As policymakers endeavor to address the teacher shortage as a whole, they should also consider the research around teacher diversity and explore policies that aim to increase the achievement of minority students. This issue of "coNCepts" examines the diversity gap in North Carolina and highlights the need for a strategic solution that…

Making robust and reliable information about schools accessible is one of the most powerful ways to foster engagement and promote informed decisions that will shape our communities. Though education data is frequently collected and aggregated at the state level, data is rarely synthesized across cities. This report provides comparable information…

Over the past decade, there has been growing interest in real-time assessment of student engagement and motivation during interactions with educational software. Detecting symptoms of disengagement, such as off-task behavior, has shown considerable promise for understanding students' motivational characteristics during learning. In this paper, we…

The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is an international comparative study of student achievement. TIMSS 2011 represents the fifth such study since TIMSS was first conducted in 1995. Developed and implemented at the international level by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement…

The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2011 is the fifth administration of this international comparative study since 1995 when first administered. TIMSS is used to compare over time the mathematics and science knowledge and skills of fourth- and eighth-graders. TIMSS is designed to align broadly with mathematics and…

With passage of The No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, the nation's schools have been under pressure to bring all students to a proficient level as defined by their state. The State of California currently uses a status model accountability system to measure whether a student, school, or district is proficient. Other states such as Arizona,…

The growing epidemic of male underachievement has spawned a great deal of research in the recent past. This body of research has been inconclusive in determining the causes of the problem. This Capstone Project looked at six factors to determine if any of them had a significant effect on the math achievement of either gender. This study was…

The Schools to Watch: School Transformation Network Project is a whole school reform model designed to improve the educational practices, experiences, and outcomes of low-performing middle-grades schools. Developed by the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, the four-year project was funded in 2010 by a U.S. Department of Education…

Background: Although males are often the initiators of teen sexual activity, pregnancy prevention programs generally target females. To address this deficiency, the Wise Guys Male Responsibility Curriculum was developed to be delivered to adolescent males in weekly classroom sessions. Methods: Seventh grade participants (n = 124) in the Wise Guys…

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.…

Unlike in elementary school, high-school teacher effects may be confounded with both selection to tracks and unobserved track-level treatments. I document sizable confounding track effects, and show that traditional tests for the existence of teacher effects are likely biased. After accounting for these biases, high-school algebra and English…

NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) results in mathematics and reading are based on representative samples of 1,100 to 2,300 public school students at grade 4 and 900 to 2,100 public school students at grade 8 in each participating urban district in 2013. Twenty-one urban districts participated in the 2013 assessments. The assessments…

The Nation's Report Card[TM] informs the public about the academic achievement of elementary and secondary students in the United States. Report cards communicate the findings of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a continuing and nationally representative measure of achievement in various subjects over time. Results from the…

The 2013 North Carolina Youth Risk Behavior Survey (NCYRBS) was developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and adapted by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) to monitor health-risk behaviors and to measure progress toward achieving Healthy North Carolina 2020 objectives. The survey, administered in…

Students entering high school in 9th grade face a formidable challenge. The transition to high school from 8th grade brings with it increased risks for all students. For example, students in 9th grade are anywhere from three to five times more likely to fail a class than students in any other grade. Similarly, ninth grade retention rates are…