Education Resources Overview

Fidelity of implementation is a critical but often neglected component of any new system, practice, or intervention in educational research and practice. Fidelity is a multidimensional construct focused on providing evidence of adherence, quality, dosage, differentiation, and responsiveness following implementation. Unfortunately, fidelity has not always been prioritized, although evidence suggests that is changing, at least in published research.

This analysis examines the importance summer break has on a growing gap in mathematics proficiency between students of differing socio-economic status.

This analysis examines the importance summer break has on a growing gap in reading proficiency between students of differing socio-economic status.

Schools in the United States now spend more than $2 billion each year on education technology. But what are schools getting in return for this significant investment in technology learning? Robert Slavin examines the results from five studies designed to answer this question.

This analysis examines whether the current mechanisms for providing federal education funding to disadvantaged children are effective and whether the system works as originally intended.

This report explores some of the most financially disadvantaged school districts in the country and identifies a typology of conditions that have created or reinforced their disadvantage. It report lays out a typology of conditions that lead to severe fiscal disadvantage for local public school systems. It then provides examples of states, state policy conditions, and specific local public school districts identified as being severely financially disadvantaged.

This report begins by identifying those states where combined state and local revenues are systematically lower in higher-poverty districts–that is, states with “regressive” school funding distributions. Based on this analysis, the authors focus on six states–Illinois, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and North Carolina–where children attending school in higher-poverty districts still have substantially less access to state and local revenue than children attending school in lower-poverty districts. With these states in mind, the authors then go beyond recent reports on school funding inequities to uncover some nontraditional causes of these imbalances.

The National Report Card is a critique of state school funding systems and the extent to which these systems ensure equality of educational opportunity for all children, regardless of background, family income, place of residence or school. The report makes the assumption that "fair" school funding is defined as "a state finance system that ensures equal educational opportunity by providing a sufficient level of funding distributed to districts within the state to account for additional needs generated by student poverty."

The Second Edition of the National Report Card on public school funding, Is School Funding Fair?, shows that far too many states continue to deny public schools the essential resources they need to meet the needs of the nation's 53 million students and to boost academic achievement. The National Report Card rates the 50 states on the basis of four "fairness indicators" - funding level, funding distribution, state fiscal effort, and public school coverage. The Report provides the most in-depth analysis to date of state education finance systems and school funding fairness across the nation.

The 3rd Edition of Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card details how the Great Recession and its aftermath have affected school funding in the states. The National Report Card (NRC) examines each state's level of commitment to equal educational opportunity, regardless of a student's background, family income, or where she or he attends school. Providing fair school funding -- at a sufficient level with additional funds to meet needs generated by poverty -- is crucial if all students are to be afforded the opportunity to learn and be successful.

In these pages, we estimate the costs of blendedlearning models and fulltime virtual schools as currently operated in the U.S.

The focus of this essay is on which economic methods can complement and enhance impact evaluations. The authors propose the use of six domains to link intervention effectiveness to the best technique needed to determine which practice is the most cost-effective choice.

The authors discuss how to use economic techniques to evaluate educational programs and show how to apply basic cost analysis to implementation of school-wide positive behavior support (SWPBS).

This report examines the efficiency of the nation's public education system

This report analyzes two critical, and sometimes competing, issues in school finance reformer: fiscal equity and fiscal efficiency. It makes the case that fiscal equity and fiscal effectiveness are not mutually exclusive, and this nation needs to do more to improve both the fairness and the productivity of public school dollars. In other words, we need to make sure that schools and districts not only get enough money to serve their student populations but also that they then spend those dollars wisely.

In most schools, resources are shrinking as the student body becomes more diverse and challenging. Yet if teachers advocate too loudly for additional resources or more support for education from the home, they are criticized for making excuses rather than solving problems.

Class size is one variable in American education that research confirms has a positive influence student learning and was then taken to scale across the nation. Unfortunately, the results when applied at scale have not achieved the results expected in the initial studies.

