Search Results

This practice guide provides four evidence-based recommendations that teachers can use to deliver reading interventions to meet the needs of their students.

This practice guide provides school educators and administrators with four evidence-based recommendations for reducing dropout rates in middle and high schools and improving high school graduation rates. Each recommendation provides specific, actionable strategies; examples of how to implement the recommended practices in schools; advice on how to overcome potential obstacles; and a description of the supporting evidence.

This practice guide presents three evidence-based recommendations for helping students in grades 6–12 develop effective writing skills. Each recommendation includes specific, actionable guidance for educators on implementing practices in their classrooms. The guide also summarizes and rates the evidence supporting each recommendation, describes examples to use in class, and offers the panel’s advice on how to overcome potential implementation obstacles. This guide is geared towards administrators and teachers in all disciplines who want to help improve their students’ writing.

This practice guide provides four recommendations that address what works for English learners during reading and content area instruction. Each recommendation includes extensive examples of activities that can be used to support students as they build the language and literacy skills needed to be successful in school. The recommendations also summarize and rate supporting evidence. This guide is geared toward teachers, administrators, and other educators who want to improve instruction in academic content and literacy for English learners in elementary and middle school.

This practice guide provides five recommendations for improving students’ mathematical problem solving in grades 4 through 8. This guide is geared toward teachers, math coaches, other educators, and curriculum developers who want to improve the mathematical problem solving of students.

This practice guide provides three recommendations for teaching algebra to students in middle school and high school. Each recommendation includes implementation steps and solutions for common roadblocks. The recommendations also summarize and rate supporting evidence. This guide is geared toward teachers, administrators, and other educators who want to improve their students’ algebra knowledge.

This practice guide presents five recommendations intended to help educators improve students’ understanding of fractions. Recommendations include strategies to develop young children’s understanding of early fraction concepts and ideas for helping older children understand the meaning of fractions and the computations involved. The guide also highlights ways to build on students’ existing strategies to solve problems involving ratios, rates, and proportions.

Out-of-school time programs can enhance academic achievement by helping students learn outside the classroom.

Taking early action may be key to helping students struggling with mathematics.

This guide presents strategies that classroom teachers and specialists can use to increase the reading ability of adolescent students.

Geared toward educators, administrators, and policymakers, this guide provides recommendations that focus on reducing high school dropout rates.

The objective of this guide is to provide teachers with specific recommendations that can be carried out in the classroom without requiring systemic change.

This guide includes a set of concrete actions relating to the use of instructional and study time that are applicable to subjects that demand a great deal of content learning, including social studies, science, and mathematics.

This guide identifies practices that can improve the performance of chronically low-performing schools—a process commonly referred to as creating "turnaround schools."

Web-Based Intelligent Tutoring for the Structure Strategy (ITSS) is a supplemental web-based program for students in grades K-8. It is intended to develop literacy skills needed to understand factual texts encountered in classrooms and everyday life. The program teaches students how to follow the logical structure of factual text and to use text structure to improve understanding and recall. In particular, ITSS highlights five main text structures that are used to (1) make comparisons; (2) present problems and solutions; (3) link causes and effects; (4) present sequences; and (5) describe things, people, creatures, places, or events. The program helps students classify the structure of a passage by identifying certain key words, such as “solution” and “in contrast,” that clue readers in to the type of arguments the text is making.

Word Generation is a supplemental program that aims to improve students’ reading comprehension by building students’ vocabulary, academic language, and perspective-taking skills through classroom discussion and debate. Word Generation was developed for all students; however, English learners in particular could benefit from its focus on academic language. Word Generation consists of a series of interdisciplinary units with daily lessons focused on a high-interest issue to increase student engagement. Each unit targets a small number of academic vocabulary words that are integrated into texts, activities, writing tasks, debates, and discussions across content areas. Several Word Generation programs exist. In the Word Generation Weekly (WordGen Weekly) and Word Generation Elementary (WordGen Elementary) programs, units are intended to be used across English language arts, math, science, and social studies in grades 6–8 and grades 4 and 5, respectively. In the Science Generation (SciGen) and Social Studies Generation (SoGen) programs, units can supplement or be used in place of regular science and social studies curriculum units in grades 6–8. The different Word Generation programs can be implemented separately or together.

The SuccessMaker program is a set of computer-based courses used to supplement regular classroom reading instruction in grades K–8. Using adaptive lessons tailored to a student’s reading level, SuccessMaker aims to improve understanding in areas such as phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and concepts of print.

Great Explorations in Math and Science® (GEMS®) The Real Reasons for Seasons is a curriculum unit for grades 6–8 that focuses on the connections between the Sun and the Earth to teach students the scientific concepts behind the seasons. The unit utilizes models, hands-on investigations, peer-to-peer discussions, reflection, and informational student readings to help students understand science content and develop scientific investigation skills.

Voices Literature and Character Education Program (Voices LACE; formerly known as Voices of Love and Freedom and Literacy and Values) is a K–12 program that aims to promote positive character and citizenship values, literacy skills, and social skills. The program curriculum can be used over any length of time. During classroom lessons, students read books about issues such as ethnic discrimination, fighting, or bullying, and elaborate on central themes through role-playing and discussions practiced in school and at home. Emphasis is given to promoting caring relationships between teachers and students and among students, and to connecting the values taught to students’ personal stories. Voices LACE may also be implemented as a schoolwide improvement program. Optional components of the program include schoolwide events and restructuring of school organization and practices (establishing student assemblies and creating small learning communities), parental involvement (home visits and family nights), and community support (joint campaigns with supporting organizations and business).

