A central goal of upper elementary schools is improving students' skills to write persuasively using source materials. This study focused on three essential areas of writing at the upper elementary grade levels. First, children learned skills to read and use source materials through the web-based intelligent tutoring system for the text structure…

Although researchers have investigated technical adequacy and usability of written-expression curriculum-based measures (WE-CBM), the economic implications of different scoring approaches have largely been ignored. The absence of such knowledge can undermine the effective allocation of resources and lead to the adoption of suboptimal measures for…

Written expression curriculum-based measurement (WE-CBM) is a formative assessment approach for screening and progress monitoring. To extend evaluation of WE-CBM, we compared hand-calculated and automated scoring approaches in relation to the number of screening samples needed per student for valid scores, the long-term predictive validity and…

There is growing evidence that school starting age impacts children's likelihood of receiving special education services, but less is known about variations in this effect. Using a regression discontinuity design, I found that the youngest students in a kindergarten cohort are 40% more likely (p < 0.001) to be placed in special education than…

A latent profile analysis was applied to explore heterogeneity in the social and classroom behaviors of 224 peer-rejected elementary school students (56% White, 68% male, Grades 1-4, M[subscript age] = 8.1 years). Profile indicators included teacher ratings of social skills and problem behaviors on the Social Skills Improvement System (SSIS) and…

Objective: To evaluate the benefits of the Fast Track Friendship Group program implemented as a stand-alone school-based intervention on the social cognitions, social behavior, peer and teacher relationships of peer-rejected students. Method: Over four successive years, 224 peer-rejected elementary students (57% White, 17% Black, 20% Latinx, 5%…

Research on the associations among adversity, executive function (EF), and academic outcomes in low- and middle-income countries, where developmental risk factors are more prevalent and impoverished environments are more widespread than in high income countries, is sparse. This study examines the relations among cumulative risk, EF, and learning…

Extant work on the importance of children's executive function (EF) for academic skills typically employs either direct assessments of EF skills or adult reports of children's EF behaviors. Each approach has advantages, yet few studies have examined how different EF measurement approaches distinctly relate to child outcomes. We examined how direct…

Visualizations are commonly used in educational materials, however not all visualizations are equally effective at promoting learning. Prior research has supported the idea that both perceptually rich and bland visualizations are beneficial for learning and generalization. We investigated whether the perceptual richness of a life cycle diagram…

This paper presents evidence of the score reliability, factor structure, criterion-related validity, and measurement equivalence of a web-based assessment of several important social and emotional competencies for children in fourth through sixth grades. The assessment, SELweb LE (Late Elementary), is designed to measure children's understanding…

Despite strong evidence self-regulation skills are critical for school readiness, there remains a dearth of longitudinal studies that describe developmental trajectories of self-regulation, particularly among low-resource and underrepresented populations such as Spanish-English dual-language learners. The present study examined individual…

Although educators frequently use assessment to identify who needs supplemental instruction and if that instruction is working, there is a lack of research investigating assessment that informs what instruction students need. The purpose of the current study was to determine if a brief (approximately 20 min) task that reflects a common middle…

As many as 1 in 5 youth in the United States experience social, emotional, and behavioral problems. However, many students with mental health concerns are unidentified and do not receive adequate care. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the factor structure, measurement invariance, and the concurrent and predictive validity of the Early…

The purpose of this pilot study was to determine whether positive results from a word-problem intervention implemented one-to-one contributed to similar outcomes when implemented in small groups of three to four students. Third-grade students experiencing mathematics difficulty (n = 76) were randomly assigned to word-problem intervention (n = 56)…

This manuscript provides information on datasets pertaining to Project KIDS. Datasets include behavioral and achievement data for over 4,000 students between five and twelve years old participating in nine randomized control trials of reading instruction and intervention between 2005-2011, and information on home environments of a subset of 442…