The most recent incarnation of ESEA, signed into law in January of 2002 by President George W. Bush, is the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). We’re now 13 years into NCLB, so reauthorization is long overdue. It is not just the long delay that argues for congressional action, but the extent to which the Obama administration has replaced the provisions of the bill with its own set of priorities implemented through Race to the Top and state waivers. 

Applied Behavior Analysis provides a complete description of the principles and procedures needed to systematically change socially significant behavior and to understand the reasons for that change. This comprehensive text, appropriate for courses in basic principles, applications, and behavioral research methods, helps students, educators, and practitioners appreciate and begin to acquire the conceptual and technical skills necessary to foster socially adaptive behavior in diverse individuals.

This paper examines critical issues that must be considered to maximize the positive impact of big data and minimize negative effects that are currently encountered in other domains. This review is designed to raise awareness of these issues with particular attention paid to implications for educational research design in order that educators can develop the necessary policies and practices to address this complex phenomenon and its possible implications in the field of education. 

Using five AERA presidential addresses over the past half century as landmarks, this essay traces the evolution of research on teaching and teacher education as well as some critical impacts the research has had on policy and practice related to teacher education and teacher evaluation in the United States. The discussion shows how these addresses both reflected the progress and challenges of research on teaching and teacher education at the times they were delivered and identified paths that the education research community could take to address the challenges.

This article presents a critical review of the transitions that technology integration has made over the years; the amount of resources and funding that has been allocated to immerse school with technology; and the conflicting results presented on effectiveness of using is technology in education.

This paper provides a guide to statistically based methods for estimating the extra costs of educating disadvantaged students, shows how these methods are related, and compares state aid programs that account for these costs in different ways. It shows that large, urban school districts with a high concentration of disadvantaged students would receive far more aid (and rich suburban districts would receive far less aid) if statistically based pupil weights were used instead of the ad hoc weights in existing state aid programs.

The analysis in this report is based on 2019 application data from the FCC’s Schools and Libraries Program (“E-rate”). This data represents the best national source of current information on school district connectivity; specifically, what broadband services schools are buying and how much they are paying for these services

The problem was to determine the correlation between teacher clarity and the mean class student learning (achievement gain) in normal public education classes in English-speaking, industrialized countries. It is of practical and theoretical importance to know the relationship between class learning and teacher clarity.

This report: (1) investigates the declining state of the educational system in America, as measured by high school student performance in the United States and other countries; (2) identifies specific problem areas; and (3) offers multiple recommendations for improvement

The purpose of this report is to introduce new data through tables containing descriptive information, such as totals, averages, and percentages. The findings presented here demonstrate the range of information available through IPEDS; they include only a sample of the information collected and are not meant to emphasize any particular issue. While only a small amount of the data included in the spring 2017 collection are displayed in this

This report was generated in response to the enormous role technology is, and will increasingly be, playing in providing remote learning opportunities for students, whether in supporting part-time “school based” education or temporarily replacing it altogether.  

This report examines the widespread and unjust district budgeting practices and offers Congress a straightforward legislative path: Fix the so-called comparability provisions of Title I.

This unique and ground-breaking book is the result of 15 years research and synthesises over 800 meta-analyses on the influences on achievement in school-aged students. It builds a story about the power of teachers, feedback, and a model of learning and understanding.

Technology is everywhere in education: Public schools in the United States now provide at least one computer for every five students. And in 2015-16, for the first time, more state standardized tests for the elementary and middle grades will be administered via technology than by paper and pencil.

We examined 24 studies to determine the effects on word recognition and reading comprehension of correcting errors during oral reading. Corrective feedback improved students' word reading accuracy on words in lists, and accuracy in reading words in passages. Some correction procedures had greater benefits than others.

Direct observation plays an important role in the assessment practices of school psychologists and in the development of evidence-based practices in general and special education. The defining psychometric features of direct observation are presented, the contributions to assessment practice reviewed, and a specific proposal is offered for evaluating the psychometric merit of direct observation in both practitioner developed and commercial/research specific applications.

