As immigrants account for an increasing proportion of American youth, understanding how these young people experience change in their citizenship status is an important, yet rarely examined area for research. There is a plethora of evidence that opportunities to participate in American society are stratified according to class, race and ethnicity.…

For schools and teachers to help students develop knowledge and skills, students need to show up to class. Yet absenteeism is prevalent, especially in secondary schools. This study uses a rich data set tracking class attendance by day for over 50,000 middle and high school students from an urban district in academic years 2007-2008 through…

The aim of this paper is to describe a school-based universal intervention (the Tilly's Life Center "I Am Me" program) to promote emotional competence and social-emotional skills in adolescents. We present results of a mixed-methods program evaluation conducted in public schools in Southern California. In Study 1, sixteen students…

This paper argues for a radical restructuring of education for grades 11-14--by erasing the arbitrary dividing line between high school and college--to open opportunities for the learners the current systems leave behind. The authors make the case for an entirely new type of institution--neither high school nor college--designed specifically to…

Research has found that when compared with civilian students, military-connected students in the United States have more negative mental health outcomes, stemming from the stress of military life events (i.e., deployment). To date, studies on military-connected youth have not examined the role of protective factors within the school environment,…

Substance use among adolescents is a complex problem and an ongoing concern. Literature has identified a critical need to understand the role that schools can play in preventing adolescent substance use. Adopting an ecological perspective, we used multigroup logistic regression to determine the influence of school support and school meaningful…

The aim of this thesis is to investigate and present the status of student synthesis with color coded formula writing for grade level six through twelve, and to make recommendations for educators to teach writing structure through a color coded formula system in order to increase classroom engagement and lower students' affect. The thesis first…

The third Attorney General's California Student Substance Use Survey was conducted between December 1989 and March 1990. A total of 6,282 students in grades 7, 9, and 11 participated. The primary focus was the extent to which declines in the use of drugs other than alcohol observed in the 1987-88 survey persisted, and whether the decline included…