Middle school offers an entryway onto the path of college readiness. However, many practitioners and researchers have focused their efforts on high school students. Remaining is a population of potential college-going students, whose opportunities to prepare for college at an earlier stage are overlooked because middle school is not viewed as the…

This generic qualitative inquiry explored general education middle school teachers' perceptions and experiences delivering social and emotional (SEL) and/or college and career readiness advisory lessons in addition to their daily content curriculum in their post-COVID-19 in-person learning classrooms. Research has indicated the importance of SEL…

This article provides a "snapshot" of fourth grade English Language Arts (ELA) vocabulary instruction before and after implementation of college and career readiness standards. Our exploratory study's findings demonstrate the instructional shifts for teaching deep vocabulary knowledge as required by college and career readiness…

Education is often depicted as one of the best ways out of poverty. At the same time, research over many decades finds that most educational outcomes are strongly correlated to poverty. It is not likely that these two themes are true at the same time. Either schools are windows of opportunity and help overcome or mitigate poverty and other…

In U.S. K-12 public schools, educational policy and practice for English learner (EL) students center around two sets of academic standards: English language proficiency (ELP) standards and content standards such as in English language arts and mathematics. This study examined the types of language demands manifested in those standards in Grade 5.…

Project Explore targeted minority students in grades six through eight who attended 28 Houston Independent School District (HISD) middle schools during the 2019-2020 academic year. In 2019-2020, a total of 2,095 students were accepted for participation in the Project Explore program, and an additional 715 students were waitlisted for program…

This study identifies students' academic trajectories in the middle grades relative to a set of college readiness benchmarks. We apply math and reading college readiness benchmarks to rich longitudinal data for more than 360,000 students across the nation. Student-level and school-level demographic characteristics significantly predict academic…

This research study analyzed the impact of an early college readiness program (ECRP) on students' academic performance on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) reading and mathematics assessments in Grades 3, 4, and 5. ECRP is a college readiness system designed to support students to reach postsecondary education. The ECRP…

There are many important questions teachers and administrators need to ask as they grapple with how to ensure high school graduates are college and career ready. What does it mean to prepare students for a world that is rapidly changing--a world in which science and technology are altering how we live, work, play, and interact? If teachers focus…

Higher education institutions are in a great position to create authentic programming to support local underfunded or underperforming public school districts. This article gives an overview of an education outreach collaborative between a 4-year public university, local schools, and a community institution and highlights lessons learned from the…

This study is designed to assess the effects of states' adoption of college- and career-ready (CCR) standards on student achievement. Relying on state-level NAEP data from 1990 to 2015, we use comparative interrupted time series analyses to assess whether the adoption of CCR standards led to a larger improvement in student achievement in states…

This executive summary report includes results for Austin Partners in Education (APIE) programs in 2019-2020 including math classroom coaching, GEAR UP tutoring, college readiness, and mentoring. It highlights continued academic programs serving students in middle and high school and describes APIE support provided to teachers' instruction. As…

Educators, researchers, and policy makers concerned about college under-enrollment among underserved groups of students have traditionally focused reform efforts at the high school level. Over the last several decades, however, there has been a growing interest in improving college readiness beginning at the elementary level. Recently, the…

An elementary school counselor and intern delivered a six-session curriculum unit designed to enhance career and college readiness self-efficacy to 47 fourth-grade students. The intervention effect was compared with 48 other fourth-grade students. Ninety percent of the variance was due to ethnicity differences. White students had higher…

Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest partnered with the Arkansas Department of Education to examine Arkansas's middle school and high school indicators of postsecondary readiness and success, building on an earlier study of these indicators (Hester et al., 2021). Academic indicators include attaining proficiency on state academic…