George Farkas

This project will use social ecological theory to investigate modifiable factors in family, classroom, school, and neighborhood contexts that are associated with or predictive of bullying victimization in 3rd-5th grade, the extent to which these social contextual factors function as mediators or moderators of other explanatory factors (e.g., family sociodemographic level, children's K-2nd grade academic or behavioral functioning), and whether and to what extent bullying victimization is rela...

This Exploration grant will analyze secondary data from three nationally representative databases to examine significant disproportionality in special education, including to what extent disproportionality may be resulting from systemic bias in disability identification. A lack of scientific consensus has emerged regarding racial and ethnic disparities in disability identification. Until recently, over-representation was widely believed to result from U.S. schools inappropriately over-identi...

In an information society and knowledge economy, writing is a ubiquitous requirement for full civic and workforce participation. The evolution to more source-based, analytic writing can be seen in current educational standards and assessments, including the Common Core State Standards (CCSS); Next Generation Science Standards; and College, Career, and Civic Life Framework. Recent national education statistics indicate that U.S. students are not prepared to meet the challenges of this complex...

In this project, researchers will examine the efficacy of Visual Syntactic Text Formatting (VSTF), a technology for reformatting text to make it easier to understand, on 7th and 8th grade students' reading and writing outcomes. Students are expected to read and understand more and more complex texts as they get older, and many of these texts are complicated both in their language and their structure. One way to help students better understand the complex text they read is to adjust the print...

The intended purpose of this project was to analyze nationally representative and longitudinal data to identify factors associated with or predictive of elementary and middle school students experiencing difficulties in learning science. Some groups of elementary and middle school students are far more likely to experience low science achievement, although the factors leading to this greater risk are poorly understood. Students with disabilities, low-income students, and English language lea...