The authors took a population-based approach to testing how commonly studied neighborhood socioeconomic conditions are associated with the language and cognitive outcomes of residentially stable rural and urban children tracked from kindergarten (ages 5-6) to Grade 4 (ages 9-10). Child-level kindergarten Early Development Instrument (EDI) data…

Community and school violence continue to be a major public health problem, especially among urban children and adolescents. Little research has focused on the effect of school safety and neighborhood violence on academic performance. This study examines the effect of the school and neighborhood climate on academic achievement among a population…

Youth in underserved, urban communities are at risk for a range of negative outcomes related to stress, including social-emotional difficulties, behavior problems, and poor academic performance. Mindfulness-based approaches may improve adjustment among chronically stressed and disadvantaged youth by enhancing self-regulatory capacities. This paper…

The last several decades have witnessed a large increase in the number of girls who participate in sports in the United States. Today an estimated 8 million third- through 12th-grade girls and 12 million boys participate in organized and team sports. While much progress has been made toward achieving gender equity in youth sports, too many girls…

This study contributes a novel perspective on grade retention by empirically examining how classroom composition relates to the standardized-testing performance of grade-retained students in their post-retained years. This evaluation employed a sample of entire cohorts of urban elementary school children in the Philadelphia School District over 6…

In the inner-city of Washington, D.C., lives a generation of young people for whom violence, discrimination, and poverty are a daily reality. This article describes one youth organization that encourages these young people to voice their hopes and concerns for their community and work to create solutions. The out-of-school-time programming of…

This report identifies the different settings in which summer programs for disadvantaged youth most commonly take place--schools, parks and recreation departments, community--and faith-based organizations, and child-care programs-- and examines the limitations and opportunities presented by each in building better programming. It reviews broadly…

We conducted three experiments examining the effects of peer-mediated repeated readings on students' oral reading fluency and comprehension. Each repeated reading session consisted of students reading in pairs, alternating paragraphs, for 10 minutes. Students used a scripted correction procedure when errors occurred. Students then participated in…

The National Summer Learning Association is the only national organization that focuses exclusively on learning during the summer months. It works to ensure that children and youth in high-poverty communities have access to quality summer learning opportunities that support their academic performance and healthy development through hands-on…

Trilhos Alternativos (Alternative Paths) is a community-based program that aims to integrate African-Portuguese urban youth from low-income families into Portuguese society. This article describes the first year of the program and presents formative data about effectiveness of the program. The motivation system seems to be an indirect variable…

This study describes the use of generalizability theory (GT) and many-facet Rasch measurement (MFRM) to evaluate psychometric properties of responses obtained from an assessment designed to measure complex problem-solving skills. The assessment revolved around the school activity of kickball. The task required of each student was to decide on a…

The purpose of this paper is to report our findings from a qualitative study intended to develop our understandings of: what high-poverty urban children understand and believe about food and food systems; and how such children transform and use that knowledge in their everyday lives (i.e. how do they express their scientific literacies including…

The Comic Book Project was launched originally as a way of putting into practice some of the most important educational research of the last decade--that is, the correlation between involvement in the arts and performance in academic subjects (Deasy, 2002; Fiske, 1999). This article is not necessarily about comic books; it is about children…

This article considers the possibility that school-based uses of new technologies might actually exacerbate the educational disadvantage of already disadvantaged social groups--particularly, learners from low socio-economic status populations. It draws on some recent international studies that indicate how minority, poor and urban students may be…

A Responsibility Model-based (RM) (Hellison, 2003) cross-age teaching program was developed to promote the leadership of a selected group of youth from underserved communities. The participants, called the "Urban Youth Leaders," were eight 11 to 15 year old boys who taught various physical activity skills to a group of 40 fourth graders for eight…