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This study involved random assignment of 80 school-based teams of educators to one of four conditions: (1) lesson study supported by a fractions resource kit; (2) lesson study without the fractions resource kit; (3) fractions resource kit without lesson study; or (4) practice-as-usual (no fractions resource kit, asked to refrain from lesson study). Teams were mailed the materials for their condition and used them locally. Each educator team included at least one grade 3 or 4 teacher who agreed to video record three fractions lessons, and their students comprise the student sample. Outcome measures focus on instruction, student fractions knowledge, teachers' fractions knowledge, beliefs about teaching-learning, and professional learning perceptions.

The Fast Response Survey System (FRSS) was established in 1975 by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), United States Department of Education. FRSS is designed to collect issue-oriented data within a relatively short time frame. FRSS collects data from state education agencies, local education agencies, public and private elementary and secondary schools, public school teachers, and public libraries. To ensure minimal burden on respondents, the surveys are generally limited to three pages of questions, with a response burden of about 30 minutes per respondent. Sample sizes are relatively small (usually about 1,000 to 1,500 respondents per survey) so that data collection can be completed quickly. Data are weighted to produce national estimates of the sampled education sector. The sample size is large enough to permit limited breakouts by classification variables. However, as the number of categories within the classification variables increases, the sample size within categories decreases, which results in larger sampling errors for the breakouts by classification variables.

The Elementary School Arts Education Survey, Fall 2009 data provide national estimates on student access to arts education and resources available for such instruction in public elementary schools during fall 2009. This is one of a set of seven surveys that collected data on arts education during the 2009-10 school year. In addition to this survey, the set includes a survey of secondary school principals, three elementary teacher-level surveys, and two secondary teacher-level surveys. A stratified sample design was used to select principals for this survey. Data collection was conducted September 2009 through June 2010, and 988 eligible principals completed the survey by web, mail, fax, or telephone.

The elementary school survey collected data on the availability and characteristics of music, visual arts, dance, and drama/theatre instruction; the type of space used for arts instruction; the availability of curriculum guides for arts teachers to follow; the availability of curriculum-based arts education activities outside of regular school hours; and whether those teaching the subject are arts specialists. Principals also reported on school or district provision of teacher professional development in the arts; arts education programs, activities, and events; and school-community partnerships. Principals were also asked to provide administrative information such as school instructional level, school enrollment size, community type, and percent of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.

The Fast Response Survey System (FRSS) was established in 1975 by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), United States Department of Education. FRSS is designed to collect issue-oriented data within a relatively short time frame. FRSS collects data from state education agencies, local education agencies, public and private elementary and secondary schools, public school teachers, and public libraries. To ensure minimal burden on respondents, the surveys are generally limited to three pages of questions, with a response burden of about 30 minutes per respondent. Sample sizes are relatively small (usually about 1,000 to 1,500 respondents per survey) so that data collection can be completed quickly. Data are weighted to produce national estimates of the sampled education sector. The sample size is large enough to permit limited breakouts by classification variables. However, as the number of categories within the classification variables increases, the sample size within categories decreases, which results in larger sampling errors for the breakouts by classification variables.

The Arts Education Surveys of Elementary School Teachers provide national estimates on arts education and arts instructors in public elementary schools during the 2009-10 school year. This data collection contains three surveys that provide information about music specialists, visual arts specialists, and self-contained classroom teachers. These three surveys are part of a set of seven surveys that collected data on arts education during the 2009-10 school year. In addition to these elementary teacher surveys, the set includes a survey of elementary school principals, a survey of secondary school principals, and two secondary teacher-level surveys. A stratified sample design was used to select teachers and arts specialists (music and visual arts) for the Arts Education Surveys of Elementary School Teachers. Data collection was conducted September 2009 through August 2010. Altogether, 1,148 eligible music specialists, 918 eligible visual arts specialists, and 734 eligible self-contained classroom teachers completed the surveys by web, mail, fax, or telephone.

The elementary teacher surveys collected data on the availability of curriculum-based arts education activities outside of regular school hours, teaching load of music and visual arts specialists in elementary schools, teacher participation in various professional development activities, the ways in which self-contained classroom teachers teach arts education as part of their instructional program, and teachers' use of formal methods of assessment of students' achievement in the arts. Furthermore, teachers were also asked to provide administrative information such as school level, school enrollment size, school community type, and percent of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what students in elementary and secondary schools in the United States know and can do in various subject areas. Assessments are conducted periodically in mathematics, reading, science, writing, the arts, civics, economics, geography, United States history, and beginning in 2014, in Technology and Engineering Literacy (TEL). Since NAEP assessments are administered uniformly using the same sets of test booklets across the United States, NAEP results serve as a common metric for all states and selected urban districts. The assessment stays essentially the same from year to year, with only carefully documented changes. This permits NAEP to provide a clear picture of student academic progress over time and for teachers, principals, parents, policymakers, and researchers to use NAEP results to assess progress and develop ways to improve education in the United States. For more information, please read An Introduction to NAEP.

