Growing evidence warns about the detrimental effects of the stress induced by natural disasters on learning outcomes. Yet less is known about how political leadership could mitigate the adverse exposure to these events. Exploiting a natural experiment--the massive 2010 earthquake in Chile--as an exogenous shock and using fine-grained student data,…

Political polarization in the United States has made many environmental issues strongly partisan, with Democrats largely receptive to environmental messaging and Republicans commonly pitted against it. This phenomenon may have meaningful implications for how environmental education is conducted for people from different sociopolitical contexts. We…

In the United States, the two main political parties, Democrats and Republicans, have become increasingly polarized, including with regard to environmental issues. As part of a national study of environmentally focused single-day field trips for early adolescent youth in 2018, we conducted exploratory research to examine how outcomes differed for…

This article explores how extracurricular programs designed as interventions in the criminalization of Black girls may constrict their identities. Through a womanist theoretical framework, authors investigate the discourses about Black girlhood that permeate one extracurricular initiative which aims to counter the effects of exclusionary…

Understanding why women are consistently underrepresented in STEM fields has been a constant puzzle, with a consistent feature of the puzzle being performance in math. This study uses data from TIMSS exams to investigate cross-national gender differences in math-related affect, more precisely liking mathematics, confidence in mathematics, and…

In this dissertation, I address the issue of social inequalities in education and the role of the education system in confronting them. The project involves two main parts, one empirical and the other conceptual. In the first part--chapters 1 and 2--I address the practical dimension of how to reduce social inequalities in education by exploring…