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In this paper, we argue that teacher professional development programs focused on inquiry-based learning increase students' likelihood of selecting STEM majors. Long-term student data was collected accessing the University of Houston's Educational Research Center database for each student whose teacher participated in the Applied Mathematics Program! (AMP!) professional development between the years 2014 and 2019. Using propensity scoring to create a matched comparison group, we conducted a logistic regression to model the likelihood of students choosing a STEM major in college if they had a teacher who participated in AMP! versus students who did not have a teacher who participated in the AMP!. Our analyses indicate that when teachers participate in AMP!, their students are more likely to select a STEM major in college. Additionally, female students had much larger effect sizes, particularly Black female students, whose likelihood of selecting a STEM major doubled when their teachers participated in AMP!.

This study investigated the effectiveness of an intervention designed to support sixth-grade Spanish-speaking English as Additional Language (EAL) learners and their English proficient classmates in acquiring pre-algebra knowledge and skills and associated academic vocabulary. The sample consisted of 88 EAL learners and their 139 English proficient classmates who had failed a fifth-grade final math exam. Treatment materials and methods differed from those used in the control group by building students' foundational math skills and academic language; using visual and linguistic supports; and capitalizing on student's home language knowledge. Data were analyzed using generalized linear mixed modeling at the item level. Both EAL learners and English-proficient treatment students outperformed control students on measures of math and academic vocabulary.

In this study, we examine the unique and shared contributions of Spanish and English core academic language skills (CALS) to English reading comprehension in a population of Spanish-English dual language learners in Grades 4 and 5 (n = 165). We focus on cross-disciplinary CALS, operationalized as sets of high-utility lexical, syntactic and discourse resources prevalent in school texts. This study finds that Spanish and English CALS are positively and significantly related, and, further, that both sets of skills exert a unique positive influence on English reading comprehension. Aligned with an interpretation of linguistic interdependence between Spanish and English academic language skills, results document their cross-linguistic contribution to reading comprehension for students enrolled in educational programs that foster literacy and content learning regularly in two languages.

Mastery of order-disorder processes in highly nonequilibrium nanostructured oxides has significant implications for the development of emerging energy technologies. However, we are presently limited in our ability to quantify and harness these processes at high spatial, chemical, and temporal resolution, particularly in extreme environments. Here, we describe the percolation of disorder at the model oxide interface LaMnO3/SrTiO3, which we visualize during in situ ion irradiation in the transmission electron microscope. We observe the formation of a network of disorder during the initial stages of ion irradiation and track the global progression of the system to full disorder. We couple these measurements with detailed structural and chemical probes, examining possible underlying defect mechanisms responsible for this unique percolative behavior.

A series of nanopillar compression tests were performed on tungsten as a function of temperature using in situ transmission electron microscopy with localized laser heating. Surface oxidation was observed to form on the pillars and grow in thickness with increasing temperature. Deformation between 850 °C and 1120 °C is facilitated by long-range diffusional transport from the tungsten pillar onto adjacent regions of the Y2O3-stabilized ZrO2 indenter. The constraint imposed by the surface oxidation is hypothesized to underly this mechanism for localized plasticity, which is generally the so-called whisker growth mechanism. The results are discussed in context of the tungsten fuzz growth mechanism in He plasma-facing environments. The two processes exhibit similar morphological features and the conditions under which fuzz evolves appear to satisfy the conditions necessary to induce whisker growth.