The current study investigated the effectiveness of three distinct educational technologies--two game-based applications (From Here to There and DragonBox 12+) and two modes of online problem sets in ASSISTments (an Immediate Feedback condition and an Active Control condition with no immediate feedback) on Grade 7 students' algebraic knowledge. More than 3,600 Grade 7 students across nine in-person and one virtual schools within the same district were randomly assigned to one of the four conditions. Students received nine 30-minute intervention sessions from September 2020 to March 2021. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses of the final analytic sample (N = 1,850) showed significantly higher posttest scores for students who used From Here to There and DragonBox 12+ compared to the Active Control condition. No significant difference was found for the Immediate Feedback condition. The findings have implications for understanding how game-based applications can affect algebraic understanding, even within pandemic pressures on learning.

Nationally, educators suspend Black students at greater rates than any other group. This disproportionality is fueled by stereotypes casting Black students as "troublemakers"--a label students too often internalize as part of their identities. Across two independent double-blind randomized field trials involving over 2,000 seventh graders in 11 middle schools, we tested the efficacy of a brief intervention to buffer students from stereotypes and mitigate the racial suspension gap. The self-affirmation intervention helps students access positive aspects of their identities less associated with troublemaking in school. Confirmed in both trials, treatment effects cut Black-White suspension and office disciplinary referral gaps during seventh and eighth grade by approximately two thirds, with even greater impacts for Black students with prior infractions.

We report the results of a preregistered, cluster randomized controlled trial of a mathematics learning intervention known as interleaved practice. Whereas most mathematics assignments consist of a block of problems devoted to the same skill or concept, an interleaved assignment is arranged so that no 2 consecutive problems require the same strategy. Previous small-scale studies found that practice assignments with a greater proportion of interleaved practice produced higher test scores. In the present study, we assessed the efficacy and feasibility of interleaved practice in a naturalistic setting with a large, diverse sample. Each of 54 7th-grade mathematics classes periodically completed interleaved or blocked assignments over a period of 4 months, and then both groups completed an interleaved review assignment. One month later, students took an unannounced test, and the interleaved group outscored the blocked group, 61% versus 38%, d = 0.83. Teachers were able to implement the intervention without training, and they later expressed support for interleaved practice in an anonymous survey they completed before they knew the results of the study. Although important caveats remain, the results suggest that interleaved mathematics practice is effective and feasible. [For the corresponding grantee submission, see ED595322.]

Many talented students in under-resourced schools do not reach their full potential. Research shows that by sixth grade, children born into poverty have likely spent 6,000 fewer hours learning than their middle-class counterparts. Higher Achievement, an intensive summer and after-school program, aims to close that learning gap. It offers participants more than 500 hours of academic enrichment activities a year to help them meet the high academic standards expected of college-bound students. Known as "scholars"; Higher Achievement students enter the program during the summer before either fifth or sixth grade and commit to attending through eighth grade. The summer program consists of six weeks of morning classes in English Language Arts (ELA), math, science, and, in some centers, social studies, followed by enrichment activities in the afternoon, including chess, cooking, art, and soccer. During the school year, in addition to the program's regular study hall and enrichment activities, a cadre of mostly young professionals volunteer one day a week, delivering 75-minute ELA or math lessons to small groups of scholars. These volunteers receive detailed lesson plans and training so they can successfully execute the program's rigorous curricula. Part of what makes Higher Achievement affordable is its use of volunteers in this way. An earlier experimental evaluation of Metro DC, Higher Achievement's flagship affiliate in Washington, DC, and Alexandria, Virginia, found that the program was effective in improving academic performance two years after students applied. Since then, Higher Achievement has expanded to three new cities: Baltimore, Maryland; Richmond, Virginia; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Keenly aware that many effective flagship programs fail to be effective in new locations, the federal government funded an experimental validation study to examine the impacts at these expansion sites. Eligible students were randomly assigned either to a program group that could participate in Higher Achievement, or to a control group that could not enroll in the program. Comparing the two groups' outcomes provided an estimate of the program's impacts. The study found that the expansion sites experienced many of the implementation challenges common to school-based, out-of-school-time programs (for example, staff turnover, coordination with the host school, and lower-than-hoped-for attendance by middle school students), as well as those often seen in new programs (such as a lack of strong relationships with key partners and difficulty recruiting volunteers). Even so, Higher Achievement was found to be at least adequately implemented in all three cities. The study found that the program's detailed lesson plans, with scripted questions and student instructions, enabled the volunteers to deliver rigorous academic lessons. This report addresses the following questions: (1) How did the Higher Achievement centers operate during the study and what lessons are there for similar programs?; (2) Did scholars receive more academic enrichment over the two-year study period than they would have received without Higher Achievement?; and (3) How did Higher Achievement impact scholars' grades and test scores over the two years since they applied?

The purpose of this replication study was to provide replication evidence not currently available of the effects of a research-based mathematics program, schema-based instruction, on the mathematical problem-solving performance of 7th-grade students. The replication was implemented in 36 schools in 5 districts; 59 mathematics teachers and their students (N = 1,492) participated in the study. Multilevel hierarchical linear analyses revealed statistically significant differences between conditions on proximal and distal measures of mathematics problem solving, with effects sizes similar to those reported in Jitendra et al. (2015).

