This paper addresses the transition of community college students to degree programs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The paper presents the results of an evaluation of a two-week residential summer bridge program that recruited community college students from a wide range of academic, ethnic, and socioeconomic…

Many undergraduates are interested in community-based programming, but at most land-grants undergraduates have little contact with Extension. This article describes a grant project that developed two undergraduate courses about Extension and community-based, experiential education. The academic-year course incorporates lecture, discussion, guest…

Conventional theories of student development are often used to explain student persistence, attrition, amd marticulation in education and thus formulate the basis for student retention models. Student development theories fail to consider the diverse set of socioeconomic cultural and academic experiences of Indigenous peoples, in this case…

The 2015 Minnesota Legislature enacted a state postsecondary educational attainment goal: 70 percent of Minnesota adults (age 25 to 44) will have attained a postsecondary certificate or degree by 2025 ("Minnesota Laws 2015 Chapter 69, Article 3, Section 6"). To achieve this goal, Minnesota must address disparities across the educational…

"Spelling Mastery" is designed to explicitly teach spelling skills to students in grades 1 through 6. One of several Direct Instruction curricula from McGraw-Hill that precisely specify how to teach incremental content, "Spelling Mastery" includes phonemic, morphemic, and whole-word strategies. The What Works Clearinghouse…

This study of 952 fifth and sixth graders in Washington, DC, and Alexandria, Virginia, found that students who were offered the "Higher Achievement" program had higher test scores in mathematical problem solving and were more likely to be admitted to and attend private competitive high schools. "Higher Achievement" is a…

Through case-study reports, this paper examines the development of two induction-year teachers (years one to three) through their participation in a professional development community in the United States: the Invitational Summer Institute (ISI) of the National Writing Project. Typically, the ISI focuses its professional development efforts on…

In this article, we describe our research involving the administration of the Critical Reading Inventory-2 (CRI-2), an informal reading inventory that places special emphasis on thoughtful response to text and higher level thinking. We administered the CRI-2 to a group of students to obtain diagnostic data for guiding instruction. The data for…

Today a college degree is considered the ticket to a good job and the gateway to economic advancement. A student's chances of gaining admission to college, however, are often based more on parental wealth than the student's achievements. At the nation's most selective colleges, three percent of incoming freshmen come from families in the bottom…

Students who graduate from high school who are college-ready are more likely to graduate than those who are not college-ready. The need for remediation on college campuses burdens both students and institutions with financial and opportunity costs that at best delay, and at worst impede graduation rates. At a time when workforce preparation skills…

A number of challenges continue to influence the schooling experience of Black students. While some progress has been made for some, chronic underperformance has remained largely unchanged over the past two decades. What has become increasingly a part of the experiences of Black children and other students of color has been the increasing police…

This paper examines poverty's impact on student physical health, socioemotional health, and the brain. Further, although children spend only 20 percent of their time in school, this paper examines the school's role in student development, as well as proposes effective policies and programs that go beyond the classroom.

An introductory, multidisciplinary lecture-laboratory course linked with a summer research experience has been established to provide undergraduate biology and chemistry majors with the skills needed to be successful in the research laboratory. This three-credit hour course was focused on laboratory skills and was designed to reinforce and develop…

This study sought to determine the beliefs that tenured, in-service high school science teachers hold about how their participation in a large mid-Atlantic university's 6-week summer research experiences for teachers (RET) program might influence their pedagogical practices. The findings show a number of factors that teachers believed helped them…

At a 5-day summer camp designed for middle-school girls (N = 50), fifth through ninth-grade students were able to identify with individual scientists and learn more about the science field. Data from the girls' journals, pictorial representations, and field notes demonstrated that these young women related to scientists who actively engaged them…