Research about the effectiveness of different types of feedback in programmed instruction was investigated. Knowledge of results had the least data to support its efficacy. Knowledge of correct responding (KCR) has been shown to be effective in several studies.

A comprehensive, easily digestible introduction to research methods for undergraduate and graduate students. Readers will develop an understanding of the multiple research methods and strategies used in education and related fields, including how to read and critically evaluate published research and how to write a proposal, construct a questionnaire, and conduct an empirical research.

Studies that examined copy-cover-compare (CCC) and variations of this procedure were reviewed and analyzed. This review revealed a substantial number of studies that validated the use of CCC across spelling and math skills and across students with and without disabilities.

The primary obstacle to faster progress in U.S. education reform is hard to put your finger on, because it’s an absence, not a presence. It is not an interest group or a manifest social problem. It is the infrastructure we never built for identifying what works. It is the organizational framework we’ve not yet constructed for building consensus among education leaders across the country to identify what’s working.

This meta-analysis examines leadership approaches and the relationship between educational leadership and student achievement. In the literature review identified 151 articles/dissertations, for inclusion in this study. The results revealed educational leadership has a medium-level effect on students’ achievement. 

This report fills an important gap in the literature on school leadership by presenting an approach for understanding the resources and expenditures associated with efforts to prepare, hire, evaluate, develop, and support school leaders and by presenting estimates of those resources and expenditures. 

More than 300 studies that appeared to address the efficacy of formative assessment in grades K-12 were reviewed. Many of the studies had severely flawed research designs yielding uninterpretable results.

Schools devote substantial resources to teacher professional development each year. Yet studies show much of this investment is directed toward ineffective short-term workshops that have little impact on instructional change or student outcomes. At the same time, more intensive job-embedded forms of professional learning, such as instructional coaching, require substantially more resources than traditional professional development.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis will undoubtedly have dire consequences
for all sectors of public education. The rapid transition to remote modes of instruction in the
spring of 2020 and the subsequent anxiety about the start of the 2020–21 academic year
have highlighted the critical need for well-prepared educators.

This report highlights the lack of innovation, flexibility, and new ideas in state financing of public education. It concludes: many state and education leaders continue to support and employ methods that prevent schools and principals from undertaking the efforts that they think are most needed to improve education in their classrooms. The use of state categorical–funds to school districts with strict limits on their use–exemplifies this lack of innovation in school finance.

This article provides a summary of measuring the fiscal impact of practices in education
educational policy.

This report examines the current available state remedies for inequity; examine the Equity and Excellence Commission’s findings regarding the inequities that exist in U.S. educa�tion and its five-part agenda to address them; and conclude with recommendations designed to operationalize that agenda and make equal educational opportunity a reality for each and every child in the United States.

This paper provides the history and summarizes the development of the Campbell Collaboration. The Campbell Collaboration is a “nonprofit organization with the mission of helping people make well-informed decisions about the effects of interventions in the social, behavioral, and educational domains. The paper looks at the organization’s efforts to build a world library of accurate, synthesized evidence to inform policy and practice and improve human well-being worldwide. The Education section of the Campbell research library produces reviews on issues in early childhood, elementary, secondary, and postsecondary education. Topics range from academic programs, teacher qualifications, testing, to a wide variety of school-based interventions. Campbell systematic reviews and related evidence synthesis provide unbiased summaries of bodies of empirical evidence. 

The authors summarize 35 years of empirical research on goal-setting theory. They describe the core findings of the theory, the mechanisms by which goals operate, moderators of goal effects, the relation of goals and satisfaction, and the role of goals as mediators of incentives. The external validity and practical significance of goal-setting theory are explained, and new directions in goal-setting research are discussed.

This report examines how local school district funding is allocated in a way that hurts poor and minority students. The four papers include: (1) the history of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and its comparability provision, (2) the unexpected consequences of the comparability provision in practice, (3) the ways in which Title I might be fixed, and (4) the ways in which those fixes might be implemented with positive results.

