Connections Academy is a full-time, tuition-free, virtual public school program that served more than 70,000 K-12 students in 27 states in the 2017-2018 school year. Pearson sought to explore how Connections Academy schools perform compared to the alternatives. This Research Report presents findings from two research studies: one…

All but four states in the nation now permit teachers to come into the profession through an "alternate route," compared to only a few 30 years ago. Alternate routes into the classroom have grown so acceptable that about one in five teachers now enters the profession through one of these programs, which offer some real benefits to the…

Art education in Hong Kong has undergone various changes in response to educational reform. In art assessment, a major change in the Hong Kong New Senior Secondary (NSS) Curriculum is the inclusion of art criticism as a compulsory component of the new public examination. Assessing students' abilities to interpret art in an art criticism public…

Increasing the rigor of courses taken in high school is a crucial part of education policy. However, existing knowledge about high school coursework is outdated. Using data from a recent nationally representative data set, this brief reports results that expand our knowledge base on the relationship between rigorous coursework and postsecondary…

Ten secondary schools in a large state-wide education system initiated a virtual school network to address the lack of upper secondary school courses for university entry in smaller high schools. This article highlights the yearlong professional learning program designed to prepare a cohort of classroom teachers, who were novices to teaching…

In order to provide equitable opportunities and equal access to an effective, personalized education, the Houston Independent School District (HISD) offers Apex Learning, a district-funded virtual platform with online instructional course options, to all students in grades 7-12. The purpose of this report is to provide district leaders with data…

WestEd is undertaking a multiyear series of implementation studies intended to inform the California State University (CSU) system about the implementation of Executive Order 1110 (EO 1110). A major policy adopted by the CSU Chancellor's Office in 2017, EO 1110 requires CSU campuses to eliminate non-credit developmental courses in Written…

The purpose of this study was to determine predictors of community college student academic success in corequisite English and mathematics courses. Academic success was defined dichotomously on a pass or fail basis. The population included 1,934 students enrolled in at least one corequisite English and/or mathematics course at a community college…

The goal of our research is to identify strengths and weaknesses of high school level science fair and improvements that might enhance learning outcomes based on empirical assessment of student experiences. We use the web-based data collection program REDCap to implement anonymous and voluntary surveys about science fair experiences with two…

Since the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 began holding schools accountable for high school graduation rates, multiple strategies have emerged to help more students receive their diplomas. Among the most popular and widely deployed are credit recovery programs, which allow students to "recover credits" from one or more courses that they…

In this study, individual students' engagement in learning mathematics in different contexts was explored. The students' narrated identities during their first compulsory upper secondary mathematics course provided a way to understand students' shifts in participation and why these shifts occurred in different contexts at particular times.…

Nearly 63% of students with disabilities are included in general education classrooms for some part of their day, and at the high school level, 79% participate in state reading and math assessments (U.S. Department of Education, 2016). Middle and high school classes pose particular challenges because, unlike elementary classrooms, they are usually…

This companion document to "New Eligibility Rules for the University of California? The Effects of New Science Requirements" provides the following technical appendices: (1) Transcript Evaluation Service (TES) sample; (2) Cal-PASS Plus (CPP) sample; (3) Additional tables and figures; and (4) Qualitative interview questions. [These…

The Austin Independent School District (AISD) offered several academic summer programs to students June through August 2021. These programs offered students opportunities to accelerate their learning, recover academic course credits, and support grade level transition. Although AISD offered a variety of summer programs in 2021, this report focuses…

Information technologies literate is an individual who produces information, can use it functionally in life, can solve problems, think critically, has entrepreneurial, stable, communication skills, empathizes, contributes to society and culture etc. The purpose of this research is to examine the effectiveness of "Information Technologies and…