In California, Black students have markedly lower academic achievement than their White peers and Black students are also more likely to experience exclusionary discipline, such as suspensions (Cano, 2020, Losen & Martinez, 2020). What can be done to mitigate these racial disparities in schools? In this brief, we investigate whether increasing…

Gender gaps in exam scores or final grades are common in introductory college science and engineering classrooms, with women underperforming relative to men with the same admission test scores or college grade point averages. After failing to close a historically documented gender gap in a large introductory biology course using interventions…

Despite encouraging findings that show that interventions can improve students' math understanding, achievement gaps in math often persist or even widen for students who struggle. Practitioners play a significant role in closing these achievement gaps because they have the responsibility to select or design interventions. Practitioners may wish to…

This report is a continuation of work that examined the progress being made by districts to close the achievement gap in Kentucky (Butler and Poquette, 2019) and aims to further investigate the context in which districts are closing the achievement gap. Districts' achievement gap issues vary significantly: the size of districts' achievement gaps…

The primary aims of this study were twofold: (a) to describe average change in the written narrative performance of second grade students from the fall and spring of the school year and (b) examine patterns of individual growth to test for Matthew effects. Participants included 299 children in second grade. Microstructural measures were derived…

Background: Studies in the United States show that school students from some ethnic backgrounds are susceptible to stereotype threat, that this undermines their academic performance, and that a series of virtually zero-cost self-affirmation writing exercises can reduce these adverse effects. In England, however, socioeconomic status (SES) is a…

New York City's universal pre-kindergarten program, which increased full-day enrollment from 19,000 to almost 70,000 children, is ambitious in both scale and implementation speed. We provide new evidence on the distribution of pre-K quality in NYC by student race/ethnicity, and investigate the extent to which observed differences are associated…

This research examined how self-efficacy, collective efficacy, and professional development compared between core content and special education middle school teachers working with middle school students in reading comprehension and fluency. Accordingly, no statistically significant difference in teacher self-efficacy between core content and…

We investigated effects of tracking students into higher, more academic, and lower, less academic, school types immediately after primary school (early tracking) instead of having a comprehensive secondary school system (late tracking) on school gender segregation and gender gaps in achievement outcomes. We assumed that, in early tracking…

This study leverages six years of public prekindergarten (pre-K) and kindergarten data (N = 22,469) from the Boston Public Schools (BPS) to examine enrollment in BPS pre-K from 2012-2017 for students from different racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and linguistic groups. The largest differences in enrollment emerged with respect to race and…

This article aims to encourage educators and universities to explore interventions and practices that cultivate a growth mindset to reduce inequality in the academic success of students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds and ethnic or other minorities, especially in STEM. Universities invest significantly in closing the achievement gap,…

Despite focused effort and attention over recent years, many potential barriers to progression and success remain within Higher Education. This study focuses on a cohort of 168 students studying on two semester-long Foundation Year Biological Sciences modules delivered at the University of East Anglia in the academic year 2021/22. These modules…

The COVID-19 pandemic devastated student achievement, with declines rivaling those after Hurricane Katrina. These losses widened achievement gaps between historically marginalized students and their peers. Three years later, achievement remains behind pre-pandemic levels for many students. This paper examines 2022-23 academic recovery efforts…

Peru faces substantial social and economic inequality. Rural communities experience social exclusion through the undervaluation of their cultural heritage and native languages, creating significant barriers to their personal and professional growth. Higher education scholarships aim to address this issue, yet educational institutions--typically…

The current study investigated the effects of school mobility on the academic achievement of different racial/ethnic groups in four cohorts of students from a very large urban school district. In this study, I compared within-year and between-year mobility and, most importantly, account for all the schools students attended over the study period.…