This annual publication is one of the best ongoing sources for tracking and analyzing important developments and trends in education over time using the latest available data. In 2019 the spotlights were on: “Early Childhood Care Arrangements”; “Choices and Costs Characteristics of Public School Teachers Who Completed Alternative Route to Certification Programs”; and “Trends in Student Loan Debt for Graduate School Completers.”

This special CEP report highlights findings about the critical element of school climate from case studies of the first year and half of SIG implementation in Maryland, Michigan, and Idaho.

This study provides evidence that student-weighted allocation can be a means toward greater resource equity among schools within districts. Resource equity is defined here in per-pupil needs-weighted fiscal terms.

The authors trace the district's process of moving to a system of student-based budgeting:
funding children rather than staff members and weighting the funding according to schools'
and students' needs.

This paper addresses one key driver of spending variation between schools: shared district resources.

This report analyzes funding inequities in the context of four formulas that determine the amounts and destinations of grants under Title I, Part A. States with small populations and low concentrations of poor children receive radically larger grants on a per-poor-child basis than states with larger populations, including those with substantial rural poverty. Children living in concentrated poverty are poorly served by a labyrinthine funding scheme comprising four separate formulas. This paper exposes the technical considerations that should inform a smarter, fairer approach to funding grants under Title I, Part A

This report provides a new perspective on the nation’s largest virtual school provider through a systematic review and analysis of student characteristics, school finance, and school performance of K12-operated schools.

Assessments used in Missouri are designed to measure how well students acquire the skills and knowledge described in Missouri’s Learning Standards (MLS). The assessments yield information on academic achievement at the student, class, school, district and state levels.

This study investigated treatment fidelity in social work research. The authors systematically reviewed all articles published in five prominent social work journals over a 5- year period.

This analysis provides an overview of funding equity by race and poverty concentration across states the funding disparities across the nation and within states. It finds that nationally, the highest poverty districts receive about $1,200 less per student than the lowest poverty districts. The differences are even larger–roughly $2,000 per student–among districts serving the most and the fewest students of color.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2020, May). Students with disabilities.

The book recommends that federal and state policy makers take on the responsibility of promoting equal access to technology while the federal government and foundations play an important role by supporting the development, evaluation, and revision of OTPD.

This chapter presents a taxonomy that distinguishes among different categories of theories, models and frameworks used in implementation science. The chapter describes five categories of theoretical approaches that achieve three overarching aims: process models, which are aimed at describing and/or guiding the process of translating research into practice; determinant frameworks, classic theories and implementation theories, which are aimed at understanding and/or explaining what influences implementation outcomes; and evaluation frameworks, which are aimed at evaluating implementation.

The report highlights the importance of bolstering students’ ability to navigate through digital texts. It also examines the relationship among computer access in schools, computer use in classrooms, and performance in the PISA assessment. 

US President Obama has launched one of the world’s most ambitious education reform agendas. Under the heading “Race to the Top”, this agenda encourages US states to adopt internationally benchmarked standards and assessments that prepare students for success in college and the workplace: recruit, develop, reward, and retain effective teachers and principals. 

We sought to identify, examine, and summarize empirical literature focused on early childhood behavior interventions examined using a single case research designs (SCD) and published between 2001 and 2018. The findings of the current review suggest: promoting implementation fidelity through implementation support to improve social validity outcomes, providing guidelines for timing and frequency of social validity assessment, and development of social validity assessment tools designed to assess each of the social validity dimensions.

This article provides an analysis of how collaborative teacher education has developed in terms of practice, discourse, and the relationship between general and special education across three historical stages. It explores how collaborative teacher education between general and special education has been positioned over time in relationship to larger national reform efforts in teacher education.

Our nation faces a daunting challenge in making sure that we have a sufficient supply of well-educated, well-prepared teachers for our children. There is surely widespread agreement that good teachers are vital to our future. However, there is not widespread agreement about how we accomplish this goal. Some propose that we raise standards for entry into the teaching profession, while others suggest that we lower unnecessary barriers.

