The importance of vocabulary for reading comprehension is widely accepted. Evidence-based approaches for improving vocabulary are needed in schools, yet few exist.  Vocabulators, an online tool that can be integrated into the school day to teach students the vocabulary needed to process text, was developed to fill that gap. A new study published in the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness assessed the effectiveness of Vocabulators. The study included third grade students across seven schools in the northeast and southwest United States, six of which received Title I funding. Students identified as reading below average with some risk of reading failure within each class were randomly assigned to either the Vocabulators intervention or to continue their teachers’ normal literacy instruction. The Vocabulators group participated in the program for half an hour a day, three days per week. Students used the program as determined by their teacher, such as during center/station time, intervention block, or...

Developing metacognition and self-regulated learning (SRL) skills improves educational performance and attainment. There is evidence that interventions focused on these skills may help students from low SES backgrounds, but we are still learning how best to facilitate this development. A recent review by Daniel Muijs and Christian Bokhove of the University of Southampton in England synthesized studies to determine the programs and characteristics that have the greatest impact on metacognitive and SRL development. Effective instruction included direct approaches via explicit instruction and modeling of metacognition and SRL practices by teachers, and indirect approaches such as the presence of a learning environment with relevant practice opportunities, dialogue, and scaffolded inquiry with student autonomy. Teachers felt more successful programs lasted more than two semesters, included leadership support, training and mentoring, and a receptive environment for the intervention. Some practices appeared to have more of an impact than others. Intrinsic to the process of SRL and...

Cultivating prosocial behaviors is an important educational goal. A recent study published in Frontiers in Psychology examined whether prosocial behaviors were also rewarding for young children. The participating children were given a sharing, an instrumental helping task, and an empathic helping task. Their prosocial behaviors and happiness levels during and after the tasks were coded and compared. The study was conducted using a Dutch cohort and a Chinese cohort of young children to examine whether cultural differences exist. In total, there were 122 Dutch toddlers of which 101 participated again one year later, and 91 Chinese preschoolers involved in the study.  The following results were found consistent across both Chinese and Dutch children: Compared with receiving treats, children became happier after sharing. Children also became happier after performing instrumental helping behaviors. Whether children were being thanked after they helped others did not change their happiness levels. The authors concluded that prosocial behaviors...

Amid the heated policy debate on whether to lift the cap on the number of charter schools, people often cite charter schools’ more intensive tutoring and better academic performance to lobby for lifting the cap. A recent paper indicated that public schools with high-dosage after-school tutoring have the potential to be a politically neutral solution to increase student achievement without lifting the cap. Researchers at Harvard University conducted a school-level randomized evaluation to examine the effects of high-dosage reading tutoring on New York City’s middle school students. Using matched-triple randomization procedures, 60 traditional New York City public schools were divided into a treatment group, a control group, and a ‘pure’ control group. During three years of the project, selected students in the treatment group attended one-to-four reading tutoring for 2.5 hours every day, while students in the control and the ‘pure’ control groups had neither tutoring nor other after-school services. Meanwhile, the New York...

A study published in the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness reports on the impact of the program MyTeachingPartner-Math/Science (MTP-M/S) on teaching practice and students’ math and science skills in pre-kindergarten. MTP-M/S is a pre-k curriculum primarily composed of inquiry-based activities and supported by a high dosage of professional development for teachers before and during program implementation. For this study, 140 pre-k classrooms in the mid-western and southeastern U.S. were randomly assigned to the intervention or the business-as-usual condition. The MTP-M/S program was implemented in 33-week long units (twice a week for each subject) over 2 years. The results were as follows: At the end of year 1, teachers in the treatment group had higher levels of mathematics and science teaching quality evaluated through video-taped observations, as compared to the control group. No significant effects were found in children’s math and science outcomes at the end of the first year, but science and math skills...

Family is influential on students' learning in many ways. Recently, Yang and Zhao (2020) examined parenting practices' impacts on children's academic performance using a large sample of middle school students in China. The analysis was conducted using data from the China Education Panel Survey 2015, which was a nationally representative survey in China. The study sampled 9,920 students from 112 middle schools in China. The survey included questionnaires for the students, their parents, teachers, and the school. Moreover, students' academic achievement was measured by their exam scores in Chinese, English, and mathematics provided by their respective school administration offices. The analysis examined the relationships between academic performance and parenting styles. The findings were as follows: The most dominant parenting styles of Chinese parents were authoritarian and neglectful. Authoritarian parenting style was conducive to academic performance. The effects of parenting styles were more salient among children from a disadvantaged background and...

Preschool intervention programs have been of great interest to educational researchers, since early childhood investments can yield robust long-term benefits. A recent research article, published in the current issue of Review of Educational Research, investigated the effectiveness of book giveaway programs for infants’ families. Researchers focused on three major book giveaway programs: Bookstart in the UK, Reach Out and Read in the USA, and Imagination Library in the USA. Each program has different treatment dosages: Before a child turns five, Bookstart provides up to two books; Reach Out and Read provides up to ten books; and Imagination Library supplies up to 60 books. After filtering through the inclusion criteria, researchers included 44 studies in their meta-analysis: 11 concerning  Bookstart, 18 concerning  Reach Out and Read, and 15 concerning  Imagination Library. By providing easily accessible and age-appropriate books, book giveaway programs aim to motivate parents to begin reading to their children from infancy, which...

Academic self-concept is a central factor that affects various psychological and behavioral outcomes. Students compare their academic achievement across social (How good am I at this compared to my classmates?), temporal (How good am I compared to how I was?), and dimensional (How good am I in math compared to English?) domains. A meta-analysis of 505 datasets (n=572,718) gathered findings on social and dimensional comparisons concerning achievement and academic self-concept in mathematical and verbal subjects. An important consequence of the dimensional construct is that as students develop positive self-concepts around particular subjects, they may develop negative self-concepts around those on the other end of the math-verbal continuum. Strengthening self-concept in math or science leads to weaker self-concept in reading and writing, and vice versa. Students who realize they excel in math may mentally diminish their skill in reading–they become ‘math’ people. Interestingly, this balancing act of math-verbal abilities does not align with...

ASSISTments is an online platform that automatically generates feedback for students as they complete problems and shares this feedback with teachers, providing data on student performance to guide instruction decisions.  An evaluation published in the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness assessed the effectiveness of ASSISTments when used for math homework in middle schools. The study was conducted with 2769 students across 43 schools in Maine over two years. Schools were randomly assigned to begin the intervention early or at a later start date. Teachers using the ASSISTments programs were given the ability to choose existing problems or upload their own to the program to tailor the technology to their particular math course plan. Students were expected to complete homework in ASSISTments at least 3 times a week. Results showed positive effects of ASSISTments on the TerraNova math assessment (ES = +0.22), with greater effects for lower-performing students. These results suggested that ASSISTments is...