalistic and behavioristic view of AIS to enable a standardizable mapping of both the behavior of the system and of the learner. In this model, the "learners" interact with the learning "resources" in a given learning "environment" following preset steps of learning…

In education, practitioners are increasingly looking for strategies to bring data and evidence into decisionmaking and to roll out programs in intentional ways that allow for ongoing improvement. This toolkit acts as a guide to improvement strategies for teams of practitioners at colleges, providing them with the knowledge and tools they need to…

In this thesis, I present three related papers that collectively investigate the instructional supports on screen and in the media viewing context that influenced English and heritage language vocabulary knowledge in DLLs. In study 1, I examine how specific pedagogical approaches used in educational media might benefit DLLs. In study 2, I…

Cynthia Coburn, in her 2016 article in the "American Journal of Education"--''What's Policy Got to Do With It?''--states that the field of policy implementation suffers from the propensity to learn the same lessons over and over again. This repetition of mistakes, I argue, stems from a failure to account for predictable patterns in how…

Models are central to the practice and teaching of science. Yet people often fail to grasp how scientific models explain their observations of the world. Realizing the explanatory power of a model may require aligning its relational structure to that of the observable phenomena. The present research tested whether "relational…

The period of early adolescence is characterized by dramatic changes, simultaneously affecting physiological, psychological, social, and cognitive development. The physical transition from elementary to middle school can exacerbate the stress and adversity experienced during this critical life stage. Middle school students often struggle to find…

Although basing instruction on learning trajectories (LTs) is often recommended, there is little direct evidence regarding the premise of an LT approach--that instruction should be presented (only) one LT level beyond a child's present level. We evaluated this hypothesis in the domain of early shape composition. One group of preschoolers, who were…

We describe the design and development of a technology-based inference-making intervention system that includes a set of interactive learning modules, each of which engages students to (a) view age-appropriate children's videos, (b) learn vocabulary words that are central to main ideas in each video, (c) respond to inferential questions, (d)…