Closing the Achievement Gap in the Classroom Through Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

It has been shown that Culturally Relevant Pedagogy is beneficial in schools with a wide range of populations because of its emphasis on academic achievement for all students, cultural competency, and social justice issues. This study focused on teachers’ perceptions about how to use a Culturally Relevant Pedagogy model in the classroom. Interviews with 20 in-service teachers across eight states revealed the following themes: (a) teachers’ ideas about Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and the classroom environment, and (b) school and district support on Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and social community, resources, and teachers’ training to understand Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. This paper explores themes to reveal how in-service teachers perceived their preparedness to teach using CRP strategies in the classroom. In order to close the achievement gap, a paradigm change is required. It is necessary to employ CRP strategies to create this change and integrate students’ everyday life with classroom learning objectives so that achievement disparity in classrooms may be reduced. English Language Learners (ELLs), students with low socio-economic status, and racial/ethnic minorities were the focus of this study.

Literacy Development, Higher Education, and the Achievement Gap

This chapter will explore the challenges of students entering college who have gaps in their literacy development. Historical events within education that have led to some of these skills set gaps will be reviewed. Additionally, causes and current remedies to help students as they try to navigate higher education while needing additional support with their literacy skills will be discussed. Finally, the issue of how colleges are forced to react to students who do not have the skills to compete with the expected academic rigor and steps needed to help both high school educators and professors remedy these instructional challenges will be reviewed.

The Power of Love

Reading for pleasure, or aesthetic reading, brings about a colossal number of benefits. Only half of Americans can say they read even one book a year for pleasure. The rate of teachers who read for pleasure is approximately the same as the general public. The standards-based approach to education, which resulted in a surge of standards-based testing, has not resulted in a significant improvement in reading teaching or learning for students. In fact, the achievement gap and the plight of the struggling learner has not improved at all. The standards-based testing movement may be partially to blame for the reduction in reading enjoyment. Increasing a love of reading in students can make a significant impact on a student's academic career. The teachers now in the classroom do not have a love a reading to model or pass on to students. Teachers have the power to impact how students feel about reading. As higher education instructors it is time to take actions that will bring about more success for our students and their students.

The Impact of Leadership and Targeted Interventions to Close the Achievement Gap of Disadvantaged Pupils: A Case Study

<p style="text-align: justify;">This research explores the impact of effective leadership and targeted interventions in closing the achievement gap of disadvantaged pupils in primary schools. Findings suggest that the case study schools use effective school leaders and a range of targeted interventions including early intervention, small group additional teaching, one-to-one tuition, peer tutoring, parental involvement, booster class, mastery learning, pastoral care, and enrichment programmes. Each of the above success factors and intervention strategies was explored in detail in the paper. The overall conclusions of this study are that the case study schools have closed the achievement gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers through providing effective school leaders and the use of a range of effective intervention strategies. We would suggest that the case study schools’ stories of how they have closed the achievement gap through providing strong school leaders and the use of targeted interventions are of local and national significance. Our research also suggests the possibilities for further research. The recommendations from the study are that there is a need to replicate and expand this research with a larger sample of the study, in order to explore in detail what works in schools.</p>

Socio-Emotional Skills and the Rich-Poor Learning Gap

Empirical evidence suggests that children's socio-emotional skills—an important determinant of school achievement—vary by socio-economic family background. In this study, we assessed the degree to which differences in socio-emotional skills contribute to the achievement gap between rich and poor children. We used data on 74 countries from the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which contains an extensive set of psychological measures, including growth mindset, self-efficacy, and work mastery. We developed three conceptual scenarios to analyze the role of socio-emotional skills in learning inequality: simple accumulation, multiplicative accumulation, and compensatory accumulation. Our findings are in line with the simple accumulation scenario: rich children have somewhat higher levels of socio-emotional skills than poor children, but the effect of these skills on academic performance is largely similar for both groups. Using a counterfactual decomposition method, we show that socio-emotional skills explain no more than 8.8% of the rich-poor achievement gap. Based on these findings, we argue that initiatives to promote social and emotional learning (SEL) are unlikely to substantially reduce educational inequalities.

The achievement gap in reading competence: the effect of measurement non-invariance across school types

Background After elementary school, students in Germany are separated into different school tracks (i.e., school types) with the aim of creating homogeneous student groups in secondary school. Consequently, the development of students’ reading achievement diverges across school types. Findings on this achievement gap have been criticized as depending on the quality of the administered measure. Therefore, the present study examined to what degree differential item functioning affects estimates of the achievement gap in reading competence. Methods Using data from the German National Educational Panel Study, reading competence was investigated across three timepoints during secondary school: in grades 5, 7, and 9 (N = 7276). First, using the invariance alignment method, measurement invariance across school types was tested. Then, multilevel structural equation models were used to examine whether a lack of measurement invariance between school types affected the results regarding reading development. Results Our analyses revealed some measurement non-invariant items that did not alter the patterns of competence development found among school types in the longitudinal modeling approach. However, misleading conclusions about the development of reading competence in different school types emerged when the hierarchical data structure (i.e., students being nested in schools) was not taken into account. Conclusions We assessed the relevance of measurement invariance and accounting for clustering in the context of longitudinal competence measurement. Even though differential item functioning between school types was found for each measurement occasion, taking these differences in item estimates into account did not alter the parallel pattern of reading competence development across German secondary school types. However, ignoring the clustered data structure of students being nested within schools led to an overestimation of the statistical significance of school type effects.