Youth readers navigate complex school contexts involving not only different classes, teachers, and texts but also various institutional processes, such as tracking and reading assessment. Yet little research has examined how or why adolescents' literacy skills vary as youths interact with these myriad contexts across space and time. During this…

Whether there is a gender-by-item interaction that makes easy mathematics test items easier for females than for males and difficult items harder for females than for males was tested in two studies, involving 10,321 eighth graders and 5332 ninth graders and results from nine mathematics tests. The hypothesis was generally supported, as discussed.…

Despite heated debate over detracking, little research exists on how the reform plays out in the classroom. This article, based on a year-long interpretive study of a detracked ninth-grade program at a diverse urban high school, focuses on the encounter between the "official" practices of the detracked classrooms under study and the…