This report analyzes the disparity in funding and resources in K-12 education for children of color and low-income families. It found that millions of students–largely low-income students and students of color–continue to attend segregated and economically isolated schools. State and district school finance systems perpetuate and compound these inequities by providing less money to students with the greatest need.

Governor Brown has proposed a new funding system–known as a weighted pupil formula–that would direct more revenue to California school districts serving many economically disadvantaged students. This report examines the relationship between funding and student disadvantage and addresses questions about converting the current school finance system to a weighted pupil formula.

The authors use research-based "impact modeling" to show how a strategic approach to recruiting and supporting rookie teachers could yield as much as 4.2 extra months of student learning. We provide 5 recommendations for school systems to leverage their investment in structures that provide rookie teachers with both shelter and development.

This Statistics in Brief provides a snapshot of the state of teacher professional development activities among U.S. public school teachers using data collected through the 2011-12 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) Public School Teacher Questionnaire. This report relies on data provided by public school teachers about their professional development activities during the 2011-12 school year.

This paper focuses on one aspect of district spending ambiguity, namely, differences in per-pupil spending masked by teacher salary cost averaging. 

This study shows that the overuse of suspensions in California schools is harming student achievement and graduation rates, and resulting in billions of dollars in economic damage. The study quantifies the financial consequences of school suspensions down to the district level, reporting both the additional costs borne by taxpayers as a result of suspensions and the economic benefit lost to the state. 

This essay seeks to help you put the hard-earned experience of others to use through a set of practical steps, prompts, and tips for matching the right evaluator to your need.

Both student outcomes and treatment fidelity data are necessary to draw valid conclusions about intervention effectiveness. Reviews of the intervention outcome literature in related fields, and prior reviews of the school psychology literature, suggest that many researchers failed to report treatment fidelity data.

Over the past two decades, the role of school psychologists internationally has shifted from a more narrow focus on assessment to a broader emphasis on problem solving and delivering intervention services via consultation. Defining interventions is important for replication and translation of practice. Further, to make valid, data-based decisions about intervention effectiveness, school psychologists need to consider student outcomes in light of treatment integrity data.

A commonly used research design in applied behavior analysis involves comparing two or more independent variables. There were some consistencies across studies, with half resulting in equivalent outcomes across comparisons. In addition, most studies employed the use of an alternating treatments or multi-element single-subject design and compared a teaching methodology. 

This literature review was conducted to evaluate the current state of evidence supporting communication interventions for individuals with severe intellectual and developmental disabilities. Many researchers failed to report treatment fidelity or to assess basic aspects of intervention effects, including generalization, maintenance, and social validity.

Findings are reported related to the research methods and statistical techniques used in the 450 group quantitative studies examined as part of the literature review portion of the Division for Early Childhood Recommended Practices project. Results suggested that the methodological integrity of the quantitative research used to inform recommended practices was not uniformly convincing and compelling. 

High teacher turnover imposes numerous burdens on the schools and districts from which teachers depart. Some of these burdens are explicit and take the form of recruiting, hiring, and training costs. Others are more hidden and take the form of changes to the composition and quality of the teaching staff. This study focuses on the latter. 

This paper examines the issue of education equity by analyzing per-pupil state and local education spending. Using U.S. Department of Education school-level expenditure data that includes real teacher salaries, the paper concludes: (1) Students of color are being shortchanged across the country when compared to their white peers. (2) The traditional explanation–that variation in schools’ per-pupil spending stems almost entirely from different property-tax bases between school districts–is inaccurate as approximately 40 percent of variation in per-pupil spending occurs within school districts. (3) Changing a particular provision of federal education law–closing the so-called comparability loophole–would result in districts making more equitable expenditures on students of color.

