Too many policies and practices aiming to improve college access and admissions overlook an important group of prospective enrollees: current college students. Substantial policy attention is placed on supporting college applications and decisions for those applying straight from high school. Even though one million students switch into a new…

The goal in personalized assessment is to best fit the needs of each individual test taker, given the assessment purposes. Design-in-Real-Time (DIRTy) assessment reflects the progressive evolution in testing from a single test, to an adaptive test, to an adaptive assessment "system." In this article, we lay the foundation for DIRTy…

The Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy partnered with The Boston Foundation to examine and document the school-level practices that have enabled high growth and high academic achievement at the Pioneer Charter School of Science II, the winner of the 2021 Pozen Prize for Innovative Schools. The Rennie Center began with a review of…

The COVID-19 pandemic is putting immense strain on districts, schools, students, families, and all the stakeholders connected to them. During the Great Recession, many people enrolled in a postsecondary pathway based on the job market's weakness. Those without any postsecondary education fared particularly poorly after the Great Recession.…

About 60 percent of polled U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 plan to attend a four-year college, with another 12 percent indicating they plan to attend a two-year college, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. Others plan to work full time, join the military or attend a technical/vocational school, but 13 percent said they weren't sure what…

The Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) show that most young people aspire to some form of post-school education or training. According to data on young Australians who were aged 24 in 2018, the majority of young people achieve their post-school educational aspirations. This paper explores the noticeable differences in aspirations and…

The 2020 U.S. census revealed that Asian American and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI) populations are among the fastest growing in the nation, with 24 million Asian American and 1.6 million NHPI residents. Despite a long history of anti-Asian sentiment and racism in the U.S., Asian American and NHPI students have been harmfully…

This paper considers gender and social class in relation to teacher education through an episodic study of the development of adult educational institutions in Huddersfield. It briefly discusses nineteenth-century mechanics' institutes in the town before moving to a consideration of school teacher training college students in the twentieth…

In dual enrollment programs, high school students can take college courses and earn both high school and college credit--but in the past, dual enrollment had been used mostly by high-achieving students. In 2016, the California Legislature passed a law that expanded access to students who had been underserved in higher education. The resulting…

In this article we introduce key concepts from critical psychology to explore their potential when operationalised in qualitative, empirically-based analyses of career guidance and counselling. Critical psychology is particularly concerned with understanding the concrete lines of action that can support generalised human agency -- a focus that is…

The decline in childbirths in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008-9 will reverberate into the 2020s and 2030s. This will lead to fewer high school graduates, and fewer students with the family background and finances to propel them into traditional college enrollment. Early college programs have been a success story in American education,…

This article juxtaposes the evolving scholarship investigating the influence of cultural capital on student learning and the developing trajectory of sociologists employing quantitative research methods. It critically reviews results from 34 studies analysing PISA or ASPIRES data to generate three key insights demonstrating complexities in…

Based on Nancy Schlossberg and her colleagues' extensive interviews with 100 retired adults, Susan Komives describes six predominate pathways retirees took to make meaning of this new transition in their lives. These pathways identified people as continuers, adventurers, easy gliders, involved spectators, searchers, and retreaters. Using the…

The increasing importance of a college degree has led policymakers and educators to focus on strengthening the path to college beyond college entry. In this research brief the authors review four factors key to educational attainment: (1) aspirations and beliefs, (2) academic preparation, (3) knowledge and information, and (4) fortitude and…

LGBTQ+ students have worse academic and health outcomes than their heterosexual counterparts, and these disparities increase when taking race/ethnicity into account. 57% of Latinx LGBTQ+ students report feeling unsafe at school due to their gender expression, and 35% are more likely to miss school due to feelings of unsafety. This fact sheet…