In a randomized field trial with 2,850 seventh-grade mathematics students, we evaluated whether an educational technology intervention increased mathematics learning. Assigning homework is common yet sometimes controversial. Building on prior research on formative assessment and adaptive teaching, we predicted that combining an online homework tool with teacher training could increase learning. The online tool ASSISTments (a) provides timely feedback and hints to students as they do homework and (b) gives teachers timely, organized information about students' work. To test this prediction, we analyzed data from 43 schools that participated in a random assignment experiment in Maine, a state that provides every seventh-grade student with a laptop to take home. Results showed that the intervention significantly increased student scores on an end-of-the-year standardized mathematics assessment as compared with a control group that continued with existing homework practices. Students with low prior mathematics achievement benefited most. The intervention has potential for wider adoption. [For the corresponding grantee submission, see ED575159.]

The Louisiana Striving Readers evaluation assessed the implementation and effectiveness of the Voyager "Passport Reading Journeys" (PRJ), a widely used supplemental literacy intervention for struggling adolescent readers that reflects the research-based practices recommended by the National Reading Panel (2000) and other more recent syntheses (Biancarosa & Snow, 2004; Edmonds, et al., 2009; Kamil, et al., 2008; Scammacca et al., 2007; Torgesen et al., 2007). To date, PRJ has been adopted in 45 states across the country in almost 470 districts and over 2,200 schools, and has served over 268,000 students. PRJ offers four levels of instruction appropriate for middle and high school students. The PRJ curriculum uses direct, explicit instruction in reading comprehension, vocabulary, and word study for adolescents who struggle with reading using age-appropriate fiction and non-fiction texts. The Louisiana Striving Readers Program, funded by the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) through a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, targeted over 1,200 struggling readers in grades 6-7 from ten middle schools across the state of Louisiana. The grant required a rigorous, independent experimental evaluation, conducted by SEDL, addressing fidelity of program implementation and program impacts on student motivation and reading achievement. The study reported here had two specific aims: (1) determine the fidelity of implementation, or the extent to which the program was delivered as the grant indicated it should be implemented; and (2) determine the impacts of PRJ on student reading and other related outcomes (i.e., student motivation and engagement in reading) and how the effects may have varied by student subgroups. This report details the intervention, the implementation study design and results, and the impact study design and results.

On average, Florida students earn only half of the points possible in the statistics content area of the state's annual mathematics assessment. Leaders in Broward County Public Schools, a large, diverse, urban school district, viewed changes to statistics curriculum and instruction as one way to address this issue. This study randomly assigned 40 middle schools in the district to either implement a replacement curriculum unit with four days of teacher professional development in probability and statistics or continue with their practice-as-usual instruction in probability and statistics. The replacement unit supported teaching and learning of all the probability and statistics standards in the grade 7 course description. The replacement unit with the associated professional development, called the Supporting Teacher Enactment of the Probability and Statistics Standards program, improved student understanding of statistics and statistics instruction. The magnitude of the effect on student understanding was 23 percent of 1 standard deviation, which is comparable to an increase of 9 percentile points for an average student. [For the appendixes, see ED610168. For the study snapshot, see ED610167.]

The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of Uncommon Schools in a turnaround setting. Uncommon was awarded a 2016 grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) to support TurnNJ, a project intended to support Uncommon's whole-school turnaround efforts in Camden and Newark, New Jersey. The study used a propensity score matching approach to examine the effects of two TurnNJ elementary schools and one TurnNJ middle school on student outcomes. The TurnNJ schools produced substantial positive effects on student achievement in math and English language arts. Additional research is needed to examine whether the TurnNJ school model could be successful in other contexts and to assess the impacts of the model on other outcomes beyond academic achievement. [The report was submitted to Uncommon Schools.]

This article reports findings from a quasi-experimental study of the impact of a summer robotics program for urban middle-grade students. The study focuses on student engagement, measured by school attendance rate the year following the program. Program students, who were nearly all low-income minority students, were matched to comparison students who did not attend summer school. After establishing baseline equivalence in attendance between the groups, the study found a statistically and educationally significant program effect on school attendance the following year, suggesting that high-interest hands-on educational activities can help maintain student engagement in school.

Reading comprehension in the content areas is a challenge for many middle grade students. Text structure-based instruction has yielded positive outcomes in reading comprehension at all grade levels in small and large studies. The text structure strategy delivered via the web, called Intelligent Tutoring System for the Text Structure Strategy (ITSS), has proven successful in large-scale studies at 4th and 5th grades and a smaller study at 7th grade. Text structure-based instruction focuses on selection and encoding of strategic memory. This strategic memory proves to be an effective springboard for many comprehension-based activities such as summarizing, inferring, elaborating, and applying. This was the first large-scale randomized controlled efficacy study on the web-based delivery of the text structure strategy to 7th-grade students. 108 classrooms from rural and suburban schools were randomly assigned to ITSS or control and pretests and posttests were administered at the beginning and end of the school year. Multilevel data analyses were conducted on standardized and researcher designed measures of reading comprehension. Results showed that ITSS classrooms outperformed the control classrooms on all measures with the highest effects reported for number of ideas included in the main idea. Results have practical implications for classroom practices.