Despite New York’s wrong turn, the $6 billion for Reading First has more generally been one of the best investments ever in federal education spending. It has already brought some remarkable reading breakthroughs in many parts of the country and among at-risk students.

This chapter addresses the development of local norms; that is, norms that represent students from a particular educational system. Specifically, this chapter focuses on developing academic local norms for educational problem solving. 

This volume provides a comprehensive summary of developments in theories and techniques within the areas of sampling, measurement, and statistical methods for analyzing behavioral data. By unifying new theories, techniques, methodologies, terminology, and language in behavioral observation research, the authors provide a comprehensive source for students and researchers.

Treatment fidelity reporting practices are described for journals that published general and special education intervention research with high impact factors from 2005 through 2009. The authors reviewed research articles, reported the proportion of intervention studies that described fidelity measurement, detailed the components of fidelity measurement reported, and determined whether the components of fidelity reported differed based on the research design, the type of intervention, or the number of intervention sessions.

This report analyzes the inequities of the current school finance models and proposes adoption of a model called Weighted Student Funding. It is a system of school funding based on five principles: (1) Funding should follow the child, on a per-student basis, to the public school that he/she attends; (2) Per-student funding should vary according to the child's need and other relevant circumstances; (3) It should arrive at the school as real dollars (4) These principles for allocating money to schools should apply to all levels; and (5) Funding systems should be simplified and made transparent.

Presented are 12 author contributed chapters which developed out of an invisible college of leaders concerned with providing services to the severely, profoundly, and multiply handicappe

The U.S. Department of Education Office of Educational Technology created this guide to assist software developers, startups and entrepreneurs in gaining specialized knowledge and is designed to help apply technology in smart ways to solve persistent problems in education.

Implementation fidelity is often thought of as a necessary condition to achieve internal validity and as having a relation to student outcomes. To examine the nature of this relation, we reviewed reading intervention studies for students in K-12 in which measures of implementation fidelity were included in final data analysis.

The faux teacher shortage is of tremendous consequences. It routinely results in both states and school disricts lowering their standards for who is license and hired. But more important, it serve to distract us from fixing the chronic and persistent and alignment of teacher supply and demand. 

A review of 20 experimental, shared book reading (SBR) interventions using questioning strategies with preschool children was conducted. The studies were analyzed in terms of their quality, focus, and the questioning strategies employed. Although there were few methodological concerns about the studies conducted, treatment fidelity and replicability of the reported interventions are raised as issues needing attention in future research.

This study compares the effect size and return on investment for rapid assessment, between, increased spending, voucher programs, charter schools, and increased accountability.

This article compares the relative cost-effectiveness of the five policies, using best-evidence estimates drawn from available data regarding the effectiveness and costs of rapid assessment, increased spending, voucher programs, charter schools, and accountability, using a conservative methodology for calculating the relative effectiveness of the rapid assessment.

The current review sought to describe the implementation and evaluation of trauma-focused school practices as represented in the published literature. Through a systematic literature search, we identified 39 articles describing trauma-focused practices implemented in school settings with elementary populations and coded data regarding these interventions’ characteristics as well as their implementation and evaluation procedures.

The Annenberg Institute for School Reform is a national policy-research and reform support organization that promotes quality education for all children, especially in urban communities.

The organization promotes well-informed decision making by preparing, maintaining and disseminating systematic reviews in education, crime and justice, social welfare and international development.

The Center for Public Education provides up-to-date research, data, and analysis on current education issues and explores ways to improve student achievement and engage public support for public schools.

CRRE is a research center who’s major goal is to improve the quality of education through high-quality research and evaluation studies and the dissemination of evidence-based research.

The Center on Great Teachers and Leaders (GTL Center) is dedicated to supporting state education leaders in their efforts to grow, respect, and retain great teachers and leaders for all students.

The Council’s mission is to promote the cause of urban schools and to advocate for inner-city students through legislation, research and media relations.

The Education Digest is monthly publication that scans hundreds of publications so it can select the most critical, most newsworthy articles. They are then condensed for quick reading.