The social-belonging intervention is a wise psychological intervention designed to convey the message that worries and doubts about belonging during transition into higher education are common to all first-year students and tend to dissipate with time. The aim of this first systematic review on the social-belonging intervention was to investigate…

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted education delivery around the world, with school closures affecting over 1.6 billion students worldwide. In India, schools were closed for over 18 months, affecting 248 million students. This study estimates the effect of the pandemic on adolescent literacy and schooling outcomes in India. We used data from the…

Why do certain students thrive when facing adversity while others languish? In the mindset theory, growth mindset is opposed to fixed mindset, and could explain why some people fulfil their potential and others do not. With the COVID pandemic dragging on, having a growth mindset may be even more critical. For students who are able to set their own…

Recent research demonstrates that the test score gap between relatively advantaged and relatively disadvantaged students is much higher in some school districts than it is in other districts. But measured school quality often varies dramatically within a school district, and therefore it is important to know whether individual schools differ in…

This paper reviews prior research to assess the effectiveness of Title I in closing the achievement gaps of disadvantaged students vis-à-vis their non-disadvantaged counterparts. A research synthesis approach is adopted to summarize national assessments of Title I conducted between 1966 and 2011. These analyses are supplemented by the authors'…

Teacher performance pay programs are theorized to improve student achievement by incentivizing teachers, but opponents counter that teachers are not motivated by money. We used regression discontinuity techniques and data on a census of the students, teachers, and schools in a large urban minority-majority school district to show receipt of a…

This report describes disadvantaged students' access to effective teaching in grades 4 through 8 in 29 diverse school districts, using value-added analysis to measure effective teaching. Recent federal initiatives emphasize measuring teacher effectiveness and ensuring that disadvantaged students have equal access to effective teachers. These…

Children from low socioeconomic backgrounds (SES) are at increased risk of reading problems. Although phonological awareness consistently emerges as a critical literacy skill for children, little research exists regarding the effects of the acquisition of phonological awareness skills on decreasing the reading achievement gap between children of…

As secondary students' interest in science is decreasing, schools are faced with the challenging task of providing adequate instruction to engage students--and more particularly the disadvantaged students--to learn science and improve their science inquiry skills. In this respect, the integration of Web-based collaborative inquiry can be seen as a…

Policymakers aiming to close the well-documented achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students have increasingly turned their attention to issues of teacher quality. A number of studies have demonstrated that teachers are inequitably distributed across student subgroups by input measures like experience and qualifications, as well…

In this follow-up to "Do High Flyers Maintain Their Altitude? Performance Trends of Top Students," the academic growth of 35,000 elementary and middle school students in 31 states, all of them high achievers within their own schools, were followed over a three-year period. Their achievement scores were matched with their associated…

The authors analysed school performance data to review how well disadvantaged pupils achieve in academy chains. They included chains only if they had at least three academies in 2013, and two sponsored secondary academies for the whole period from September 2010 to July 2013. This means that academies are included in our analysis only when there…

The educational success of Latino students is critical to the prosperity and vitality of California and the nation. The state has more than three million Latino students in its classrooms, accounting for roughly half of all the children in public schools. This report tracks the most recent data on Latino achievement in California and examines…

A handful of studies have found evidence of a gap in academic achievement between students of high- and low-socioeconomic status (SES) families. Furthermore, some scholars argue that the gap tends to widen as students get older. Evidence is, however, inconclusive and relies mostly on limited methodological designs. Drawing on the Hamburg School…

As the incomes of affluent and poor families have diverged over the past three decades, so too has the educational performance of their children. But how exactly do the forces of rising inequality affect the educational attainment and life chances of low-income children? In "Whither Opportunity?" a distinguished team of economists,…