This experimental study evaluated the effectiveness of a research-based intervention, schema-based instruction (SBI), on students' proportional problem solving. SBI emphasizes the underlying mathematical structure of problems, uses schematic diagrams to represent information in the problem text, provides explicit problem solving and metacognitive strategy instruction, and focuses on the flexible use of multiple solution strategies. Eighty-two teachers/classrooms with a total of 1,999 seventh-grade students across 50 school districts were randomly assigned to a treatment (SBI) or control (business-as-usual) condition. An observational measure provided evidence that the SBI intervention was implemented with fidelity. Results of multilevel modeling indicated that the SBI group scored on average significantly higher than the control group on the posttest and retention test (9 weeks later) and also showed significantly more growth in proportional problem solving. There were no treatment effects on the Process and Applications subtest of the Group Mathematics Assessment and Diagnostic Evaluation. These results demonstrate that SBI can be more effective than the control approach in improving students' proportional problem solving. [This paper was published in the "Journal of Educational Psychology," (EJ1082754).]

Positive behavior interventions and supports (PBIS) improve student behavior. Yet, teachers may not receive adequate training to implement PBIS at the classroom level. This study evaluated class-wide function-related intervention teams (CW-FIT) as a classroom-level behavior management system to determine whether the behavior of middle school students would improve with teacher implementation of CW-FIT. A multiple-baseline across conditions design was used to evaluate changes in on-task behavior of adolescent students in sixth and seventh grade from a socioeconomically and ethnically diverse middle school. In addition, the effects on teacher behavior-specific praise statements and teacher reprimands were assessed. Consistent with previous evaluations of CW-FIT, findings indicated a functional relation between the intervention and increases in on-task student behavior. In addition, the findings also showed improvements to teacher behavior with increases in behavior-specific praise statements; however, no effect was observed with teacher reprimands. Social validity measures indicated students and teachers found the intervention favorable. Implications, limitations, and areas for future inquiry are discussed.

Inference skill is one of the most important predictors of reading comprehension. Still, there is little rigorous research investigating the effects of inference instruction on reading comprehension. There is no research investigating the effects of inference instruction on reading comprehension for English learners with reading comprehension difficulties. The current study investigated the effects of small-group inference instruction on the inference generation and reading comprehension of sixth- and seventh-grade students who were below-average readers (M = 86.7, SD = 8.1). Seventy-seven percent of student participants were designated limited English proficient. Participants were randomly assigned to 24, 40-min sessions of the inference instruction intervention (n = 39) or to business-as-usual English language arts instruction (n = 39). Membership in the treatment condition statistically significantly predicted higher outcome score on the "Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test" Reading Comprehension subtest (d = 0.60, 95% confidence interval [CI] [0.16, 1.03]), but not on the other measures of inference skill.

This article presents findings from an intervention across sixth and seventh grades to teach academic words to middle school students. The goals included investigating a progression of outcomes from word knowledge to comprehension and investigating the processes students use in establishing word meaning. Participants in Year 1 were two sixth-grade reading teachers and 105 students (treatment n = 62; control n = 43) and in Year 2, one seventh-grade reading teacher and 87 students (treatment n = 44; control n = 43) from the same public school. In both years, results favored instructed students in word knowledge, lexical access, and morphological awareness on researcher-designed measures. In Year 2, small advances were also found for comprehension. Transcripts of lessons shed light on processes of developing representations of unfamiliar words.

A typical mathematics assignment consists primarily of practice problems requiring the strategy introduced in the immediately preceding lesson (e.g., a dozen problems that are solved by using the Pythagorean Theorem). This means that students know which strategy is needed to solve each problem before they read the problem. In an alternative approach known as "interleaved practice," problems from the course are rearranged so that a portion of each assignment includes different kinds of problems in an interleaved order. Interleaved practice requires students to choose a strategy on the basis of the problem itself, as they must do when they encounter a problem during a comprehensive examination or subsequent course. In the experiment reported here, 126 seventh-grade students received the same practice problems over a three-month period, but the problems were arranged so that skills were learned by interleaved practice or by the usual blocked approach. The practice phase concluded with a review session, followed 1 or 30 days later by an unannounced test. Compared to blocked practice, interleaved practice produced higher scores on both the immediate and delayed tests (Cohen's d = 0.42 and 0.79, respectively). Two appendices include: (1) Serial Position of Each Graph and Slope Problem in the Assignments (table); and (2) Frequency of Responses of Three Teachers to Statements About Interleaved Practice (table). [Note: This article was "in press" at the time of submission. No citation information is available at this time.]

Most mathematics assignments consist of a group of problems requiring the same strategy. For example, a lesson on the quadratic formula is typically followed by a block of problems requiring students to use the quadratic formula, which means that students know the appropriate strategy before they read each problem. In an alternative approach, different kinds of problems appear in an interleaved order, which requires students to choose the strategy on the basis of the problem itself. In the classroom-based experiment reported here, grade seven students (n = 140) received blocked or interleaved practice over a nine-week period, followed two weeks later by an unannounced test. Mean test scores were greater for material learned by interleaved practice rather than by blocked practice (72% vs. 38%, d = 1.05). This interleaving effect was observed even though the different kinds of problems were superficially dissimilar from each other, whereas previous interleaved mathematics studies required students to learn nearly identical kinds of problems. We conclude that interleaving improves mathematics learning not only by improving discrimination between different kinds of problems but also by strengthening the association between each kind of problem and its corresponding strategy. [This article was published in: "Psychonomic Bulletin & Review" v21 n5 p1323-1330 Oct 2014; http://dx.doi.org/ 10.3758/s13423-014-0588-3.]

