This study explores how public-school teachers who host student teachers in urban, grade 7-12 classrooms (referred to as cooperating teachers or classroom mentors in this study) define their role in preparing pre-service teachers. This study is particularly interested in yielding insight into how participants describe the "practice" of…

Positive perceptions of school climate correlate with many dimensions of academic well-being and student health. Unfortunately, some existing research finds more favorable perceptions in middle school for general education students (GENs) than for students with disabilities (SWDs). Given the importance of ninth grade to student success, it is…

This study explores the association between school-level poverty rates and young peoples' perceptions of student empowerment, drawing on survey and administrative data from a large urban district. Participants included 29,318 diverse youth in grades 6-12 from 211 schools. We used multilevel linear regression models to estimate the relationships…

In this study with 153 middle school students, we investigate the influence of the number of decimal places from the reading of a measurement device on students' decisions to change or keep an initial hypothesis about falling objects. Participants were divided into three groups, introduced to two experiments--the time it takes a free falling…

"Xtreme Reading" is a supplemental literacy curriculum designed to improve the literacy skills of struggling students in grades 6 to 12. The curriculum is primarily designed to help students improve their vocabulary, decoding, fluency, and reading comprehension skills. To ensure a productive learning environment, students initially learn…

"Xtreme Reading" is a supplemental literacy curriculum designed to improve the literacy skills of struggling students in grades 6 to 12. The curriculum is primarily designed to help students improve their vocabulary, decoding, fluency, and reading comprehension skills. To ensure a productive learning environment, students initially learn…

"Xtreme Reading" is a supplemental literacy curriculum designed to improve the literacy skills of struggling students in grades 6 to 12. The curriculum is primarily designed to help students improve their vocabulary, decoding, fluency, and reading comprehension skills. To ensure a productive learning environment, students initially learn…

There are racial/ethnic disparities associated with school punishment practices and academic progress. In addition, research suggests that urban schools have stricter school punishment practices and higher grade retention rates. What remains unknown, however, is the relationship between race/ethnicity, school punishment practices, and retention…

Executive functions (EFs) show promise as important mediators of adolescent academic performance. However, the expense of measuring EFs accurately has restricted most field-based research on them to smaller, non-longitudinal studies of homogeneous populations with specific diagnoses. We therefore monitored the development of 259 diverse, at-risk…

Two decades ago, the New Jersey Supreme Court in "Abbott v. Burke" mandated that the state establish high quality preschool education in the 31 highest-poverty school districts. New Jersey created a pre-K program with high standards and a continuous improvement system that transformed a patchwork of private and public programs into a…

In 2017 Georgia instituted a flexibility policy through which school districts enter into performance contracts with the state that grant districts waivers from state rules and allow schools and districts greater autonomy. In exchange, schools and districts must meet academic performance targets. The performance contracts are intended to…

Balanced literacy has been proposed as a compromise or middle ground between philosophical approaches to reading instruction that stress teaching of word recognition and those that stress construction of meaning. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the READ 180 balanced literacy supplementary instruction program on…

This research aimed to examine students' perceptions of their life skills while attending project-based learning (PBL) schools. The study focused on three questions including: (1) What are students' perceptions of their development of life skills in project-based learning schools?; (2) In what ways, if any, do students perceive an increase in…

In recent years, the regression discontinuity design (RDD) has gained widespread recognition as a quasi-experimental method that when used correctly, can produce internally valid estimates of causal effects of a treatment, a program or an intervention (hereafter referred to as treatment effects). In an RDD study, subjects or groups of subjects…

Background: Childhood obesity continues to be a public health problem in the United States. Increasing consumption of fruits and vegetables (F/V) is one strategy for decreasing high consumption of energy-dense, high-fat foods, thereby improving weight status. Many Orleans Parish public schools were provided with salad bars (SBs) to augment school…