Although there is a large body of research on the effectiveness of supplemental instruction for college undergraduates, very little of it has focused on transfer students, who often confront additional sources of stress and historically perform more poorly than their native student counterparts. In this study, we investigated the effectiveness of…

We evaluated a program to improve literacy instruction on the Kenyan coast using training workshops, semiscripted lesson plans, and weekly text-message support for teachers to understand its impact on students' literacy outcomes and on the classroom practices leading to those outcomes. The evaluation ran from the beginning of Grade 1 to the end of…

Despite increased investment in early childhood care and education (ECCE) globally, little is known about its effectiveness in low-income countries. Using kernel exact matching within a national sample of 1,623 Zambian 6-year-olds, we test the associations between ECCE participation and seven domains of children's school readiness. We find ECCE…

In 1997, the New York School Choice Scholarships Foundation Program (SCSF) randomly offered three-year scholarships to attend private schools to approximately 1,000 low-income families in New York City. In this paper we leverage exogenous variation generated by the SCSF to estimate the causal effect of the private school voucher offer--and the…

Recent methods to improve generalizations from nonrandom samples typically invoke assumptions such as the strong ignorability of sample selection, which is challenging to meet in practice. Although researchers acknowledge the difficulty in meeting this assumption, point estimates are still provided and used without considering alternative…

This article examines the effects of one year of exposure to "Learning to Read in a Healing Classroom" (LRHC) on the reading and math skills of second- to fourth-grade children in the low-income and conflict-affected Democratic Republic of the Congo. LRHC consists of two primary components: teacher resource materials that infuse…

By 2013, all 50 states and the District of Columbia had adopted college- and career-ready standards in English language arts and mathematics, placing a greater emphasis on argument writing to prepare students for life after high school. Solving the specific problem of how to help teachers teach to new standards for argument writing as well as the…

The objective of this study was to determine the latent profiles of reading and language skills that characterized 7,752 students in kindergarten through tenth grade and to relate the profiles to norm-referenced reading outcomes. Reading and language skills were assessed with a computer-adaptive assessment administered in the middle of the year…

Given increasing interest in evidence-based policy, there is growing attention to how well the results from rigorous program evaluations may inform policy decisions. However, little attention has been paid to documenting the characteristics of schools or districts that participate in rigorous educational evaluations, and how they compare to…

A valuable extension of the single-rating regression discontinuity design (RDD) is a multiple-rating RDD (MRRDD). To date, four main methods have been used to estimate average treatment effects at the multiple treatment frontiers of an MRRDD: the "surface" method, the "frontier" method, the "binding-score" method, and…

Many interventions targeting cognitive skills or socioemotional skills and behaviors demonstrate initially promising but then quickly disappearing impacts. Our article seeks to identify the key features of interventions, as well as the characteristics and environments of the children and adolescents who participate in them, that can be expected to…

In this article we seek to promote a deeper understanding of the value of universal intervention research in education as well as other fields and to call for greater interdisciplinary learning and discourse. Our goal is to deepen the conversation regarding how to build a stronger research orientation toward longitudinal, population-level outcomes…

This article summarizes results from 12 empirical evaluations of observational methods in education contexts. We look at the performance of three common covariate-types in observational studies where the outcome is a standardized reading or math test. They are: pretest measures, local geographic matching, and rich covariate sets with a strong…

The acquisition of early mathematical knowledge is critical for successful long-term academic development. Mathematical language is one of the strongest predictors of children's early mathematical success. Findings from previous studies have provided correlational evidence supporting the importance of mathematical language to the development of…

Early educational intervention effects typically fade in the years following treatment, and few studies have investigated why achievement impacts diminish over time. The current study tested the effects of a preschool mathematics intervention on two aspects of children's mathematical development. We tested for separate effects of the intervention…