College students make job decisions without complete information. As a result, they may rely on misleading heuristics ("interesting jobs pay badly") and pursue options misaligned with their goals. We test whether highlighting job characteristics changes decision making. We find increasing the salience of a job's monetary benefits…

This study synthesizes theories of achievement motivation to better understand the development of academic task values in high school students and their relation to college major selection. We utilize longitudinal structural equation modeling to understand how grades relate to task values, how task values across domains relate to one another over…

Various district-level factors contribute to the successful implementation of Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) in schools, a widely implemented evidence-based framework supporting students' social, emotional, and behavioral development. Prior research has identified the district PBIS coordinator as a critical factor supporting…

We conduct the first quantitative analysis of "blind removals," an increasingly popular reform that seeks to reduce the over-representation of Black children in foster care by eliminating biases in the removal decisions of investigators. We first show that over-representation in most foster care systems is driven by Black children being…

School choice advocates argue that choice policies increase access to desirable schools by breaking the link between residence and school placement. However, a growing body of research suggests that the distance from home to school actually influences school choice decisions. In this study, we examine the relationship between residential…

Social and emotional learning (SEL) has been increasingly emphasized in educational research and practice for promoting children's wellbeing. Perhaps the most well-known SEL framework is the model provided by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). This framework has become the dominant framework informing state SEL…

Active teaching methods are believed to facilitate higher-order thinking skills and prepare allied health students for independent clinical decision-making. This quantitative, correlational study aimed to explain the relationships between student preferences for active over traditional methods and their beliefs, the frequency and positiveness of…

This paper explores enabling conditions for scaling high-quality project-based learning (PBL) to understand factors that influence how PBL spreads, whether and how it can be sustained and the extent to which it informs meaningful change in schools. We report on a year-long collaboration across three research projects. Each project team analyzed…

We propose transaction cost economics theory as a tool for exploring when school administrators rely on information from two types of sources: internal sources like their own colleagues, and external sources like researchers and government agencies. The theory's application is illustrated in a comparative case study of two public school districts…

An evaluation was implemented over a 3-year period to assess a statewide financial capability program for low-income, diverse clientele in Michigan. Pre- and post- program evaluation data was used to determine knowledge gain and intended behavior change. Follow-up evaluation data confirmed behavior changes across 10 financial practices. Using the…

The COVID-19 pandemic drastically disrupted the functioning of U.S. public schools, potentially changing the relative appeal of alternatives such as homeschooling and private schools. Using longitudinal student-level administrative data from Michigan and nationally representative data from the Census Household Pulse Survey, we show how the…

Increasingly, farmers are looking to private sector advisors to inform their nitrogen decisions, but little is known about these important actors. We held a Sustainable Nitrogen Roundtable workshop to bring together important groups--private sector farm advisors, Extension educators, scientists, and farmers--to discuss new research and more…

In this paper we examine how facilitators' prior experiences as mathematics teachers frame their work when facilitating a practice-based professional development (PD) for the first time. We focus on the experiences of a novice facilitator of StoryCircles, a professional learning process in which teachers collectively script and visualize a…

How did political factors and public health affect state and local education decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially the continuation of in-person schooling? Using an original data set of state policies, we find that governors ordered school closures in spring 2020 but left decisions to districts in the fall, regardless of partisanship.…

Increasing enrollment in undergraduate and graduate economics courses that focus on the natural world (natural resource, environmental, energy, and mineral economics) is important for preparing a work force capable of addressing complex environmental issues. This is especially challenging for smaller universities that want to offer diverse…