Practitioners and scholars have begun to recognize the need to fracture disciplinary boundaries in K-12 learning settings in favor of more holistic approaches. STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) education, in particular, has been proposed as a means to reimagine science education based on youths' widespread interest in…

Adolescence is a period of exploration of sexuality and of its integration into personality. Existing research on Latina adolescents, however, has been largely limited to disease and pregnancy prevention, ignoring the integration of sexual well-being with other aspects of health. Accordingly, this paper presents findings from a photovoice project…

Background: Latinx adolescents are at increased risk of teen pregnancy. This study evaluates the impact of Re:MIX, a comprehensive sexuality education program cofacilitated by professional health educators paired with young parent educators implemented with primarily Latinx youth in Texas. Methods: A cluster randomized trial was conducted with…

Researchers have found that computer modeling fosters the learning of causal mechanisms in systems, an important crosscutting concept in science that many novice learners find challenging. Despite the research that highlights the role of teacher's instructional practices in enacting computer tools, few studies have considered teachers' use of…

Starting in the 2019-2020 school year, NewSchools Venture Fund awarded a research grant to ACT to better understand factors related to social and emotional learning (SEL). SEL lessons were implemented in schools serving students who were 96% Latinx, 85% economically disadvantaged, and 38% English learners during the 2019-2020 school year. The…

Background or Context: Dual language education aims to foster the development of bilingualism, biliteracy, sociocultural competence, and academic skills in all school subjects. Early correlational research suggests that participation in dual language education is associated with higher achievement. Recent studies leveraged more comprehensive sets…

This research is based on a collaborative project with the "University Scholars Program" (USP), a college access program that serves middle and high school students who will be the first in their families to attend college. In this paper, we draw upon in-depth and focus group interviews with Latina/o parents whose children are enrolled…

We provide novel evidence on the broader impacts of school choice systems by quantifying disparities in peer continuity from middle to high school in New York City. We find that Black and Hispanic students and those in high-poverty neighborhoods attend high school with a much smaller fraction of their middle school or neighborhood peers than their…

This issue brief is part of a five-part series that reports findings from research conducted by ACT in collaboration with Region One Education Service Center. This study focuses on SEL implementation and includes results from surveys completed by educators and administrators who participated in an SEL implementation study during the 2019-2020…

This paper uses quantitative analytics to study talk-based participation in 100 mathematics classrooms across one racially diverse urban school district in the USA. Using the EQUIP observation tool and hierarchical linear modeling, we characterize the quantity and quality of participation for students across 3025 coded turns, by race and gender.…

Newsela contracted with LearnPlatform by Instructure (LearnPlatform), a third-party edtech research company, to examine the relationship between Newsela ELA usage and outcomes for students. LearnPlatform designed the study to satisfy Level II requirements (Moderate Evidence) according to the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). The study included…

Background: Everyday digital technologies play an important role in mediating human activity that is socio-political and humanizing. The everyday cyborg engages in speculative fabulation that is about fantastical new world-making in times of multiple crises. The work presented in this article builds on previous projects that have examined how…

Purpose: The purpose of this journal-ready dissertation was to determine the primary reasons that students are assigned exclusionary discipline consequences. Another purpose involves ascertaining the degree to which differential consequences are present by student ethnicity/race in the discipline consequence assigned for the same misbehavior.…

Prior research has shown that Black and Hispanic students are more likely to experience office discipline referrals than White youth, and the magnitude of these inequalities has been found to vary by gender. However, it remains unclear whether racial/ethnic and gender disparities in office referrals might be amplified among students in more…

Few studies examine how racial-ethnic peer discrimination experiences of Latinx youth vary across the race-ethnicity of the perpetrator. In a sample of 170 Latinx early adolescents (M[subscript age] = 12.86 years, range = 10.33-15.23; 51% female), we identified 4 latent profiles of youth: (a) relatively low likelihood of experiencing…