Differential Susceptibility of Peer Influences: Gene-Environment Interactions and Gene-Environment Correlations

This paper examines potential gene-environment interactions in responses to peer influences on tobacco use. Specifications found in the literature that link own use to school-level tobacco use suggest widespread interactive effects, where individuals with the short/short 5-HTT genetic variant have the largest responsiveness to peer smoking. However, I show that individuals are sorted into schools in ways that suggest important gene-environment correlations may confound these findings. Using an across-cohort, within school strategy to separate school level effects (including school selection bias) and grade-level peer effects, I find evidence of reversals of the baseline specifications, so that the results suggest that individuals with the long/long 5-HTT variant are most susceptible to peer influence, increasing the likelihood of smoking by 3 percentage points per 10% increase in peer smoking. These results are consistent with a broader concern that many gene-environment models may fail to fully account for gene-environment correlation.

Effects of Technology Enhancements and Type of Teacher Support on Assessing Spanish-Speaking Children’s Oral Reading Fluency in Second Grade

We examined student-, classroom-, and school-level effects in predicting second-grade Spanish-speaking children’s oral reading fluency in Spanish. Teachers in 67 randomly selected urban schools administered the Tejas LEE to 1,537 first- and second-grade students. Oral reading fluency was measured in the passages students read for comprehension. Covariates were mean fluency in Grade 1, variability in fluency in Grade 1, degree of grouping in the school, and the proportion of second-grade students in the classroom and/or the school taking the Tejas LEE. Treatment effects were administration format (paper, desktop, handheld) and type of teacher support (no mentoring, web mentoring, and on-site plus web mentoring). Second-grade teachers positively affected students’ reading fluency when (a) they administered the Tejas LEE on paper with the associated paper reports in classrooms of bilingual students, and (b) they either received web mentoring and had relatively homogeneous classrooms or received on-site or no mentoring and had ability-grouped classes. Implications for interpreting assessment results are discussed in the context of the type of support provided to teachers and the grouping of bilingual students by language and/or by ability.

Final Reading Outcomes of the National Randomized Field Trial of Success for All

Using a cluster randomization design, schools were randomly assigned to implement Success for All, a comprehensive reading reform model, or control methods. This article reports final literacy outcomes for a 3-year longitudinal sample of children who participated in the treatment or control condition from kindergarten through second grade and a combined longitudinal and in-mover student sample, both of which were nested within 35 schools. Hierarchical linear model analyses of all three outcomes for both samples revealed statistically significant school-level effects of treatment assignment as large as one third of a standard deviation. The results correspond with the Success for All program theory, which emphasizes both comprehensive school-level reform and targeted student-level achievement effects through a multi-year sequencing of literacy instruction.