There are two types of assessments: main NAEP and long-term trend NAEP. Main NAEP is administered to fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-graders across the United States in a variety of subjects. The Main NAEP is conducted between the last week of January and the first week in March every year. National results are available for all assessments and subjects. Results for states and select urban districts are available in some subjects for grades 4 and 8. The Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) is a special project developed to determine the feasibility of reporting district-level NAEP results for large urban districts. In 2009 a trial state assessment was administered at grade 12. Long-term trend NAEP is administered nationally every four years. During the same academic year, 13-year-olds are assessed in the fall, 9-year-olds in the winter, and 17-year-olds in the spring. Long-term trend assessments measure student performance in mathematics and reading, and allow the performance of students from recent time periods to be compared with students since the early 1970s.

For example, the 1997 and 2008 NAEP arts assessments were part of the Main NAEP Assessments. The NAEP 1997 Arts Assessment was conducted nationally at grade 8. For music and visual arts, representative samples of public and nonpublic school students were assessed. A special "targeted" sample of students took the theatre assessment. Schools offering at least 44 classroom hours of a theatre course per semester, and offering courses including more than the history or literature of theatre, were identified. Students attending those schools who had accumulated 30 hours of theatre classes by the end of the 1996-97 school year were selected to take the theatre assessment. The NAEP 2008 Arts Assessment was administered to a nationally representative sample of 7,900 eighth-grade public and private school students. Approximately one-half of these students were assessed in music, and the other half were assessed in visual arts. The music portion of the assessment measured students' ability to respond to music in various ways. Students were asked to analyze and describe aspects of music they heard, critique instrumental and vocal performances, and demonstrate their knowledge of standard musical notation and music's role in society. The visual arts portion of the assessment included questions that measured students' ability to respond to art as well as questions that measured their ability to create art. Responding questions asked students to analyze and describe works of art and design. For example, students were asked to describe specific differences in how certain parts of an artist's self-portrait were drawn. Creating questions required students to create works of art and design of their own. For example, students were asked to create a self-portrait that was scored for identifying detail, compositional elements, and use of materials.

Most recently, in 2016, a total of 8,800 eighth-graders in the nation's public and private schools responded to and critiqued existing works of music and visual art and created their own original artwork. NCES collected and analyzed the data and released the 2016 report highlighting key findings. Average music and visual arts responding scores are reported separately on a scale of 0 to 300 points. Average creating scores for visual arts are reported on a scale of 0 to 100 percent. Results are also reported by student groups, school type, and region, as well as in comparison to the 2008 assessment.

In addition, NAEP has a number of special studies that are conducted periodically. These include research and development efforts such as the High School Transcript Study and the National Indian Education Study. More information on these special studies is available on the NAEP Web site.

The Chicago Longitudinal Study investigates the educational and social development of a same-age cohort of 1,539 low-income, minority children (93 percent African American) who grew up in high-poverty neighborhoods in central-city Chicago and attended government-funded kindergarten programs in the Chicago Public Schools in 1985-1986. Children were at risk of poor outcomes because they face social-environmental disadvantages including neighborhood poverty, family low-income status, and other economic and educational hardships.

Study Goals

The CLS is guided by four major goals:

1. To document patterns of school performance and social competence throughout the school-age years, including their school achievement and attitudes, academic progress, and psychosocial development.
2. To evaluate the effects of the Child-Parent Center and Expansion Program on child and youth development. Children and families had the opportunity to participate in this unique Head Start type early childhood intervention from ages three to nine (preschool to third grade).
3. To identify and better understand the educational and psychosocial pathways through which the effects of early childhood experiences are manifested, and more generally, through which scholastic and behavioral development proceeds.
4. To investigate the contributions to children's educational and social development of a variety of personal, family, school, and community factors, especially those that can be altered by program or policy interventions to prevent learning difficulties and promote positive outcomes.

Studies addressing the first two goals have been reported extensively. Participation in the Child-Parent Center Program for different lengths of time, for example, has been found to be significantly associated with higher levels of school achievement into adolescence, with higher levels of consumer skills, with enhanced parent involvement in children's education, and with lower rates of grade retention and special education, lower rates of early school dropout, and with lower rates of delinquent behavior (Reynolds, 1994, 1995, 2000; Reynolds and Temple, 1995, 1998; Temple, Reynolds, and Miedel, in press). Children's patterns of school and social adjustment over time (Reynolds and Bezruczko, 1993; Reynolds and Gill, 1994; Reynolds, 2000) as well as several methodological contributions (Reynolds and Temple, 1995; Reynolds, 1998a, 1998b) also have been reported elsewhere. Examples of studies addressing goals three and four are reported in a special issue of the Journal of School Psychology (Reynolds, 1999).

