Math performance continues to be an important focus for improvement. Many districts adopted educational technology programs to support student learning and teacher instruction. The ASSISTments program provides feedback to students as they solve homework problems and automatically prepares reports for teachers about student performance on daily…

Students who experience teacher caring and high expectations (i.e., warm demand) are typically more engaged and successful at school. Yet, relative to White students, students of color tend to report lower levels of school social belonging and more distant relationships with their White teachers. Leveraging data from 179 6th-9th grade Measures of…

Introduction: Despite the assumed importance of school-focused possible identities for academic motivation and outcomes, interventions rarely assess the effect of the intervention on possible identities. This may be due to difficulty coding open-ended text at scale but leaves open a number of questions: 1) how do school-focused possible identities…

Objective: Racial discrimination experiences are common among youth with an ethnic minority background, and such experiences affect health. Stress-sensitive systems like the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis have been proposed as one mechanism. HPA-axis activity, measured through daily patterns of salivary cortisol, is altered among…

Background: Youth of color from low-income urban communities are crucial participants in research, as their involvement can shape effective, culturally responsive interventions and policy to promote youth health and well-being. These young people, however, are an often-neglected research population, due in part to perceived challenges associated…

Design2Learn (D2L) is a NYC-based afterschool program aimed at increasing middle school students' interest, engagement, and achievement in science. Designed by ExpandED Schools, D2L centers around three core strategies: (1) collaborative teaching between an in-school science teacher and two afterschool educators; (2) curricular bridging, which…

An extensive theoretical and qualitative literature stresses the promise of instructional practices and content aligned with minority students' experiences. Ethnic studies courses provide an example of such "culturally relevant pedagogy" (CRP). Despite theoretical support, empirical evidence on the effectiveness of these courses is…

This study applies cumulative adversity and stress proliferation theories to examine risk and protective resource profiles of youth with three different levels of housing and parental care instability. Data derive from a state representative sample (n=27,087) of school-based adolescent students. ANCOVA analyses identified significant differences…

Brief, targeted self-affirmation writing exercises have recently been offered as a way to reduce racial achievement gaps, but evidence about their effects in educational settings is mixed, leaving ambiguity about the likely benefits of these strategies if implemented broadly. A key limitation in interpreting these mixed results is that they come…

The U.S. is in the midst of an effort to intensify middle school mathematics curricula by enrolling more 8th graders in Algebra. California is at the forefront of this effort, and in 2008 the state moved to make Algebra the accountability benchmark test for 8th grade mathematics. This paper takes advantage of this unevenly-implemented policy to…