Academic discourse communities and learning circles are characterized by collaboration, sharing commonalities in terms of social interactions and language. The discourse of these communities is composed of jargon, common terminologies, and similarities in how they construe and communicate meaning. This study examines the extent to which discourse…

The District conducts two kinds of dropout analyses every year in Miami-Dade County Public Schools. The "cross-sectional" analysis of student dropouts examines dropout rates among students enrolled in various grades at one point in time. A "longitudinal" analysis, also conducted annually, tracks a group of students in the same…

Researchers from MDRC and Johns Hopkins University partnered with Florida's Broward County Public Schools (BCPS) in 2009 to launch an independent evaluation of the district's initiative to implement Ninth Grade Academies (NGAs) in every district high school. An NGA is a self-contained learning community for ninth-graders that operates as a school…

Background: Cluster-randomized experiments that assign intact groups such as schools or school districts to treatment conditions are increasingly common in educational research. Such experiments are inherently multilevel designs whose sensitivity (statistical power and precision of estimates) depends on the variance decomposition across levels.…

A quasi-experimental study designed to provide evidence of the effectiveness of the "Jamestown Reading Navigator" ("JRN") program for students in grades 9-10 was conducted in the Miami Dade Public School District (MDCSD). "Jamestown Reading Navigator" is a reading intervention program developed by McGraw-Hill…

This study examines the different high school academic outcomes of Broward County Public Schools (BCPS) students who entered the ninth grade for the first time during the 1997-98 and 1998-99 school years. Specifically, researchers examined these students to determine the degree to which they earned a standard diploma or an alternative completion…

This report encompasses the results of two 1974-75 testing programs: (1) the Florida Statewide Assessment Program of communication skills and mathematics, administered to pupils in grades 3, 6, and 9, and (2) the countywide testing program involving the Stanford Achievement Test, a national standardized test administered to pupils in grades 1-12.…