Job Corps is the largest and most comprehensive education and job training program in the United States for young people ages 16 to 24 who are not in school or working. Most students live at and take classes at its approximately 120 residential centers. To explore ways to improve student outcomes and reduce per-student costs, Job Corps pilot…

Discussion of alternative education is growing across the country as states and districts look for ways to better serve students whose needs are not met in traditional high school settings. Alternative settings, however, vary greatly in how they operate, whom they aim to enroll, and the methods they use to educate students. The variation of…

Students, teachers, and school leaders are seeking flexibility and supports to enable powerful, personalized learning experiences both inside and outside of the traditional classroom. In personalized learning, instruction is tailored to each student's strengths, needs, and interests--including enabling student voice and choice in what, how, when,…

The population of Spanish-speaking preschoolers in the United States continues to increase and there is a significant need to develop psychometrically sound early language and literacy screening measures to accurately capture children's ability in Spanish. In this paper, we describe the innovative design and calibration process of the new…

Deep-sea research is rarely available to undergraduate students. However, as telepresence technology becomes more available, doors may open for more undergraduates to pursue research that includes remote fieldwork. This descriptive case study is an initial investigation into whether such technology might provide a feasible opportunity for…

This report presents findings from Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education's (WICHE) "Multistate Longitudinal Data Exchange Pilot" ("MLDE" or "Exchange"), which includes an array of analyses of the combined dataset covering 192,689 students from the four states (Hawai'i, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington) that…

As educational attainment grows increasingly more essential to individual and societal prosperity and simultaneously more expensive, policymakers' appetite for evidence of the return on the investment in a college education has swelled and they increasingly want to equip prospective college students and their families with concrete information…

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has contracted with the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to examine ways to implement the 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs) into the school meals programs. In the meantime, USDA has requested that state agencies begin proactively implementing the applicable recommendations for the 2005 DGAs…

In this technical report, we describe the development of cognitive diagnostic test items that form the basis of the diagnostic system for Project DIVIDE (Dynamic Instruction Via Individually Designed Environments). The construct underlying the diagnostic test is division of fractions. We include a description of the process we used to identify the…

This report presents results of the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in reading and mathematics at grade 12. Results for students in the nation and, for the first time, in the 11 states that volunteered to participate in the 2009 state pilot program are reported as average scores and as percentages of students performing at…