Community colleges increase college access--extending postsecondary educational opportunities to students who otherwise may not have access, but they also exhibit low rates of program completion and transfer to four-year colleges. Sociological research on community colleges focuses on the tension between increasing educational opportunity and…

First language learners acquire vocabulary in the context of participation in discourse, and the quantity and richness of that discourse is the best predictor of their progress. Similarly, we argue, engagement in discourse, in particular debate and discussion, is an effective component of classroom instruction for second and foreign language…

In the early years of the "Journal of Child Language," there was considerable disagreement about the role of language input or adult-child interaction in children's language acquisition. The view that quantity and quality of input to language-learning children is relevant to their language development has now become widely accepted as a…

This study tested the acceptability and efficacy of an innovative intelligent tutoring system (ITS), "Adventures Aboard the S.S. GRIN," that translates the evidence-based in-person Social Skills Group Intervention (SSGRIN), into an interactive game-based social tutorial. This randomized controlled pilot trial tested the first half of the…

Understanding of numerical development is growing rapidly, but the volume and diversity of findings can make it difficult to perceive any coherence in the process. The integrative theory of numerical development posits that a coherent theme is present, however--progressive broadening of the set of numbers whose magnitudes can be accurately…

(Purpose) Students who are deaf or hard of hearing (SDHH) are a low-incidence group of students; however, SDHH also have a high incidence of additional disabilities (SDHH+). Many SDHH and SDHH+ require accommodations for equal access to classroom instruction and assessment, particularly in mainstreamed educational settings where spoken English is…

Because of its widespread adoption and implementation (in over 13,000 schools in the US; Center on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, 2010), there has been increasing attention to how School-wide Positive Behavior Support (SWPBS) systems can be sustained. Sustained implementation can be defined as "continued use of an…

Place value notation is essential to mathematics learning. This study examined young children's (4- to 6-year-olds, N = 172) understanding of place value prior to explicit schooling by asking them write spoken numbers (e.g., "six hundred and forty-two"). Children's attempts often consisted of "expansions" in which the proper…

Schools are under increasing pressure to reclassify their English learner (EL) students to "fluent English proficient" status as quickly as possible. This article examines timing to reclassification among Latino ELs in four distinct linguistic instructional environments: English immersion, transitional bilingual, maintenance bilingual,…

We present a machine learning model that uses particular attributes of individual questions asked by teachers and students to predict two properties of classroom discourse that have previously been linked to improved student achievement. These properties, uptake and authenticity, have previously been studied by using trained observers to live-code…

Learning is facilitated by conversational interactions both with human tutors and with computer agents that simulate human tutoring and ideal pedagogical strategies. In this article, we describe some intelligent tutoring systems (e.g., AutoTutor) in which agents interact with students in natural language while being sensitive to their cognitive…

Coh-Metrix analyzes texts on multiple measures of language and discourse that are aligned with multilevel theoretical frameworks of comprehension. Dozens of measures funnel into five major factors that systematically vary as a function of types of texts (e.g., narrative vs. informational) and grade level: narrativity, syntactic simplicity, word…

Children's early mathematics skills develop in a cumulative fashion; foundational skills form a basis for the acquisition of later skills. However, non-mathematical factors such as working memory and language skills have also been linked to mathematical development at a broad level. Unfortunately, little research has been conducted to evaluate the…

Letter name knowledge in the preschool ages is a strong predictor of later reading ability, but little is known about the psychometric characteristics of uppercase and lowercase letters considered together. Data from 1,113 preschoolers from diverse backgrounds on both uppercase and lowercase letter name knowledge were analyzed using Item Response…

This article focuses on California's efforts to improve the alignment between K-12 and postsecondary schooling through the Early Assessment Program (EAP). Implemented in 2004, the EAP was designed to give high school students information about their academic preparedness for postsecondary education and to encourage teachers to teach for college…