Recently a novel instrument -- the Core Academic Language Instrument (CALS-I) -- aimed at testing a constellation of school-relevant English language skills was developed and validated for use in the United States (Uccelli, Barr, Dobbs, Galloway, Meneses and Sánchez, 2015. Core Academic Language Skills: An expanded operational construct and a novel instrument to chart school-relevant language proficiency in preadolescent and adolescent learners. "Applied Psycholinguistics" 36: 1077-1109). The unitary construct tested by the CALS-I was dubbed Core Academic Language Skills (CALS) and it aimed to identify and describe a set of skills that comprise academic language proficiency of high utility across curricular content areas. This study piloted a version of the CALS-I that was slightly modified for use in South Africa targeting specifically middle-school learners. The results of this study reveal that the CALS construct functions almost identically to the United States sample when tested in South Africa, and this provides strong evidence for the fundamental and cross-cutting nature of these pedagogically relevant skills.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to find morphological markers with good diagnostic accuracy to identify developmental language disorders (DLD) in Spanish-English bilingual children. Method: The participants in this study included 66 Spanish-English bilingual children between the ages of 4;0 and 6;11 (years; months) with (n = 33) and without DLD (n = 33). We employed a comprehensive production task in Spanish to elicit morphological structures that have been previously found to be problematic for Spanish-speaking children with DLD. These structures included elements of nominal morphology (articles, direct object pronouns, adjectives, and plurals) and verbal morphology (verbs and the subjunctive mood). Logistic regression was used in this study to find a set of grammatical structures that most accurately predicted group membership. Results: Spanish-English bilingual children with and without DLD significantly differed from each other in their accurate production of articles, clitics, adjectives, verbs, and the subjunctive mood. Clitics, verbs, and the subjunctive mood in isolation had adequate diagnostic accuracy. A combination of verb and subjective mood accuracy best predicted group membership in this study (sensitivity of 85% and specificity of 91%). Conclusion: In addition to clitics, verbs, and the subjunctive mood, both elements of verbal morphology should be considered grammatical markers of DLD in Spanish-English bilingual children.

Physics program for girls (PPG) is a two-week program held every summer since 2006, with the goal of engaging young women in inquiry-based physics experiments and to connect them with female science, technology, engineering, and mathematics professional role models. The program recruits young women to participate the summer after they have taken chemistry but before they enroll in their first high school physics course. Qualitative data collected over the years about PPG have shown that the program has been positively perceived by participants; 87% said they are more prepared for physics, 95% said that they think physics might be hard, but believe they can do it, and 91% said that they are positive that they will earn an A or B in their science course. However, there has not been any analysis of PPG students' performance in their introductory physics classes. The goal of this paper is to understand this impact using chemistry and physics end of semester assessment scores for girls who participated in PPG, as well as girls who did not participate in PPG but were from the same schools and had similar demographics to the PPG participants. Girls who participated in PPG performed comparably to girls who did not participate in PPG on chemistry, but PPG girls performed better than non-PPG girls in physics. This finding persisted even after controlling for the prior year's chemistry scores.

In this cluster randomized control trial study, the authors explored the efficacy of an intervention designed to improve second-grade English learners' knowledge of challenging, high-utility English vocabulary. The authors also examined whether the intervention had a differential effect on content words that differ on two attributes (cognate status and abstractness designation) and whether the effects lasted across time. Within schools, teachers were randomly assigned to treatment or control conditions, resulting in 12 treatment classrooms and 10 control classrooms. Teachers in the treatment condition developed vocabulary using six methods: interactive shared reading, direct instruction of individual words, instruction in cognate use, activities to foster word consciousness and reinforce instructed words, and use of visual and linguistic supports. Teachers in the control condition read the same books with the target vocabulary inserted into the stories. Findings on the curriculum-based and standardized measure of vocabulary indicated that the intervention implemented for four 50-minute lessons per week for 18 weeks was effective in helping English learners acquire challenging high-utility school-relevant vocabulary (Cohen's d = 1.88 for content words; d = 0.41 for connecting words; d = 0.47 for the Test of Oral Language Development). The effects differed by word characteristics, with higher effect sizes for words that are noncognates (d = 1.57 for both concrete and abstract noncognates; d = 1.02 concrete cognates; d = 0.81 for abstract cognates). Ten months after the intervention, treatment students still outperformed control students on content vocabulary learned during the intervention (d = 1.31). This study helps validate a multifaceted approach to vocabulary intervention and research.

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of clinical review bias on the coding of grammaticality in child language. Seventy-four native-English students studying communication disorders and sciences made judgments about the grammaticality of 250 utterances presented in five language samples. Each language sample included grammatical, ungrammatical, and ambiguous utterances. Participants were randomly assigned to a blind or nonblind group. The nonblind group was presented with diagnostic information, whereas the blind group was not. We employed a generalized linear mixed model to examine the binary data. Our results suggest that both blind and nonblind participants were accurate in judging grammatical and ungrammatical utterances. However, nonblind participants were slightly more likely to judge ambiguous utterances as ungrammatical when the language sample identified the child as having a language impairment, suggesting that there was an effect of clinical review bias in this study. This effect, although statistically significant, was small.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify which morphological markers have the best diagnostic accuracy to identify developmental language disorders (DLD) in monolingual Spanish-speaking children. Method: The participants in this study included 50 Spanish-speaking monolingual children with (n = 25) and without (n = 25) DLD. Data collection took place in Mexico. Children were administered a comprehensive elicitation task that set up felicitous contexts to produce morphological structures previously identified as problematic for Spanish-speaking children with DLD: articles, direct object pronouns, adjectives, plurals, verb conjugations, and the subjunctive in Spanish. Results: Statistically significant group differences between children with and without DLD were found for all morphological structures examined but plurals. Logistic regression analyses suggested that a model that included clitic and verbs was the best model to uniquely predict group membership. This model showed sensitivity of 96% and specificity of 80%. Conclusion: Clitics and verbs should be considered morphological markers of DLD in monolingual Spanish-speaking children.

