Much of the achievement gap between rich and poor students can be attributed to out-of-school factors, yet few schools have a comprehensive, coordinated system for addressing students' nonacademic needs. Within a group of Catholic schools located in one city, this study examined academic achievement on the Stanford Achievement Test battery in…

How to close the achievement gap in the classroom so that no student is left behind becomes one of the most important issues nowadays. This study aims to construct a collaborative and competitive game-based learning environment to improve English proficiencies and reduce the achievement gap for disadvantaged students. The Wireless Crossword…

Using four-wave longitudinal reading and mathematics data (4th to 7th grades) from a large urban school district, growth curve modeling was used as a tool for examining three research questions: Are achievement gaps closing in reading and mathematics? What are the associations between prior-achievement and growth across the reading and mathematics…

The call for "mathematics for all" reaffirms the belief that all students should have equal access, equal educational experiences, and equal educational outcomes. Existing gap in students' mathematics achievement have long been coupled with the demographic categories of race and ethnicity, culture and language, SES and social class,…

Lack of researcher consensus on how to measure disadvantaged students' access to effective teaching has made it challenging for practitioners to draw lessons from the data. This brief aims to help policymakers understand the emerging evidence by synthesizing findings from three peer-reviewed studies that collectively span 17 states. The studies…

Experimental research has demonstrated both the deleterious effects of negative stereotypes about ability on academic performance and the relative ease with which stereotypes can be countered in educational settings. The extent to which stereotypes contribute to the achievement gap between American students from dominant social and economic groups…

The United States currently lags behind globally in the areas of math and science. In order to compete and meet the skills necessary for the future workforce, it has become necessary to seek out instructional strategies that will increase student achievement in those academic areas. With the wide variety of diversity occurring in public schools…

Efforts to reform the educational system in the United States from 1954-2012 have failed to recognize the importance of the students' perspective about a school's culture and its impact on student achievement. This study addressed the problem of an achievement gap that exists between high poverty schools and their more affluent counterparts in a…

This study evaluated the overall reading achievement of African American (n = 42) and White (n = 21) sixth grade students in an urban Midwestern school, after their teachers' engaged in culturally proficiency training provided by The Minnesota Humanities Center. Data for students in the study was collected for comprehension levels or acuity…

This dissertation investigates and problematizes emergent bilingual students' achievement gaps in an existing corpus of middle-school science assessment data. I first characterize achievement gaps across national data, state data, and the corpus of approximately 27,000 students as an analytic backdrop. I then sample a subset of the 6th grade…

This qualitative study explored Teach for America (TFA) alumni teachers' discourse on Arizona language policy, conducted with eight teachers in the Phoenix metropolitan area who received their professional teacher preparation from TFA, a national organization that uses alternative paths to certification to place teachers in low-income schools.…

This study addresses closing the academic performance gaps between African American and Latino students and their White counterparts, and between girls and boys in mathematics. Of the various models and theories of these social inequalities that have been advanced in literature, one particularly compelling line of research concerns the idea of…

In English language learners' (ELLs) reclassification, the tension between assuring sufficient English language proficiency (ELP) in mainstream classrooms and avoiding potential negative consequences of protracted ELL status creates an essential dilemma. This present study focused on ELL students who were reclassified around the time they finished…

A vast gulf in academic achievement separates public schools in Washington, D.C.'s poorest neighborhoods from those in its most affluent. Achievement Prep, which serves 4th-8th graders in D.C.'s impoverished 8th Ward, is an outlier. Yet in 2011, 60% of Achievement Prep's "scholars" scored proficient or advanced in reading on the DC-CAS…

The authors' goals in this study are to use both the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and state accountability test score data to (1) provide a detailed description of the magnitude and trends of state-level academic achievement gaps among cohorts of students entering school in the 1990s and 2000s; (2) investigate the extent to…