David J Francis

University of Houston | U of H, UH · Department of Psychology

Background While high-frequency oscillations (HFOs) and their stereotyped clusters (sHFOs) have emerged as potential neuro-biomarkers for the rapid localization of the seizure onset zone (SOZ) in epilepsy, their clinical application is hindered by the challenge of automated elimination of pseudo-HFOs originating from artifacts in heavily corrupted...

Background/Objectives: The increase in digital tools in early childhood education highlights the need for evidence-based assessments that support cognitive development and align with educational requirements and technological advances. This study contributes to the evaluation of the Bilingual English Language Learner Assessment (BELLA), designed to...

Suicide is a leading cause of death among Black emerging adults. The concurrent effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and racial discrimination were projected to exacerbate suicide vulnerability for Black Americans. The purpose of the present study was to utilize a risk-resilience model to examine the effects of racial discrimination and COVID-related st...

This study examined the initial efficacy of World Generation (WorldGen), a Tier I social studies instructional approach for emergent bilingual (EB) students and their native English‐speaking (non‐EB) peers in Grades 6 and 7. WorldGen builds on prior research on instructional practices that have been associated with improved content knowledge and li...

This brief analyzes 4-year graduation rates among students ever classified as English learners (ever-ELs) and those never classified as English learners (never-ELs) at the intersections of gender, race/ethnicity, and neighborhood income. We follow two cohorts of New York City students who entered ninth grade in 2013–2014 and 2014–2015 ( N = 127,931...

Neuromodulation through implantable pulse generators (IPGs) represents an important treatment approach for neurological disorders. While the field has observed the success of state-of-the-art interventions, such as deep brain stimulation (DBS) or responsive neurostimulation (RNS), implantable systems face various technical challenges, including the...

Prior research supports the need for elementary-aged students with reading difficulties (RDs) to receive explicit systematic small-group evidence-based reading instruction. Yet for many students, simply receiving evidence-based reading instruction in a small-group setting is insufficient to reach the progress milestones needed to meet grade-level r...

Genetics researchers increasingly combine data across many sources to increase power and to conduct analyses that cross multiple individual studies. However, there is often a lack of alignment on outcome measures when the same constructs are examined across studies. This inhibits comparison across individual studies and may impact the findings from...

Purpose: There are many aspects of words that can influence our lexical processing, and the words we are exposed to influence our opportunities for language and reading development. The purpose of this study is to establish a more comprehensive understanding of the lexical challenges and oppor- tunities students face. Method: We explore the latent...

Purpose This study aimed to examine changes in English and Spanish morphosyntactic standardized scores over time in bilingual children. Method One hundred bilingual children participated in this longitudinal study. The average age of the children at the beginning of the study was 5;11 (years;months). A subset of the participants was identified as...

Background: Hazardous drinking and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are commonly co-occurring conditions among adults. Motivational enhancement interventions, such as personalized feedback interventions (PFI), have demonstrated efficacy for reducing hazardous drinking. Emerging though scant literature has evaluated PFI for co-occurring PTSD and...

Twice-exceptionality (2e), broadly defined as the co-occurrence of a gift or talent and a disability, has been a part of the educational lexicon since the 1990s, although its empirical backing is limited. We conducted a comprehensive review of the empirical literature on 2e and created a simulation study of 2e. For the latter, we constructed popula...

Imaging and genetic studies have characterized biological risk factors contributing to specific reading disability (SRD). The current study aimed to apply this literature to a family of twins discordant for SRD and an older sibling with reading difficulty. Intraclass correlations were used to understand the similarity of imaging phenotypes between...

Objective: Evidence indicates a counterintuitive positive relationship between physical activity and alcohol consumption, suggesting that people who engage in more physical activity consume more alcohol. Impulsivity, which has a well-documented role in alcohol use disorders, has been shown to moderate the between-person physical activity-drinking...

Purpose: This study aimed to examine changes in English and Spanish morphosyntactic standardized scores over time in bilingual children. Method: One hundred bilingual children participated in this longitudinal study. The average age of the children at the beginning of the study was 6;0. A subset of these children was identified as children with dev...

Objective: High-frequency oscillations (HFOs) are considered a biomarker of the epileptogenic zone in intracranial EEG recordings. However, automated HFO detectors confound true oscillations with spurious events caused by the presence of artifacts. Approach: We hypothesized that, unlike pseudo-HFOs with sharp transients or arbitrary shapes, real...

Intervention research in education is sometimes criticized for the use of experimenter developed assessments, especially when these are over aligned with treatment. At the same time, intervention researchers sometimes prefer locally developed assessments because they appear to be more sensitive to treatment effects even when the test is not subject...

