The notion of belonging is an often-referenced but under-theorized concept in studies of school organization. The purpose of this study is to examine the politics of belonging in schools and accompanying implications for how schools are organized and led. This research employs an autophotographic methodology. Student participants took photographs…

School discipline is a salient problem of educational policy and practice. Teachers play an important role in the production and disruption of racial inequities in school discipline, yet there remains a need to disentangle the relationship between teacher characteristics, their perceptions of school climate, and school discipline patterns. This…

Scholars have examined the effects of same-gender teachers on student achievement, but the findings are mixed. In this study, we use 7 years of administrative data from students in elementary and middle schools (i.e., Grades 3 through 8) in Indiana to test links between gender matching and student achievement. We find that female teachers are…

A new generation of science curriculum materials is being developed and made widely available across K-12. These materials, along with their associated professional learning, are expected to play a pivotal role in transforming science instruction to meet the vision of A Framework for K-12 Science Education and the performance expectations of the…

Computational thinking (CT) is a set of cognitive skills that every child should acquire. K-12 classrooms are expected to provide students opportunities (tasks) to think computationally. We introduce a CT competency assessment for middle school students. The assessment design process started by establishing a cognitive model of CT domain mastery,…

This partnership-based study identified how many middle and high school students take care of parents, siblings, and grandparents at home, via student surveys across Rhode Island public schools (N = 48,508; 46% White non-Latinx; 21% Latinx; 47% girls). Further, we investigated how students' caregiving for family related to their school engagement,…

In their recently renamed theory, situated expectancy-value theory (SEVT), Eccles and Wigfield (2020) emphasized the importance of situations in influencing individuals' motivational beliefs and academic choices. Adopting a novel approach--network analysis--this study aimed to examine how situations may impact the associations among expectancies,…

This study utilizes life history methodology to understand how White teachers develop racial awareness while also exploring how the education profession acts as an inflection point for racialized understandings of the world. Furthermore, as the educators in this study grew in their racial awareness, there was a rise in conflicting and ambivalent…

The Gifted and Talented program in New York City is one of the largest and longest running programs for gifted students in the nation. Yet little is known about its effects on student outcomes. Using student-level administrative data of New York City public school students between the 2010--2011 and 2018-2019 academic years, we studied the effects…

Canadian middle and high school students (N = 2,278) completed a "CTRL-F" curriculum teaching them how to evaluate online information by reading laterally to investigate sources, check claims, and trace information to original contexts. A subset of CTRL-F students (N = 316) were in classes with teacher-matched control groups (N = 287).…

The current study investigated the effectiveness of three distinct educational technologies--two game-based applications (From Here to There and DragonBox 12+) and two modes of online problem sets in ASSISTments (an Immediate Feedback condition and an Active Control condition with no immediate feedback) on Grade 7 students' algebraic knowledge.…

Guided by the following questions: (1) What are the experiences of immigrant children attending schools in communities experiencing police brutality and anti-immigrant sentiments? (2) How do middle school children of immigrants visually represent their experiences with legal violence? and (3) What are children's visions of freedom and community…

The effectiveness of incorporating independent reading practice in schools has long been a subject of uncertainty. To shed light on this ongoing debate, this meta-analysis seeks to investigate the impact of in-school independent reading on three crucial measures--attitudes toward reading, word recognition, and comprehension--focusing on K-10…

Pandemic-era disruptions to schooling resulted in academic setbacks for many students. To help students catch up, school districts nationwide are implementing a range of academic recovery interventions. In this paper, we use multiple data sources to evaluate the impact and implementation of academic recovery interventions in four school districts…

Research documents positive associations between school climate and student outcomes, and, as such, many policymakers have positioned it among their chief priorities for school improvement. Despite this increased focus, extant research has offered mixed findings on the presence and magnitude of racial school climate disparities. The present study…