After-school youth development programs support social-emotional functioning which leads to better academic and behavioral outcomes. This article examines three common predictors of social-emotional functioning individually and concurrently to better understand the role of these predictors in the after-school setting. The common predictors are…

Students with autism may struggle to develop the academic skills necessary for success in school and beyond. Understanding and improving academic skills performance requires appropriate measurement approaches. One such option that has been minimally studied with students with autism is curriculum-based measurement (CBM). Coinciding with the need…

Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to reflect on and process the sounds of spoken language and to conduct mental operations on the units that represent them, that is, phonemes. This study intended to examine the descriptive and psychometric properties of the phonemic awareness of schoolers test assessment (PASTA), a new tool that assesses…

Most US students attend coeducational classes, but to what extent do students feel integrated into the entire classroom of their peers, especially with other-gender (OG) peers? The major goal of this study was to investigate how variations in gender integration (GI), measured by students' expectancies about inclusion, efficacy, and social costs of…

Student engagement not only improves student achievement but also affects the dropout rate. Positive classroom interaction between teachers and students enhances student engagement. The interaction between teachers and students is bidirectional, and student engagement can also affect teachers' classroom teaching behavior. Both student engagement…

We explored third- to fifth-grade children's friendship concepts in 20 autistic and 21 nonautistic students matched for mental age. Transcripts of semi-structured interviews were coded for definitions of friendship, friendship expectations, and friendship transgressions (i. e., violations of friendship expectations), and subjected to quantitative…

The purpose of the present study is to examine whether physical and relational victimization negatively impacts indicators of school climate--students' perceptions of school safety, their attachment to school, and their help-seeking behavior--and whether gender moderates these associations. Using a sample of 361 third through fifth-grade students…

A critical next step in advancing our understanding of teacher practices that can equitably engage and support learning in diverse classrooms is determining the effectiveness of culturally responsive interventions. Yet, quantitative measurement indicators of the effectiveness of culturally responsive teaching interventions are scarce. Most…

The current study examined the link between academic enablers and different types of reading achievement measures. Academic enablers are skills and behaviors that support, or enable, students to perform well academically, such as engagement, interpersonal skills, motivation, and study skills. The sample in this study consisted of 61 third-,…

This study explored the relationships among formative curriculum-based measures of reading (CBM-R), student engagement as an extra-academic indicator of student motivation, and summative performance on a high-stakes reading assessment. A diverse sample of third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade students and their teachers responded to questionnaires…

This study investigated how performance on reading curriculum-based measurement (R-CBM) in Spanish is related to performance on R-CBM in English. Parallel process growth models and quantile regression analyses were used to examine the relations between initial benchmark scores and growth and the consistency of the relations across student reading…

Many studies have found gender differences in certain areas of academic achievement, such as reading and math. Fewer studies have examined gender disparities in writing skills. The current study explored gender differences in written expression performance. Participants were 1,240 male and female students in third through eighth grade,…

Summer loss of reading is a potential factor in maintaining, and potentially widening, the achievement gap. This study used curriculum-based measurement of reading (R-CBM) to investigate the effect of the summer on reading. For this study, 317 students in Grades 2 to 5 were assessed in the spring and fall using Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early…

This study explored differences in test anxiety on high-stakes standardized achievement testing and low-stakes testing among elementary school children. This is the first study to directly examine differences in young students' reported test anxiety between No Child Left Behind (NCLB) achievement testing and classroom testing. Three hundred…

This study examined the relations between reading fluency and comprehension among elementary school students (N = 171) in Grades 2, 3, and 5, all of whom were designated as English language learners (ELL) at some point in their educational careers. Although the overall relation between reading fluency and comprehension (r = 0.56) was consistent…