Doors to other educational opportunities and future professions are closed when students have a low motivational profile in mathematics starting in elementary school and continue with an unchanged profile into high school (Lazarides et al., 2020). Students must learn how to increase their mathematical self-efficacy in order to increase their…

Significant environmental impacts such as climate change, reduction in biodiversity, increasing food scarcity, impacts on water supply and availability, and exacerbation of human health problems are occurring and are expected to increase. Despite these environmental challenges the teaching of California's environmental literacy standards, the…

Growth mindset plays an important role in students' motivation for learning. Students who believe that their abilities are malleable are more likely to set mastery goals and to persist when encountering difficulties. Design-based makerspace -- or a makerspace structured with design-based learning components -- has many features known to improve…

Reclassification can be an important juncture in the academic experience of English Learners (ELs). Literature has explored the potential for reclassification to influence academic outcomes like achievement, yet its impact on social-emotional learning (SEL) skills, which are as malleable and important to long-term success, remains unclear. Using a…

This qualitative study assesses the influence of a college-level intervention program on its student participants' self-efficacy. Self-efficacy theory provides an essential foundational lens for this study as it provides the necessary sources to broaden an intervention program's plans from students' individualized experiences. Study participants…

Mixtecos are Indigenous people that originate from the states of Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Puebla, in Mexico. This community is unique in that it speaks an unwritten language with different variations based on locations north or south of Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Puebla. California and other agricultural states have been the major relocation areas for…

Despite the existent gender parity in undergraduate biology degree attainment, gendered differences in outcomes are prevalent in introductory biology courses. Less is known about whether these disparities persist at the upper-division level, after most attrition is assumed to have occurred. Here, we report the consistent presence of gender equity…

This research studied the variables that affected a student's self-perception and success in first-year composition at a community college. The study utilized a quantitative research method to analyze the Research Question. Quantitative data was collected from a northern California community college using a seven-point Likert-scale. The Research…

We investigated the relationship of self-sexualization to self-objectification, weight concerns, self-efficacy, academic outcomes, and career aspirations among preadolescent girls. Participants were 89 six- to nine-year-old girls; parental reports were also obtained. Two thirds of girls showed signs of self-sexualization by choosing a sexualized…

Amid growing interest from educators and policymakers in supporting students' social and emotional learning (SEL), this brief describes the development of key social-emotional skills within the CORE districts, a network of urban California school districts that collectively serve more than one million students. Specifically, we use CORE's unique…

Our UC Santa Barbara research team engages in ongoing efforts to enhance and validate the Social Emotional Health Surveys (Primary, Secondary, and Higher Education). The initiative to enhance the secondary version is supported by an Institute of Education Sciences grant (#R305A160157, 2016-2020), which provides funding to refine, standardize, and…

Mounting evidence demonstrates that social-emotional skills are important for students' academic and life success, yet we have limited evidence on how these skills develop over time and how this development varies across student subgroups. In this study, we use the first large-scale panel survey of social-emotional learning (SEL) to describe how…

This manual reports on the development and validation of the original Social Emotional Health Survey-Secondary (carried out between 2012 and 2017). We shared the first version of the SEHS-S because it had sufficient validation evidence based on research completed by 2015; hence, the form reported on in this manual is called the SEHS-S (2015)…

This study explored the effectiveness of a unique math intervention program in a local school district in Orange County, California in terms of academic achievement and student perceptions about their math abilities as a result of their experiences in the program. As the predominate instructional approach, the program provided students with…

The idea that individual behavior is the result of society's influence on individual self-concept beliefs reflects more than a century of theory and research. Therefore, this study focuses on self-concept as a construct of primordial human characteristics such as emotion, aspiration, love, conflict, anger, jealousy, contradiction, guilt, and…