Student achievement in mathematics has been a focal concern in the United States for many years. The National Research Council's 2001 report and the recent report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel (2008) both called attention to student achievement in mathematics, and both called for all students to learn algebra by the end of eighth grade. Reports have argued, further, that achieving this goal requires that students first successfully learn several topics in rational numbers--fractions, decimals, ratio, rate, proportion, and percent. These topics are typically covered in grades 4 through 7, yet many students continue to struggle with them beyond the seventh grade. The National Mathematics Advisory Panel wrote that--difficulty with fractions (including decimals and percent) is pervasive and is a major obstacle to further progress in mathematics, including algebra. The panel also specified that by the end of seventh grade, students should be able to solve problems involving percent, ratio, and rate, and extend this work to proportionality. The U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Educational Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE)--within the Institute of Education Sciences--initiated the Middle School Mathematics Professional Development Impact Study to test the impact of a professional development (PD) program for teachers that was designed to address the problem of low student achievement in topics in rational numbers. The study focuses on seventh grade, the culminating year for teaching those topics and has three central research questions: (1) What impact did the PD program provided in this study have on teacher knowledge of rational number topics? (2) What impact did the PD program provided in this study have on teacher instructional practices? and (3) What impact did the PD program provided in this study have on student achievement in rational number topics? The study produced the following results: (1) The study's PD program was implemented as intended; (2) The PD program did not produce a statistically significant impact on teacher knowledge of rational numbers (effect size = 0.19, p-value = 0.15); (3) The PD program had a statistically significant impact on the frequency with which teachers engaged in activities that elicited student thinking, one of the three measures of instructional practice used in the study (effect size = 0.48); and (4) The PD program did not produce a statistically significant impact on student achievement (effect size = 0.04, p-value = 0.37). This report presents the study's findings after 1 year of implementing the PD in the treatment schools. A subsequent report will present findings after 2 years of implementing the PD. Chapter 1 presents an overview of the study. Chapter 2 describes the study design and its realization, including a description of the sample and tests of baseline equivalence of the treatment and control groups on observed characteristics. Chapter 3 describes the design and implementation of the PD program and the extent of service contrast between the treatment and control groups. Chapter 4 addresses the impact of the PD program on teacher knowledge, instructional practice, and student mathematics achievement. Chapter 5 provides several nonexperimental analyses that explore additional questions related to the impact findings. Appended are: (1) Data Collection; (2) Details of the Study Samples and Analytic Approaches; (3) Supplemental Information on the Design and Implementation of the PD Program; (4) Supporting Tables and Figures for Impact Analyses; and (5) Exploratory Analyses: Approaches and Additional Results. (Contains 9 exhibits, 9 figures, and 90 tables.)

Adding to the growing debate and evidence base on the effects of charter schools, this evaluation was conducted in 36 charter middle schools in 15 states. It compares the outcomes of 2,330 students who applied to these schools and were randomly assigned by lotteries to be admitted (lottery winners) or not admitted (lottery losers) to the schools. Both sets of students were tracked over two years and data on student achievement, academic progress, behavior, and attitudes were collected. The study is the first large-scale randomized trial of the effectiveness of charter schools in varied types of communities and states. Among the key findings were that, on average, charter middle schools that held lotteries were neither more nor less successful than traditional public schools in improving math or reading test scores, attendance, grade promotion, or student conduct within or outside of school. Being admitted to a study charter school did significantly improve both students' and parents' satisfaction with school. Charter middle schools' impact on student achievement varied significantly across schools. Charter middle schools in urban areas--as well as those serving higher proportions of low-income and low achieving students--were more effective (relative to their nearby traditional public schools) than were other charter schools in improving math test scores. Some operational features of charter middle schools were associated with less negative impacts on achievement. These features include smaller enrollments and the use of ability grouping in math or English classes. There was no significant relationship between achievement impacts and the charter schools' policy environment. Because the study could only include charter middle schools that held lotteries, the results do not necessarily apply to the full set of charter middle schools in the U.S. Appended are: (1) Selecting the Charter School and Student Samples; (2) Calculation of Sample Weights; (3) Outcome Measures for the Impact Analysis; (4) Analytic Methods; (5) Supplemental Materials for Chapter III; (6) Supplemental Tables for Chapter IV; and (7) Supplemental Tables for Chapter V. (Contains 78 tables, 29 figures, and 164 footnotes.) [For the study snapshot of this full report, see ED510574.]

This study examined the efficacy of an after-school program, the Challenging Horizons Program (CHP), that met four days a week and focused on improving organization, academic skills, and classroom behavior. The CHP was compared with a community control that included involvement in a district-run after-school program that met one to three days a week and focused on preparation for standardized testing. Participants were 48 middle-school youth, referred as experiencing a combination of learning and behavior problems, randomly assigned to either the CHP or the control. Parent and teacher ratings of behavioral and academic functioning were collected at the beginning of the academic year and again after one semester of intervention. Relative to the control, participants in the CHP made significant improvements in parent rated academic progress, self-esteem, and overall severity of problem. While teacher ratings did not reach significance, CHP participants made medium effect size improvements in academic progress and small improvements in overall severity. Core class grades and discipline records were also examined to provide a broad picture of functioning beyond rating scale data.

Two studies explored the role of implicit theories of intelligence in adolescents' mathematics achievement. In Study 1 with 373 7th graders, the belief that intelligence is malleable (incremental theory) predicted an upward trajectory in grades over the two years of junior high school, while a belief that intelligence is fixed (entity theory) predicted a flat trajectory. A mediational model including learning goals, positive beliefs about effort, and causal attributions and strategies was tested. In Study 2, an intervention teaching an incremental theory to 7th graders (N=48) promoted positive change in classroom motivation, compared with a control group (N=43). Simultaneously, students in the control group displayed a continuing downward trajectory in grades, while this decline was reversed for students in the experimental group.