Few studies have systematically investigated the reading skill profiles of English learners (ELs) in late elementary school, a critical developmental period for language and literacy and the most common grades for initial identification with specific learning disabilities (O’Connor et al., Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 28(3), 98–112, 2...

Among bilinguals, language-related variables such as first and second language proficiency and balance may be related to important cognitive and academic outcomes, but approaches to characterizing these variables are inconsistent, particularly among at-risk samples of children. The current study employed comprehensive language assessment of English...

Background: Research on academic development has mainly focused on early time periods with less attention on individual differences in development in the later school years. Methods: To improve our knowledge of how students develop academically during later school years, this study used a multivariate growth model to investigate the developmental t...

This study reports on the design and validation of a vertically equated assessment of academic vocabulary that generalizes to a meaningful corpus of words and is measured on a developmental scale: the Test of Academic Vocabulary in English (TAVE). The study builds on previous pilot work and uses a larger sample of students who are English learners...

本研究开发了一项英语学术词汇测验 (the Test of Academic Vocabulary in English, TAVE)，并报告了TAVE的设计和验证过程。该测验旨在衡量学生对学术词汇的掌握情况，不同年级题本之间进行了垂直等值，而且评定结果可以统一到同一个发展性的量尺 (a developmental scale) 之上。此外，测验分数可以向一个有意义的语料库 (a meaningful corpus) 中推广。本研究以先前的试点工作为基础，所用样本包含2,238名来自西南某大城市的3到8年级学生，当中既有英语学习者 (English learner, EL)，也有非英语学习者，并阐述了语料库与测验的开发思路及过程。结果表明，TAVE测验呈现单维结构且具有很高的信度和关联效度，...

Purpose This study examined the relationship between utterance length, syntactic complexity, and the probability of making an error at the utterance level. Method The participants in this study included 830 Spanish-speaking first graders who were learning English at school. Story retells in both Spanish and English were collected from all children...

English language learner (EL) status has high stakes implications for determining when and how ELs should be evaluated for academic achievement. In the US, students designated as English learners are assessed annually for English language proficiency (ELP), a complex construct whose conceptualization has evolved in recent years to reflect more prec...

General academic words are those which are typically learned through exposure to school texts and occur across disciplines. We examined academic vocabulary assessment data from a group of English‐speaking middle school students (N = 1,747). We tested how word frequency, complexity, proximity, polysemy, and diversity related to students’ knowledge o...

Two approaches to word learning were investigated in 1214 6th- to 12th-grade students. Definitions were provided, followed either by two sentences that were semantically correct exemplars, called semantic reinforcement learning, or by one correct sentence and a contrasting incorrect sentence (i.e., example followed by a structurally aligned non-exa...

We evaluate the direct and inferential mediation (DIME) model for reading comprehension with a sample of struggling readers in Grades 3 to 5 (N = 364) in the context of a large-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT) investigating two theoretically distinct reading interventions (text processing + foundational skills [n = 117] or text processing on...

英语学习者(EL) 的状态对决定何时以及如何评估英语学习者的学业成就具有至关重要的意义。在美国， 被指定为英语学习者的学生每年都要接受英语水平(ELP) 的评估，这是一个复杂的构念，其概念的形成 近年来不断发展，以更准确地反映达成学科内容领域成就所需的语言要求，如各个州和州语言评估联盟 (如WIDA和ELPA21) 的标准所反映的那样。本文的目的是探讨使用学科内容领域成就测试来验证掌握语 言水平的标准的可能的作用和效用。具体来说，我们应用混合项目反应模型来识别两类EL学生：(1) 一 类EL学生他的英语语言艺术和数学成就测试题目具有与non-EL相似的难度和区分度参数和(2)另一类是测 试题目功能不同的EL学生。我们使用潜在类别IRT方法来识别两类EL学生，并评估ELP的不同分量表(读、 写...

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...

Many states now mandate early screening for dyslexia, but vary in how they address these mandates. There is confusion about the nature of screening versus diagnostic assessments, risk versus diagnosis, concurrent versus predictive validity, and inattention to indices of classification accuracy as the basis for determining risk. To help define what...

Objective: Cross-frequency coupling has been reported in the STN of patients with PD, but its significance and functional role are still not well understood. This study investigates pharmacological modulations of subthalamic oscillations and their nonlinear cross-frequency interactions across three consecutive cycles over unique 24-hour-long recor...

Articles in this issue examine (1) the primary sources of variability in reading and language achievement among Spanish‐speaking English learners (ELs) in the United States, (2) the extent to which poor performance at the end of grade 2 is identifiable in developmental trajectories beginning in kindergarten, (3) the relations among core reading con...

