This dissertation presents a comprehensive program evaluation of the dual enrollment program in a large urban school district in California. Dual enrollment has grown in popularity and is being utilized by many school districts across the country to provide access to college coursework and increase matriculation rates. This study aims to assess…

The purpose of this program evaluation was to evaluate the impact of CORE District's Breakthrough Success Community (BTSC) Program at an urban Title I high school located in Southern California. BTSC aims to improve the ninth-grade experience through a focus on five key change drivers and the implementation of improvement science. Through teacher…

This case study of a California Career Pathways Trust grant, the South Bay Digital Media Arts Consortium, which established key linkages between an urban high school district's pathway academies to local post-secondary institutions and community industry partners, provides learning lessons for other schools/organizations interested in establishing…

We present results from the first year of a three-year extramurally funded project involving a partnership between an ethnically diverse urban high school and professional research botanists. The goals are to provide students exposure to real-world science, broaden interest in scientific fields of study, and increase floristic data and herbarium…

The Pittsburgh Promise is a scholarship program that provides $5,000 per year toward college tuition for public high school graduates in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania who earned a 2.5 GPA and a 90% attendance record. This study used a difference-in-difference design to assess whether the introduction of the Promise scholarship program directly…

City Year is a learning organization committed to the rigorous evaluation of its "Whole School Whole Child" model, which trains and deploys teams of AmeriCorps members to low-performing, urban schools to empower more students to reach their full potential. A third-party study by Policy Studies Associates (PSA) examined the impact of…

This evaluation reports findings from a study of a UCLA teacher education program called IMPACT, Inspiring Minds through a Professional Alliance of Community Teachers. To measure program quality and goal attainment, the evaluation team used a comprehensive, multiple measures approach which included instructional artifacts, classroom logs, measures…

Introduction: Group-randomized trials (GRTs) are one of the most rigorous methods for evaluating the effectiveness of group-based health risk prevention programs. Efficiently designing GRTs with a sample size that is sufficient for meeting the trial's power and precision goals while not wasting resources exceeding them requires estimates of the…

This study uses an existing evaluation model and previously established measurement tools to evaluate the quality and success of Urban Compass, a private non-profit after-school program for elementary school children in the Watts district of Los Angeles. This evaluation had two major objectives. The first objective was to assess program quality by…

Project Linking Learning ("Link") was created to target the needs of gifted students in urban school districts with historically underserved populations. Project Linking Learning implemented a linking curriculum between in-class instruction and an afterschool enrichment program for selected students in second through fifth grade.…

The authors evaluated a health careers program in a U.S. urban public high school. After small subgroups of the original sample were removed, participants included 162 Asian American and Pacific Islander students. Analyses of covariance indicated that, compared with the comparison group, the treatment group reported significantly higher levels of…

In 1982, the UC Berkeley Gifted Program took in its first cohort. The initial group consisted of 282 middle and high school students. As was the case with many programs for gifted youths, admission to the program was based on students' SAT scores, and urban students were underrepresented. In this article, the author discusses how the program has…

When a student fails to master academic material, educators face a range of choices--they can provide extra tutoring, place the student in summer school, or, as a last resort, hold the student back for a year. This last option--retention--often proves to be a difficult and contentious issue for both schools and parents. California currently lacks…

This report uses administrative data provided by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) on kindergarten to third-grade students. The records begin with kindergartners in 2001, first-graders in 2002, second-graders in 2003, and third-graders in 2004 and include all LAUSD students in grades K-3 for 2004 to 2008. Altogether, the raw data…

The Learning Communities Demonstration is a national research project that is testing the effectiveness of learning communities in six community colleges across the United States: Merced College in California; The Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) in Baltimore, Maryland; Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, Florida; Houston…