George Mason University

The purpose of this project is to explore relationships between teachers' use of evidence-based practices, teachers' experience with and attitudes about adapting instruction for students with disabilities, and students' writing outcomes. Although research has emphasized the need for improving content-area writing for adolescents, particularly those with disabilities, most prior research has relied on surveys to establish knowledge on this topic. This exploration project will involve direct o...

Young children's emotional competence-expression of useful emotions, regulation of emotional expressiveness when necessary, and knowledge of internal emotions and emotions of others-contributes to their social and pre-academic competence, both concurrently and across time. Emotional competence is socially constructed and maintained. In the social world of preschoolers, both parents and teachers/caregivers loom large. Researchers have explored the contribution of parental socialization of emo...

National statistics point to a crisis in adolescent reading. According to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress, 70% of 8th graders are at or below the basic level in reading, leaving them unable to make inferences or connections within and across texts, explain causal relations, or analyze text features. Further, only 22% of 8th graders agree that reading is their favorite activity and only 13% agree that they learn a lot from reading books. In this project, the research team...

The purpose of this project is to replicate the efficacy of an advanced patterning intervention, previously shown to improve first-grade students' math, literacy, and higher-order thinking skills, with kindergarten students. "Patterning" is the ability to recognize an ordering of numbers, letters, shapes, symbols, objects, or events according to some rule of progression. This project builds on the research team's three prior IES grants (Increasing Learning By Promoting Early Abstract Thought...

"Patterning" is the ability to recognize an ordering of numbers, letters, shapes, symbols, objects, or events according to some rule of progression. Understanding the place of an item in a pattern depends on understanding how it is related to items just preceding or following it. By first grade, children are expected to be developing the ability to understand patterns involving orientation or rotation, temporal and causal patterns of activities or events, and repetitive arbitrary patterns of...

Differences in student learning in reading and mathematics between children living in poverty and those who are not are apparent in kindergarten and persist as children progress through school. To address the challenge of improving learning outcomes for young children, in a previously funded IES project, Pasnak and Kidd developed a cognitive intervention for children who had difficulty mastering knowledge and skills appropriate for kindergarten. The cognitive intervention consists of small...