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We present findings across three randomized trials of "Descubriendo la Lectura" (DLL), an intervention designed to improve literacy skills of Spanish-speaking first graders struggling with reading. DLL is a one-to-one Spanish-language literacy program lasting 12-20 weeks offered to a school's lowest performing emerging bilingual first graders. Directly replicating procedures across three cohorts, we examined Spanish and English literacy outcomes for approximately 400 students across 30 schools, 10 districts, and five states. Analyses revealed statistically significant effects of student-level assignment to DLL on all 11 Spanish-language outcomes, with an average impact of d = 0.57. Impacts across the four English-language outcomes were positive but not statistically significant. Descriptive results suggest that the Spanish-language impacts are reliably replicated, most likely due to the intervention's strong implementation supports.

Drawing on state reading achievement data provided by a California school district, we analyze the achievement impacts of Achieve3000, an intervention designed to offer K-12 students expanded opportunities to acquire literacy skills. Achieve3000 is a personalized, technology-adaptive program to supplement regular instruction in English language arts, science, and social studies. We apply propensity score matching methods to match 1,761 participating Achieve3000 students to 945 similar students to estimate the effects of the Achieve3000 intervention. Applying a doubly-robust regression model, our results suggest that Achieve3000 students outperformed comparison students by a mean effect size of 0.06. Further, two-stage least squares regression models reveal that treatment students' scores increased statistically significantly by 0.001 standard deviations for both each activity completed and for each additional hour of Achieve3000 participation. Despite some problems of implementation, our quasi-experimental evidence of the positive impacts of Achieve3000 suggests a possibly promising way to overcome COVID-19 learning losses through computer-based, one-on-one tutoring at scale.

In this paper, we report results from a multisite, student-level randomized controlled trial that examined the impact of the Building Assets, Reducing Risks (BARR) model on ninth-grade students. The BARR model is a comprehensive, strength-based approach that uses eight interlocking strategies to build intentional staff-to-staff, staff-to-student, and student-to-student relationships. This student-level RCT included approximately 4,000 ninth-grade students randomly assigned to treatment or control conditions in eleven schools. We examined six constructs of student experience including expectations and rigor, engagement, supportive relationships, social and emotional learning, sense of belonging, and grit; and five measures of academic success including course failure, core credits earned, grade point average, and Northwest Evaluation Association's (NWEA) Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) English Language Arts and Mathematics test scores. Findings suggest that BARR significantly increased core credits earned and mathematics achievement as measured by the NWEA MAP. Relative to the control group, BARR improved several aspects of student experiences in school, including an increased sense of supportive relationships and teacher expectations and rigor.

In this article, we examine classroom observations from a 3-year large-scale randomized trial in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to investigate the extent to which a professional development initiative in inquiry science influenced teaching practices in in 4th and 5th grade classrooms in 73 schools. During the course of the study, LAUSD introduced an additional districtwide scientific inquiry professional development initiative, which complicates the experimental analysis but allows us to conduct a quasiexperimental analysis of the second Multilevel models predicting the presence of science inquiry in observed classroom lessons show that both interventions increased the incidence of inquiry-based science teaching, but the impact was limited to selected features of the inquiry process. We also found that the experimental impacts on teaching practice correspond with the features of scientific inquiry to which the teachers were most frequently exposed during the professional development. (Contains 8 notes and 6 tables.)

This article describes 1st-year experimental effects of a large-scale reform providing professional development to elementary school teachers to implement an extended, inquiry-oriented science curriculum. Known as "immersion teaching" because it "immerses" teachers and students in the full cycle of scientific inquiry, this approach developed through a partnership involving university-based science and mathematics content experts and educators and K-12 educators from the Los Angeles Unified School District. Multilevel analyses, which examined school-level effects of assignment to the professional development intervention, nested Grade 4 students and their science achievement outcomes within the 80 study schools. The analyses revealed a statistically significant negative 1st-year treatment effect of school-level assignment to the initiative on the key science achievement outcome. We also tested whether the treatment had differential effects for English language learners, schools with large proportions of English language learners, and students of new teachers. We found an interaction effect of the treatment by teacher experience level for the teachers who were the primary target of the intervention, with the treatment having positive effects for novice teachers (3 years of experience or less) but a larger, negative effect for veteran teachers. We explore analytically three sets of explanations for the unexpected negative main effect of treatment: potential statistical and design artifacts, possible misalignment between the assessments and content of the treatment, and practical issues related to implementation of the treatment. (Contains 8 tables.)