This study investigated early indicators of Spanish‐speaking English learners (ELs) at risk for reading difficulties at the end of Grade 2 by examining their early bilingual oral language development, taking into account language of academic instruction. Standardized measures of reading and narrative samples were collected in English and Spanish fr...

This study investigated the dimensionality of bilingual phonological awareness (PA) in English and Spanish by replicating a kindergarten model in Grade 1, and presents alternatives to modeling clustered data. English and Spanish tasks were analyzed from previously collected samples totaling 1,586 first grade Spanish‐speaking English learners. Four...

This article serves as an introduction to the special issue on Identification, Classification, and Treatment of Reading and Language Disabilities in Spanish‐speaking English Learners. The article explains the driving forces behind the need for the special issue, the global nature of linguistic diversity, and provides an overview of the five papers...

This article examines the validity of IQ‐achievement discrepancy and low achievement as criteria for the identification of disabilities in Spanish‐speaking English‐language learners (ELs) and the factors that moderate the validity of these approaches as bases for identification. While there has been a long history of examining the validity of diffe...

Purpose The general aim of this study is to enhance our understanding of the patterns of language growth in Spanish and English during the school years. In this study, we used a longitudinal retrospective approach to explore the growth of the percentage of grammatical utterances (PGU) in both Spanish and English in 2 groups of English learners (ELs...

See: https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/supporting-english-learners-in-stem-subjects English Learners in STEM Subjects: Transforming Classrooms, Schools, and Lives recognizes that ELs comprise a diverse and multitalented pool of learners, yet these students continue to be underrepresented and lack access to rigorous STEM learning opportunit...

Objectives: Long-term neurological response to treatment after a severe traumatic brain injury (sTBI) is a dynamic process. Failure to capture individual heterogeneity in recovery may impact findings from single endpoint sTBI randomized controlled trials (RCT). The present study re-examined the efficacy of erythropoietin (Epo) and transfusion thre...

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 effi...

This study leverages advances in multivariate cross-classified random effects models to extend the Simple View of Reading to account for variation within readers and across texts, allowing for both the personalization of the reading function and the integration of the component skills and text and discourse frameworks for reading research. We illus...

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 th...

Studies have demonstrated that speaking and learning multiple languages enhances executive control, which is essential to switch between languages. This enhanced process is called ”Bilingual Cognitive Advantage”. The present study addresses the practical developmental significance of this finding by focusing on the recently documented relation betw...

This book brings together the most current thinking and research on educator stress and how education systems can support quality teachers and quality education. It adopts an occupational health perspective to examine the problem of educator stress and presents theory-driven intervention strategies to reduce stress load and support educator resilie...

This final chapter reviews the implications of applying an occupational health perspective to research, practice and policy on educator stress. It argues for the need to bring educator stress to the forefront of education research and practice in terms of explanatory models, research methodology and intervention strategies. Applying models and meth...

Research on educator stress and its effects on health outcomes faces numerous methodological challenges that affect the design, execution and analysis of scientific investigations. The chapter begins with an overview of the statistical challenges associated with multilevel field studies, which are ubiquitous in research on educator stress. Secondly...

This brief experimental study investigated the initial promise of an intervention designed to promote inference generation in adolescents with reading comprehension difficulties. The intervention, provided for nine sessions, included multisyllable word study, teacher explanation and modeling of inference generation and other comprehension processes...

We investigate the impact of a relatively brief cross-curricular intervention, Word Generation, on middle school students' development of taught academic vocabulary. Students (n = 8382) in forty-four middle schools in three urban districts were randomly assigned to treatment or control conditions. Treatment teachers implemented the program with min...

Few studies have investigated specific learning disabilities (SLD) identification methods based on the identification of patterns of processing strengths and weaknesses (PSW). We investigated the reliability of SLD identification decisions emanating from different achievement test batteries for 1 method to operationalize the PSW approach: the conco...

The authors’ purpose was to examine adolescents’ reading motivation in relation to standardized assessments of reading comprehension and fluency. After a reading pretest, 60 ninth-grade students (M age = 14.9 years) were randomly assigned to 2 groups. Compared to those in the control condition, those administered brief oral feedback intended to imp...

Component skills and discourse frameworks of reading have identified characteristics of readers and texts that influence comprehension. However, these 2 frameworks have not previously been integrated in a comprehensive and systematic way to explain performance on any standardized assessment of reading comprehension that is in widespread use across...

