This mixed methods study focused on adolescents who rejected conventional singular racial/ethnic categorization by selecting multiple race/ethnicities or writing descriptions of "Other" racial/ethnic identities in response to a survey item asking them to identify their race/ethnicity. Written responses reflected eight distinct categories…

Bullying in secondary schools is a serious concern for educators and parents. The relationship between bullying and school climate has been identified and strategies to improve school climate are available. The importance of leadership in shaping school climate has been well documented. This exploratory study explores the role of leadership in…

This study describes one local upper secondary school in Finland during the COVID-19 pandemic. All teaching was changed to distant for around two months. The study describes students' and teachers' perceptions during that time. Participants responded to the survey four times and freely described their experiences five times. The number of…

The Tennessee Department of Education's office of coordinated school health (CSH) works with every school district in the state to address all aspects of student health, with a special emphasis on reducing Tennessee's childhood obesity rates. Encouraging adequate physical activity and providing physical education for all students are the central…

This study aimed to evaluate and articulate what makes Catholic schools special and effective by measuring culture and climate in five Catholic high schools and two Catholic elementary schools in a large metropolitan area in the Midwest United States. The seven schools represented a variety of student demographics, location, and size of school.…

Institutions may be interested in using alumni career success as evidence of institutional effectiveness, but the current study suggests that using income as the sole outcome may not be entirely capturing the occupational experience of graduates. Utilising data from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project, exploratory and confirmatory factor…

Student engagement is a pivotal contributor to academic achievement, retention, and well-being, and yet the role of teacher influence on engagement is poorly understood. This is in part due to the contextual and 'hidden' nature of student engagement, and as such, levels of student engagement are assumed through observable factors such as…

Volition helps students who are in the reading process to achieve their objectives. It converts their motivation into actual actions they need to undergo to reach the predetermined goals. Such actions may include the use of strategies, whether to manage their cognition, emotions, or distractions, that may elevate their reading comprehension and…

The theoretical basis of the proposed study is drawn from an ecological-transactional (Lynch & Cicchetti, 1998) systems approach to development, which focuses on contexts, and correspondingly, overlays the gender affirmative model's (GAM) transactional model of support (Keomeier & Ehrensaft, 2018) to reveal protection in the school…

We explore the effect of students' perceived task difficulty on the mathematics self-efficacy -- performance relationship. Specifically, we expand on previous reciprocal effects studies through including students' self-efficacy for different levels of task difficulty in an empirical investigation. We examined students' self-efficacy for easy,…

Background: For youth between the ages of 10 and 24, suicide is the third leading cause of death, and results in approximately 4600 lives lost each year. Body weight status and bullying is associated with increase mental health disorders. Methods: We analyzed data from the 2015 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, consisting of 15,506 students in grades…

This paper studies the early implementation of a school improvement effort in two high schools. We examine what explains variation in the teacher adoption of program practices. Our findings highlight the tension between encouraging immediate adoption of program practices and the longer term goals of schoolwide culture change. We find that highly…

This paper studies the early implementation of a school improvement effort in two high schools. We examine what explains variation in the teacher adoption of program practices. Our findings highlight the tension between encouraging immediate adoption of program practices and the longer term goals of schoolwide culture change. We find that highly…

Background/Context: Prior research has stressed the importance of timing in the college choice process, especially as it relates to receiving early information and making plans and decisions. Little has been done, however, in terms of empirically demonstrating how soon students make their decisions about college and the ways in which the timing of…

Recent data suggest that a majority of secondary students read below the level considered proficient on state standardized tests of reading. Alternative high schools, in particular, serve a high proportion of struggling readers. This survey study investigated reading instruction provided to struggling readers in alternative schools in one state by…