There are large gaps in reading skills by family income among school-aged children in the United States. Correlational evidence suggests that reading skills are strongly related to the amount of reading students do outside of school. Experimental evidence testing whether this relationship is causal is lacking. We report the results from a…

The College Possible program provides intensive coaching by near-peer mentors, peer group support, and opportunities for academic and non-cognitive skill building to low-income students through an intensive two-year curriculum in junior and senior years of high school. The goal of the program is to close the achievement gap between low-income…

In this paper, we report results from a multisite, student-level randomized controlled trial that examined the impact of the Building Assets, Reducing Risks (BARR) model on ninth-grade students. The BARR model is a comprehensive, strength-based approach that uses eight interlocking strategies to build intentional staff-to-staff, staff-to-student,…

In the 2014 report, "Closing the Achievement Gap Through Modification of Neurocognitive and Neuroendocrine Function: Results from a Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial of an Innovative Approach to the Education of Children in Kindergarten," researchers examined the impacts of "Tools of the Mind" on cognitive and academic…

We investigated students' academic achievement in three high-enrollment, introductory-level history sections at a large, public, Hispanic-serving university. Using a conditional indirect-effects model, we analyzed supplemental instruction (SI) attendance and class absences as predictors of course success, after accounting for sex, ethnicity/race,…

Using a dataset containing nearly 500,000 courses taken by over 40,000 community and technical college students in Washington State, this study examines the performance gap between online and face-to-face courses and how the size of that gap differs across student subgroups and academic subject areas. While all types of students in the study…

Historically, minority and low-income populations have faced numerous challenges in achieving a higher education particularly students of Latino descent. Gandara and Contreras (2009) explain that Latinos are the fastest growing population in the United States and yet academically, they are further behind than any other ethnic group in the nation.…

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether participating in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) project-based learning (PBL) activities effected students who had varied performance levels and to what extent students' individual factors influenced their mathematics achievement. STEM PBL has been a critical challenge…

The intentions were noble. It was hoped that remediation programs would be an academic bridge from poor high school preparation to college readiness. Sadly, remediation has become instead higher education's "Bridge to Nowhere." This broken remedial bridge is travelled by some 1.7 million beginning students each year, most of whom will…

At the college level, the effectiveness of active-learning interventions is typically measured at the broadest scales: the achievement or retention of all students in a course. Coarse-grained measures like these cannot inform instructors about an intervention's relative effectiveness for the different student populations in their classrooms or…

The federal No Child Left Behind Act requires all students, regardless of gender, race, or socioeconomic status, to be proficient in reading by the year 2014. Although progress has been made, discrepancies in reading achievement remain. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of two instructional strategies…

An achievement gap in reading existed in a Southwest United States school district with Hispanic, economically disadvantaged, English Language Learners (ELLs), and special education sixth grade students based on Measures of Academic Progress data. This study investigated the effectiveness of the "READ 180" reading intervention program…

The achievement gap in reading between students of low versus high socioeconomic status (SES) is detrimental to students of low SES who struggle with basic reading skills such as fluency and comprehension. The purpose of this study was to investigate if the systematic use of Read Naturally, a repeated reading fluency-based program, significantly…

Using hierarchical linear modeling, student standardized test scores are analyzed to determine the impact of mentoring first- and second-year teachers on their students' achievement. The contrasting group used for comparison consists of experienced teachers in matched schools, grade level, and content area. The study contains data from 300…

This quasi-experimental study examined the impact of living-learning communities on GPA and fall-to-fall retention rates for college freshmen at Regional University (RU). The specific focus of this study was the effect of these communities on students of different ethnic groups and on the potential of these communities to reduce the academic…