Encouraging students to share and compare solution methods is a key component of reform efforts in mathematics, and comparison is emerging as a fundamental learning mechanism. To experimentally evaluate the effects of comparison for mathematics learning, the authors randomly assigned 70 seventh-grade students to learn about algebra equation solving by either (a) comparing and contrasting alternative solution methods or (b) reflecting on the same solution methods one at a time. At posttest, students in the compare group had made greater gains in procedural knowledge and flexibility and comparable gains in conceptual knowledge. These findings suggest potential mechanisms behind the benefits of comparing contrasting solutions and ways to support effective comparison in the classroom.

This study examined the initial efficacy of World Generation (WorldGen), a Tier I social studies instructional approach for emergent bilingual (EB) students and their native English-speaking (non-EB) peers in Grades 6 and 7. WorldGen builds on prior research on instructional practices that have been associated with improved content knowledge and literacy outcomes for EBs in classes of students with varying English proficiency. Using a within-teacher design, middle grades world history teachers' classes were randomly assigned to WorldGen treatment (17) or comparison conditions (16) for three to four approximately two-week units. The student sample included 42% EBs. Students in the treatment condition (n = 373) scored higher, on average, on world history content (Hedges' g = 0.47) and vocabulary knowledge (Hedges' g = 0.41) than students in the comparison condition (n = 343) but no statistically significant findings were yielded regarding disciplinary literacy skills at the end of WorldGen instruction. Of primary interest, the statistically significant main effects indicated that world history content knowledge and vocabulary learning was similar for both current EB and non-EB students in the treatment condition. The findings provide initial support for the use of the WorldGen instructional practices for improving content acquisition and vocabulary in general education social studies classes with students with a range of English proficiency. Furthermore, teachers perceived the WorldGen instructional practices and materials as providing the information and learning experiences necessary to support students in meeting grade-level expectations.

Scholars and practitioners have called for personalized and widely accessible professional development (PD) for teachers. Yet, a long-standing tension between customizing support and increasing access to such support has hindered the scale-up of high-quality PD for individual teachers. This study addresses this challenge by developing a computerized program for middle school mathematics teachers that provides frequent opportunities for teachers to interact with and obtain personalized and real-time feedback from a virtual facilitator based on natural language processing. Based on the data collected from 1727 middle school students in an experiment in which the teachers of these students were randomly assigned to the program or the business-as-usual condition (i.e., the control group), we found that the program had a statistically significant impact on students' mathematics performance. These results demonstrate the potential of incorporating an automated, interactive feedback tool supported by artificial intelligence to create effective, scalable teacher PD.

This study tested the effects of implementing a narrative computer-based educational game within a middle-school math class. Gameplay consisted of navigating through a virtual spaceship and completing missions by periodically engaging in learning-by-teaching activities that involved helping an avatar solve math problems. In a pretest/posttest matched-groups design, 58 middle-school students either played the game for 10 hours over 4 days in place of their typical math instruction (game group), or they received conventional math instruction that consisted of a matched set of practice problems (control group). Contrary to our hypotheses, results from posttest measures indicated no significant differences in learning outcomes or motivation between the two groups. Importantly, supplementary observational data indicated that students in the game group spent much of their time during gameplay engaging in activities unrelated to the educational content of the game (e.g., navigating the virtual world) and only 20% of their time engaging in learning-by-teaching activities. These results highlight the importance of designing educational games that effectively balance features intended to entertain learners and features intended to promote learning. Implications for implementing educational games into classroom instruction are discussed.

Classroom management is commonly challenging in middle schools. Class-wide function-related intervention teams (CW-FIT) is a multitiered intervention designed to decrease problem behaviors at the classroom level. It is comprises evidence-based practices such as teaching classroom expectations, increasing teacher praise, and using positive reinforcement in an interdependent group contingency. CW-FIT has shown promise in a variety of school settings, but it has not been tested in middle school art classrooms. This initial investigation examined the effects of CW-FIT using a single-subject ABAB design in two middle school art classrooms. Results indicated that class on-task behavior increased by more than 25% and teacher praise-to-reprimand ratios more than doubled during CW-FIT implementation compared with baseline levels. Results also indicated that on-task behavior for students identified as at risk for behavioral disorders improved by more than 18% during the intervention. Teachers and students found the intervention to be socially valid. Resulting implications were promising for using CW-FIT in other middle school art classrooms.

This study assesses the implementation and impacts of the Teacher Potential Project (TPP), a program designed by EL Education and which includes an English language arts (ELA) standards-aligned curriculum and embedded professional development for teachers. The study uses a randomized controlled trial (RCT) design to assess the impacts of TPP on the instructional practice outcomes of ELA teachers in grades 3 through 8 and the ELA achievement outcomes of their students. The RCT includes 70 elementary and middle schools (35 treatment and 35 control) in 18 relatively high-need districts that were randomly assigned to treatment and control conditions within matched pairs of schools in three cohorts that began participating in the 2014-2015, 2015-2016, and 2016-2017 school years. Treatment schools engaged in TPP for one year while control schools continued with business as usual. The study also uses a two-year quasi-experimental design (QED) study to assess the impact of extending implementation of TPP to a second year on teacher instructional practice and student ELA achievement outcomes. EL Education recruited 22 of the study schools (10 treatment and 12 control) in five districts in one cohort to participate in a second year of the study. The study team collected a variety of data for the evaluation of TPP, including teacher surveys and classroom observations administered in fall and spring each year and student administrative records. Impacts of TPP on ELA teacher instructional practices and student ELA achievement were estimated using multivariate regression methods. The implementation evaluation found that the TPP ELA curriculum was implemented in all schools, and that there was generally high school-level implementation fidelity of the TPP professional development components in the first and second years of TPP among the novice ELA teachers. The impact evaluation found positive impacts of TPP on ELA teachers' overall instructional practices after one year compared to teachers who used their district-provided curriculum and participated in their district's professional development supports. After two years of teacher participation, impacts on their students' ELA achievement were roughly equivalent to 1.4 months of typical student improvement, or moving an average student scoring at the 50th percentile to the 54th percentile. The findings be useful to districts and policymakers aiming to support teachers and students in the context of rigorous state standards such as the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The study of TPP makes several important contributions to the literature evaluating paired curriculum and PD programs: it uses rigorous group designs, evaluates the impact of one and two years of program implementation, and examines broad outcomes on both teacher instructional practice and student ELA achievement. [This report was submitted by Mathematica to EL Education.]