The Chicago Longitudinal Study is particularly appropriate for addressing these and other goals for two reasons. First, the CLS is one of the most extensive and comprehensive studies undertaken of a low-income, urban sample. Data were collected beginning during children's preschool years and have continued on a yearly basis throughout the school-age years. Multiple sources of data have been utilized in this on-going study, including teacher surveys, child surveys and interviews, parent surveys and interviews, school administrative records, standardized tests, and classroom observations. Thus, the impact of a variety of individual, family, and school-related factors can be investigated.

A second unique feature of the CLS is that although the project concerns child development, an emphasis is given to factors and experiences that are alterable by program or policy intervention both within and outside of schools. Besides information on early childhood intervention, information has been collected on classroom adjustment, parent involvement and parenting practices, grade retention and special education placement, school mobility, educational expectations of children, teachers, and parents, and on the school learning environment.

The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999, Kindergarten-Eighth Grade Full Sample includes the kindergarten, first, third, fifth, and eighth grade data collections for the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 (ECLS-K). Unlike the public-use longitudinal files released in previous rounds, this file contains all data for all ECLS-K sample cases that have been publicly released in any of the rounds. Thus, it can be used for within-year (cross-sectional) analyses of any round of data collection and cross-year (longitudinal) analyses of combinations of rounds. It focuses on children's early school experiences beginning with kindergarten through eighth grade. It is a nationally representative sample that collects information from children, their families, their teachers, and their schools. ECLS-K provides data about the effects of a wide range of family, school, community, and individual variables on children's cognitive, social, emotional, and physical development, their early learning and early performance in school, as well as their home environment, home educational practices, school environment, classroom environment, classroom curriculum, and teacher qualifications. The list below summarizes each wave of this study.

• 1998-1999 (the Kindergarten year-Rounds 1 and 2): The ECLS-K child assessments, parent interviews, and teacher questionnaires were conducted in the fall. Children, parents, and teachers participated again in the spring, along with school administrators.

• 1999-2000 (the First grade year-Rounds 3 and 4): The ECLS-K conducted child assessments and parent interviews for a 30 percent sub-sample in the fall. The full sample of children, parents, teachers, and school administrators participated in the spring.

• 2002 (the Third grade year-Round 5): The ECLS-K conducted child assessments and parent interviews in the spring. Teachers and school administrators completed questionnaires.

• 2004 (the Fifth grade year-Round 6): The ECLS-K conducted child assessments and parent interviews in the spring. Teachers and school administrators completed questionnaires.

• 2007 (the Eighth grade year-Round 7): The ECLS-K followed the children into middle school. Information was collected from the children, their parents, teachers, and school administrators.

For more detailed information about this data collection, please refer to the user guide.

The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 (ECLS-K) focuses on children's early school experiences beginning with kindergarten through fifth grade. It is a nationally representative sample that collects information from children, their families, their teachers, and their schools. ECLS-K provides data about the effects of a wide range of family, school, community, and individual variables on children's cognitive, social, emotional, and physical development, their early learning and early performance in school, as well as their home environment, home educational practices, school environment, classroom environment, classroom curriculum, and teacher qualifications.

With a few exceptions, the fifth grade data file contains all data collected from parents, children, teachers, or schools in the base year (fall and spring), first grade (fall and spring), third grade (spring), and fifth grade (spring) data collections. To streamline the file, however, the data from the household rosters that listed all household members, their relationship to the sampled child, and selected other characteristics are not included in the file. The composite variables describing critical household roster-based information, such as the children's family structure and selected characteristics of the family members, have been retained on the file.

Specific subjects covered by the variables in this data file include parent/child gender, parent/child race, family background, socioeconomic status, household income, parents' education level, and parents' employment and marital status. Other variables include type of childcare and childcare arrangements, the child's math, science, and reading scores, the child's learning problems and autism, as well as the child's diet issues, food security, and school food service. Variables about teachers include age, race, background, qualifications, job satisfaction, their level of impact on curriculum and policy, and time spent on classroom activities and specific subjects. Other variables include diversity of classroom students, parent-teacher discussions, family participation in school events and fundraising, whether the child's school has bars on the windows and doors, fire alarms, sprinklers, and fire extinguishers, the presence of school graffiti, as well as bus/transportation issues.