Learning to use language in order to complete source-based writing tasks is a challenge for middle grade writers worthy of additional study, especially given that these tasks are increasingly common in classrooms. Here, we examined the contribution of receptive and productive cross-disciplinary academic language skills to the writing quality of middle graders' science summaries, after accounting for students' sociodemographic characteristics, their comprehension of the science source text, and general summary features (i.e., length and copy ratio). Our results suggest that the ability to produce a high-quality science summary is predominately driven by the writers' receptive academic language proficiency, comprehension of the source text and productive academic language used when writing, including text length. We contend that these results are illuminating because of the joint examination of students' productive and receptive academic language skills. In addition, this study attempts to unpack the relation between summary length and quality, identifying levels of receptive academic language skills as an important moderator. These findings have the potential to advance the current understanding of malleable factors associated with science writing proficiency, as well as with those associated with source-based writing more generally.

This study reports on the conceptualization of a new construct targeting the cross-disciplinary academic language skills most relevant to school reading comprehension, targeting the validation of the Core Academic Language Skills (CALS) Instrument, a novel assessment tool which measures this construct. Participants included Grade 4-8 monolingual English and bilingual students designated as English learners (N = 7,152) from the United States. The study investigated the dimensionality of the core academic language skills construct, the reliability and validity of the CALS Instrument, and the impact of school grade on students' performance in core academic language skills. Results revealed the assessment measure to be unidimensional and to discriminate performance by grade level. This study offers insight into the value of measuring cross-disciplinary school-relevant language proficiency, delineates skills to be targeted through instruction to support reading comprehension, and offers a tool to identify students who will benefit most from this instruction.

Beginning in 2002, researchers developed, implemented, and evaluated the efficacy of an English reading intervention for first-grade English learners using multiple randomized control trials (RCTs). As a result of this efficacy work, researchers successfully competed for an IES Goal 4 effectiveness study using the same intervention. Unlike the efficacy studies, the findings from the effectiveness study begun in 2011 did not yield significant differences in favor of the treatment. We investigated the identification and pre-intervention performance levels of students in efficacy and effectiveness RCT studies and provide data and compare samples from these studies as one means of explaining variation in findings. Findings indicate that pre-intervention performance levels are higher for students in effectiveness RCT studies. This article serves as an exemplar for other effectiveness studies that may not replicate findings from previous efficacy trials.

This study used a within-subjects design to explore two instructional conditions for developing vocabulary in second-grade Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs)--extended instruction and embedded instruction implemented during shared interactive reading. Words assigned to the extended condition were directly taught using a multifaceted approach that included visuals, bilingual definitions, examples, spelling, and partner-talk about the words' meaning. Words assigned to the embedded condition were taught solely through brief definitions to embedded text, writing activities, and songs. In the control condition students heard the target words read aloud during shared interactive reading but without definitions or direct instruction. The study also explored the interaction between instructional condition and word type. Four types of words--abstract cognates, abstract noncognates, concrete cognates, and concrete noncognates--were randomly assigned to each condition. Nine teachers in four schools and 187 second-grade ELs participated in this within-subjects intervention, which took place in transitional bilingual classrooms. Findings indicated that across all word types, both extended and embedded instruction were more effective than the control condition in helping ELs acquire vocabulary. Findings also indicated that extended instruction was more effective then embedded instruction for all word types except concrete cognates suggesting that these young Spanish-speaking ELs were advantaged by word knowledge in their home language. Finally, while embedded instruction was less effective than extended instruction, it was much more effective than a control condition. Embedded instruction takes significantly less preparation and instructional time than extended instruction, offering teachers a practical way to teach more vocabulary to ELs.