Promoting Adolescents' Comprehension of Text (PACT) is a text- and discourse-based set of instructional practices that engage students with disciplinary texts as a means of building content knowledge and improving reading comprehension. PACT)s "efficacy" has been the subject of extensive previous trials. The purpose of this study was to…

Educational inequality due to family socioeconomic status (SES) has been the focus of both public dialogue and education research in the United States for many years. The current study aims to understand how educational inequality due to family SES has changed in the United States. Specifically, the study focuses on the changes in achievement gaps…

As parents, communities, educators, and policymakers continue to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on student learning in America, many have turned to recently released results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). NAEP measures what students know and what they can do in several tested subjects, including reading,…

Given math's importance, states are adopting a range of K12 policies to improve math outcomes. As these and other policies unfold, policymakers need to monitor intended outcomes and ultimately gauge impact. They need answers to basic questions: Are more students taking and passing algebra and advanced math? Are performance gaps changing between…

More than a quarter of all U.S. students in grades K-12 are Latinx. Examining what Latinx texts are included in classroom literature anthologies is essential to ensuring cultural representativeness of the increasing Latinx student population, especially in states such as Texas and California, whose Hispanic student population is more than 40…

Little is known about the naturalistic development of mindfulness in adolescence and how it relates to changes in emotional well-being. The current longitudinal study examined the development of one dimension of mindfulness, nonreactivity to difficult inner experience (or in more colloquial terms, being able to notice, but "take a step…

Reading Apprenticeship is a model of academic literacy instruction designed by the Strategic Literacy Initiative (SLI) at WestEd to improve student literacy skills and academic achievement. Based on understandings of the close relationship between curricular reform and professional development, Reading Apprenticeship includes an instructional…

Using a national sample of students' writing from the National Study of Writing Instruction, this study examines the current state of writing in the mathematics classroom and the extent to which enactments align with the intentions established in the research base and curricula articulated by NCTM and the CCSS-M. Over 3,000 writing assignments…

Purpose is an important aspect of character development and thriving in adolescence; yet, there is little research explaining how it develops or how contexts such as school can support its development. In this study, 1,304 eighth graders completed a survey that measured purpose as the integration of 2 dimensions-- beyond-the-self life goal…

We evaluated the effectiveness of two alternative middle-school science curriculum sequences, namely, a general science model and a topic-specific model (i.e., physics, chemistry, etc.). We also investigated the differential effectiveness of the alternative sequences for two ethnic groups. The sample consisted of 367 grade 8 science students from…

Features of eighth-grade history textbooks were examined through replication of a 20-year-old study that investigated "considerateness" of textbooks. Considerate texts provide clear, coherent information and include features that promote students' comprehension, such as explicit use of organizational structures, a range of question types…

New analytical tools have facilitated the exploration of the trajectories of alcohol use; however, there are a limited number of studies that explore early adolescence. A sample of 5,903 youths followed from sixth through eighth grade was used to (1) examine the trajectories of alcohol use and (2) determine the degree to which common correlates…

California, Florida, Illinois, New York, and Texas enroll close to 40 percent of the nation's public school students. The importance of these "Mega-States" goes beyond the sheer size of their population. They now serve more than half of the nation's English language learners (ELL), as well as some of the largest concentrations of…

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…

Spurred by a succession of reports pointing to the importance of algebra as a gateway to college, educators and policymakers embraced "algebra for all" policies in the 1990s and began working to ensure that students take the subject by 9th grade or earlier. A trickle of studies suggests that in practice, though, getting all students past…