Homework is transforming at a rapid rate with continuous advances in educational technology. Computer-based homework, in particular, is gaining popularity across a range of schools, with little empirical evidence on how to optimize student learning. The current aim was to test the effects of different types of feedback on computer-based homework. In the study, middle school students completed a computer-based pretest, homework assignment, and posttest containing challenging algebraic problems. On the homework assignment, students were assigned to different feedback conditions. In Experiment 1 (N = 103), students received no feedback or correct-answer feedback after each problem. In Experiment 2 (N = 143), students received (1) no feedback, (2) correct-answer feedback, (3) try-again feedback, or (4) explanation feedback after each problem. For students with low prior knowledge, feedback resulted in better posttest performance than no feedback. However, students with high prior knowledge learned just as much whether they received feedback or not. Results suggest the provision of basic feedback on computer-based homework can benefit novice students' mathematics learning.

In 2011 Baltimore City Schools submitted a successful proposal for an Investing in Innovations (i3) grant to offer a three year (2012-2014) summer program designed to expose rising sixth through eighth grade students to VEX robotics. The i3-funded Middle School Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Summer Learning Program was part of a larger Baltimore City STEM summer learning program entitled "Create the Solution" in 2012 and "22nd Century Pioneers" in 2013 and 2014. The five-week summer program offered in 2012, 2013, and 2014 consisted of a half-day of instruction in mathematics and science and a half-day of enrichment activities. The robotics workshop taught students the fundamentals of building robots and provided time for teams to build their own robots and participate in competitions. The larger program offered different enrichment activities such as sports or arts. This report addresses research questions regarding the program's: (1) implementation fidelity; (2) performance goals; (3) impact on student attendance and mathematics achievement outcomes; (4) impact on student aspirations for college, studying STEM subjects in college, and pursuing STEM careers; and (5) impact on measures of teacher effectiveness. The following includes a summary for each: (1) Implementation Fidelity: Instruction in mathematics and robotics was implemented with fidelity all three program years. Implementation fidelity was lower for the professional development in robotics and mathematics components of the program because teacher attendance rates did not meet the thresholds set by City Schools; (2) Enrollment Goals: Most program enrollment goals were not met. Enrollment in the i3-funded program was 193 students in 2012 (goal 400), 384 in 2013 (goal 500), and 386 in 2014 (goal 600). The program sought to enroll 80% low-performing students in mathematics each year, but fell significantly short of this goal despite the district's efforts to reach out to these students. In addition, the program goal of enrolling at least 50% female participants was not met. The program also sought to have at least 80% of students attend at least 70% of the time (17 of the 24 program days), but only 55% of students attended at that rate. The program did meet its goals for recruiting minority (at least 95%) and high poverty students (at least 80%) each year; (3) Program Impacts on Attendance: Found a significant program effect on attendance in the year following the 2012 program. Program students had average attendance rates of 1.4 percentage points higher than the comparison group the year following the program (97.0% vs. 95.6%). An even larger significant program effect for low-achieving students' attendance was found in the year following the 2012 program (96.4% vs. 93.8%). The 2013 program students had slightly but not significantly higher attendance rates than their matched comparison students in the year following the program. The authors also also examined whether there was still a program effect on attendance a year later (2013-14) for the Summer 2012 participants. Program participants had average attendance rates of 1.5 percentage points higher than comparison students (95.2% vs. 93.7%). Among the low-achieving students the attendance difference was 2.4 percentage points (93.6% for program students vs. 91.2% for comparison students). These effects were not statistically significant; (4) Program Impacts on Mathematics Achievement: There were no program effects on mathematics achievement for either the 2012 or 2013 programs; (5) Program Impacts on Student Aspirations: There was no evidence from student survey data that the robotics program had a positive effect on student aspirations to attend college, study STEM subjects in college, or pursue a STEM career for either the 2013 or 2014 programs; and (6) Program Impacts on Teacher Effectiveness: Analyses based on mean instructional effectiveness scores from Spring 2013 and Fall 2013 on the nine components of the district's teacher evaluation tool examined whether teachers who received the summer professional development in 2013 made gains in instructional effectiveness. The difference between program teachers' effectiveness scores before and after the professional development was not statistically significant. Data were not available to examine differences between program teachers and a comparable group of teachers who did not receive the summer professional development. The following are appended: (1) Implementation Fidelity; (2) Performance Goals; and (3) Methodology.

