College-bound students move from various high school environments to a collegiate setting; this transition requires acclimation. There is increased interest in the understanding of college student adjustment to decrease student attrition, thus adjustment to college has been studied in different contexts, including social and academic. The…

To test whether a growth mindset intervention could improve the academic performance of adolescents, the National Study of Learning Mindsets (NSLM) implemented a low-cost growth mindset intervention specifically designed for ninth-graders in a nationally representative sample of regular high schools during the 2015-2016 school year. The national…

Since 2006, The James Irvine Foundation has invested more than $100 million in Linked Learning, a promising approach to transforming education in California. In 2009, the Foundation launched the California Linked Learning District Initiative ("the initiative") to demonstrate this approach in nine school districts. The multiyear…

Since 2004, the National Institute for School Leadership (NISL) has offered the Executive Development Program (EDP), a leadership program for sitting school principals that is typically delivered in two-day workshops once per month over 12 months. From its inception through 2018, 15,000 principals across 23 states have participated in the EDP.…

The National Math + Science Initiative (NMSI) is a nonprofit organization committed to improving educational outcomes that traces its roots back to the early 1990s. NMSI's College Readiness Program (CRP) is a long-standing program with the goal of promoting STEM education in high schools to improve students' preparation for college. The three-year…

Making the successful transition to adulthood has become increasingly difficult for many young people in the United States, particularly for those without a college education. Those without a high school degree face even tougher prospects, with especially high unemployment rates and falling wages. A typical worker without a high school diploma…

"ACCESS", A Culture Creating Effective Systems for Success, was a three-year Investing in Innovation (i3) development grant funded by the Office of Innovation and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education. The "ACCESS" grant led the way for a district-wide redesign of educational practices based on the novel approach of…

Researchers examined the impacts of the Kalamazoo Promise Scholarship program on academic and behavioral outcomes of students in grades 9-12 in Kalamazoo Public Schools (KPS). The Kalamazoo Promise Scholarship program offers college scholarships to graduating high school students in the KPS district. The percentage of tuition and fees covered is…

The Kentucky Valley Educational Cooperative and Green River Regional Educational Cooperative received an Investing in Innovation (i3) development grant from the U.S. Department of Education to implement the Creating College and Career Readiness (C3R) initiative. The initiative offered a suite of software developed by WIN Learning (WIN) to support…

The main purpose of this study was to examine the effects of the Reading Apprenticeship professional development program on several teacher and student outcomes, including effects on student learning. A key part of the study was the use of an enhanced performance assessment program, the Integrated Learning Assessment (ILA), to measure student…

In order to study whether college scholarships can be an effective tool in raising students' performance in secondary school, we use one aspect of the Kalamazoo Promise that resembles a quasi-experiment. The surprise announcement of the scholarship created a large change in expected college tuition costs that varied across different groups of…

The lack of clear and manageable implementation models for individualized instruction continued to exist in high schools. Formal individualized teaching (FIT), a differentiated instructional model, was studied to determine its impact on student learning. The FIT model included analyzing student data using a Pareto analysis to identify individual…

Achieve3000 publishes a number of online literacy programs that differentiate lessons and activities based on student performance. Magnolia Consulting--an independent, third party evaluation firm--assessed Achieve3000 Solutions' impact on student learning during the 2014-15 school year. The researchers used a randomized control trial, where…

The study reported in this volume adds to the growing body of evaluation studies that focus on the use of NSF-funded Standards-based high school mathematics curricula. Most previous evaluations have studied the impact of field-test versions of a curriculum. Since these innovative curricula were so new at the time of many of these studies, students…

Students entering high school face many new academic challenges. One of the most important is their ability to read and understand more complex text in literature, mathematics, science, and social studies courses as they navigate through a rigorous high school curriculum. The Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Northwest conducted a study to…