Difficulties suppressing previously encountered, but currently irrelevant information from working memory characterize less skilled comprehenders in studies in which they are matched to skilled comprehenders on word decoding and nonverbal IQ. These “extreme” group designs are associated with several methodological issues. When sample size permits,...

Reading is at the interface between the vision and spoken language domains. An emergent bulk of research indicates that learning to read strongly impacts on non-linguistic visual object processing, both at the behavioral level (e.g., on mirror image processing – enantiomorphy) and at the brain level (e.g., inducing top-down effects as well as neura...

There is a lack of comprehensive research on Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) feasibility to study occupational stress, especially its long-term sustainability. EMA application in education contexts has also been sparse. This study investigated the feasibility of using EMA to study teacher stress over 2 years using both objective compliance da...

Using curriculum-based measures (CBM) to identify and monitor students’ oral reading fluency (ORF) is challenging, with student performance subject to numerous sources of variability. One source of variability that is beyond teachers’ or students’ control stems from differences in text difficulty across CBM probes at any given grade level. These di...

The integration of knowledge during reading was tested in 1,109 secondary school students. Reading times for the second sentence in a pair (Jane’s headache went away) were compared in conditions where the first sentence was either causally or temporally related to the first sentence (Jane took an aspirin vs. Jane looked for an aspirin). Mixed-effec...

Based on the analysis of 620 think- aloud verbal protocols from students in grades 7, 9, and 11, we examined students' conscious engagement in inference generation, paraphrasing, verbatim text repetition, and monitoring while reading narrative or informational texts that were either at or above the students' current reading levels. Students were ra...

Visual processing has been widely studied in regard to its impact on a students’ ability to read. A less researched area is the role of reading in the development of visual processing skills. A cohort-sequential, accelerated-longitudinal design was utilized with 932 kindergarten, first, and second grade students to examine the impact of reading acq...

Separate mixed model analyses of variance were conducted to examine the effect of textual distance on the accuracy and speed of text consistency judgments among adequate and struggling comprehenders across grades 6–12 (n = 1,203). Multiple regressions examined whether accuracy in text consistency judgments uniquely accounted for variance in compreh...

Using curriculum-based measures (CBM) to identify and monitor students’ oral reading fluency (ORF) is challenging, with student performance subject to numerous sources of variability. One source of variability that is beyond teachers’ or students’ control stems from differences in text difficulty across CBM probes at any given grade level. These di...

Objective: Weak structure-function relations for brain and behavior may stem from problems in estimating these relations in small clinical samples with frequently occurring outliers. In the current project, we focused on the utility of using alternative statistics to estimate these relations. Method: Fifty-four children with spina bifida meningo...

This article investigated the contribution of visual-motor integration (VMI) to reading ability when known predictors of later reading outcomes were also present in the data analysis. Participants included 778 first and second grade students from a large diverse urban district in Texas. The data were analyzed using multiple regression models with a...

We evaluated the technical adequacy of oral reading fluency (ORF) probes in which 1,472 middle school students with and without reading difficulties read fluency probes for 60 s versus reading the full passage. Results suggested that the reliability of 60-s probes (rs ≥ .75) was not substantively different than full passage probes (rs ≥ .77) among...

Purpose: Agreement across methods for identifying students as inadequate responders or as learning disabled is often poor. We report (1) an empirical examination of final status (post-intervention benchmarks) and dual-discrepancy growth methods based on growth during the intervention and final status for assessing response to intervention; and (2)...

This comparative study examines relationships between phonemic awareness and Spanish reading skill acquisition among three groups of Spanish-speaking first and second graders: children in Mexico receiving reading instruction in Spanish and children in the United States receiving reading instruction in either Spanish or English. Children were tested...

Little is known about how specific components of working memory, namely, attentional processes including response inhibition, sustained attention, and cognitive inhibition, are related to reading decoding and comprehension. The current study evaluated the relations of reading comprehension, decoding, working memory, and attentional control in 1,134...

The purpose of this study was to extend the research on adolescents’ motivation for reading by examining important group differences and the relation of motivation to standardized achievement. Adolescents (N = 406) ranging from grade 7 to grade 12 completed a self-report survey that assessed 13 different aspects of their reading motivation includin...

The goal of this study was to assess the effectiveness of an interventionQuality English and Science Teaching 2designed to help English language learners (ELLs) and their English proficient classmates develop academic language in science, as required by the Common Core State Standards. The intervention consisted of supplementary instructional mater...

We evaluated the effects of student characteristics (sight word reading efficiency, phonological decoding, verbal knowledge, level of reading ability, grade, gender) and text features (passage difficulty, length, genre, and language and discourse attributes) on the oral reading fluency of a sample of middle-school students in Grades 6-8 (N = 1,794)...