The effects of a mathematical problem-solving intervention on students' problem-solving performance and math achievement were measured in a randomized control trial with 1,059 7th-grade students. The intervention, "Solve It!," is a research-based cognitive strategy instructional intervention that was shown to improve the problem-solving performance of 8th-grade students with and without learning disabilities (LD). The purpose of the present study was to determine whether the effectiveness of the intervention could be replicated with younger students. Forty middle schools in a large urban school district were included in the study, with one 7th-grade math teacher participating at each school (after attrition, n = 34). "Solve It!" was implemented by the teachers in their inclusive math classrooms. Problem-solving performance was assessed using curriculum-based math problem-solving measures, which were administered as a pretest and then monthly over the course of the 8-month intervention. Students who received the intervention (n = 644) embedded in the district curriculum showed a significantly greater rate of growth on the curriculum-based measures than students in the comparison group (n = 415) who received the district curriculum only. Results of the Bayesian analyses indicated that the intervention effect was somewhat stronger for low-achieving students than for average-achieving students. Overall, findings from the present study as well as the previous study with 8th-grade students indicate that the intervention was effective across ability groups and is an appropriate program to use in inclusive classrooms with students of varying math ability.

This is the second and final report of the Middle School Mathematics Professional Development Impact Study, which examines the impact of providing a professional development (PD) program in rational number topics to seventh-grade mathematics teachers. An interim report (Garet et al. 2010) described the findings after one year of PD. The current report documents the impact after providing a second year of PD in a subset of the original participating districts and includes supplemental analyses that use data from both years of the study. The study produced the following core second-year results: (1) The study's PD program was implemented as intended, but teacher turnover limited the average dosage received; (2) At the end of the second year of implementation, the PD program did not have a statistically significant impact on teacher knowledge; and (3) At the end of the second year of implementation, the PD program did not have a statistically significant impact on average student achievement in rational numbers. Appended are: (1) Details of the Study Samples; (2) Details of Data Collection and Analytical Approaches; (3) Supplemental Information on the Design and Implementation of the PD Program; (4) Supporting Tables and Figures for Impact Analyses; and (5) Exploratory Analyses: Approaches and Additional Results. (Contains 6 exhibits, 6 figures, 81 tables and 124 footnotes.) [For "Middle School Mathematics Professional Development Impact Study: Findings after the Second Year of Implementation. Executive Summary. NCEE 2011-4025," see ED519923. For "Middle School Mathematics Professional Development Impact Study: Findings After the First Year of Implementation. NCEE 2010-4009," see ED509306.]

Students with high-incidence disabilities struggle with reading comprehension due to difficulties in background knowledge and metacognitive skills, including use of self-monitoring and other strategies. In the United States, these students typically receive the majority of their instruction in general education settings. However, there is little research comparing reading comprehension interventions with the typical basal curricula used in these classrooms. We compared the effects of an explicit reading comprehension intervention to those of a typical language-arts curriculum on upper elementary and middle school students' (n = 38) retells of passages and understanding of main ideas. A 2 x 4 repeated measures multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) revealed significant differences between instructional groups. These results indicate systematic and explicit reading comprehension instruction can be delivered successfully to students with high-incidence disabilities in general education settings. (Contains 3 figures and 4 tables.)

This study investigated the effects of different versions of Web-based instruction focused on text structure on fifth- and seventh-grade students' reading comprehension. Stratified random assignment was employed in a two-factor experiment embedded within a pretest and multiple posttests design (immediate and four-month delayed posttests). The two factors were type of feedback provided by the Web-based tutor (elaborated vs. simple feedback) and the motivational factor of choice of text topics in practice lessons (student choice of texts vs. no choice). These factors were examined to learn how they affected performance after the six-month, 90-minutes/week intervention. Students who received elaborated feedback performed better on a standardized test of reading comprehension than students who received simple feedback. Learning how to attend to errors from the elaborated feedback tutor yielded large gains in test performance. Simple feedback did not help the least skilled third of readers move from complete lack of competency to competency using the structure strategy with problem-and-solution text. Choice between two topics for practice lessons did not increase reading comprehension. Substantial effects sizes were found from pretest to posttest on various measures of reading comprehension: recall, strategy competence, and standardized reading comprehension test scores. Maintenance of performance over summer break was found for most measures. The study informs research and teaching about Web-based reading tutors, feedback, comprehension, and top-level text structure. (Contains 16 tables, 8 figures and 2 notes.)

This article describes an independent assessment of the Fast ForWord Language computer-based training program developed by Scientific Learning Corporation. Previous laboratory research involving children with language-based learning impairments showed strong effects on their abilities to recognize brief and fast sequences of nonspeech and speech stimuli, but generalization of these effects beyond clinical settings and student populations and to broader literacy measures remains unclear. Implementing a randomized field trial in eight urban schools, we generated impact estimates from separate intent-to-treat and treatment-on-the-treated analyses of the literacy outcomes of second- and seventh-grade students who were more generally at risk for poor reading and language outcomes. There were some problems of implementation in the field setting, and the Fast ForWord Language program did not, in general, help students in these eight schools improve their language and reading comprehension test scores. (Contains 6 notes and 10 tables.)

Among 68 rural learning-disabled students in grades 5-7 having moderate decoding fluency and high decoding accuracy, a paraphrasing cognitive strategy increased reading comprehension of main ideas more effectively than repeated readings or control training. Paraphrasing plus repeated readings was no more effective than paraphrasing alone. Contains 26 references. (SV)

Students in fourth and seventh grade who were poor comprehenders were taught prediction, clarification, question generation, and summarization using scaffolding instruction. Performance on a standardized comprehension test improved for the students who received the instruction. (PCB)