Most educational climate research is conducted among (day school) students who spend the bulk of their young lives outside of school, potentially limiting the amount of climate variance that can be captured. Boarding school students, on the other hand, spend much of their lives at school and thus offer a potentially unique perspective on…

Prior research shows that rural students' education expectations and aspirations, as well as their postsecondary enrollment and persistence rates, tend to be lower than those of nonrural students. However, much of that prior research may not apply to today's students because it uses old data or focuses on individual states or purposive samples.…

The purpose of this study was to compare the differences in rural high school teachers' (n = 256) self-efficacy in student engagement, instructional practices, and classroom management using selected teacher characteristics. Analysis of variance showed significant mean differences between different levels of education in self-efficacy for…

Involvement in social action and community service can promote the construction of prosocial identities and enduring patterns of civic behavior. This article explores this important process for youth that participate in the PeaceJam Ambassadors program. High school-aged "PeaceJammers" study the lives of Nobel Peace laureates while…

This study examined the early college success of students who graduated from an Indiana high school in 2010 and enrolled immediately in a public two-year or four-year college in Indiana. The study team identified data elements in Indiana's Student Information System that predicted the early college success of this cohort of students. Half of…

Our study adds to prior work on Indiana's Twenty-first Century Scholars(TFCS) program by focusing on whether participating in--rather than completing--the program affects the likelihood of students going to college and where they initially enrolled. We first employ binary and multinomial logistic regression to obtain estimates of the impact of the…

We report on the scaling up of a high school content literacy framework, Reading Apprenticeship, over a period of four years as part of the independent evaluation of an Investing in Innovation grant from the U.S. Department of Education to WestEd's Strategic Literacy Institute (SLI). Our goal was to understand the school processes that support…

This study examined whether data on Indiana high school students, their high schools, and the Indiana public colleges and universities in which they enroll predict their academic success during the first two years in college. The researchers obtained student-level, school-level, and university-related data from Indiana's state longitudinal data…

The purpose of this exploratory study was to analyze how high school principals approached developing a collaborative culture and providing collaborative leadership in a large high school setting. The population sample for this study was 82 principals of large comprehensive high schools of grades 9 through 12 or some combination thereof with…

This study examined (1) average distances traveled to attend college, (2) presumptive college eligibility, (3) differences between two-year and four-year college enrollment, (4) differences in enrollment related to differences in colleges' selectivity, and (5) degree of "undermatching" (i.e., enrolling in a college less selective than…

The evaluation, improvement, and accountability of teachers has been the topic of the nation throughout the era of No Child Left Behind. Where some critics point to a business model of measuring outputs (i.e., student achievement scores on standardized tests) to evaluate teacher performance, others will advocate for a fair evaluation system that…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine the principal perceptions and demographic relationship of the implementation and effectiveness of online learning in non-charter Indiana public high schools. An analysis was prepared to determine whether demographic factors played a role in the principal's perceptions of the implementation…

In October 2010, WestEd's Strategic Literacy Initiative (SLI) won an i3 "Validation" grant to scale up and validate the Reading Apprenticeship (RA) model in three core secondary content area classes: U.S. history, biology, and English language arts. SLI's proposal stated two goals. Goal 1: To transform academic literacy teaching and…

Programs supported by the Carl D. Perkins Act of 2006 are required to operate under the state or national content standards, and are expected to carry out evaluation procedures that address accountability. The Indiana high school course, "Advanced Life Science: Foods" ("ALS: Foods") operates under the auspices of the Perkins…

Technology education (TE) has come to encompass many facets of curriculum, ranging from industrial arts (IA) to integrating problem-solving and engineering concepts into the curriculum. For technology educators who have chosen the pre-engineering problem-solving route there is a pre-engineering curriculum called Project Lead The Way (PLTW), that…