This brief examines where STEM deserts were located within Houston Independent School District (HISD) boundaries and the students most likely to live in a STEM desert. STEM deserts are areas in which students have more limited access to STEM endorsement paths or STEM course offerings. The analyses showed STEM deserts were more common in the…

This study represents an extension of the findings of Kieffer and Thompson (2018) and evaluates potential correlates of state- and district-level achievement gaps in reading and mathematics between monolingual and multilingual students. Using data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, this study reported that there were substantial…

Young adolescents (N = 68) completed questionnaires concerning perceptions of neighborhood stress (i.e., high negative influences, low cohesion, and connectedness). Youth self-reported their own depressive symptoms and participated in a public speaking task designed to be moderately stressful. Increases in skin conductance in response to this…

This article explores the possibilities (and complexities) of multimodal meaning-making in the digital dimension, which allows students to compose with a variety of different modes, such as images, sound, music, and writing. This lets them think deeply about the ways in which meaning is constructed, conveyed, and eventually interpreted by an…

Pedagogies employing critical traditions have increasingly been used to ameliorate achievement disparities and centralize issues of power in the education of Students of Color. In this study, I trace a teacher's journey--new to critical pedagogies--as she learned about community cultural wealth and incorporated family histories as…

Background: We assessed the associations of 5 school and 7 neighborhood variables with fifth-grade students achieving Healthy Fitness Zone (HFZ) or Needs Improvement-Health Risk (NI-HR) on aerobic capacity (AC) and body composition (BC) physical fitness components of the state-mandated FITNESSGRAM® physical fitness test. Methods: Data for outcome…

This study describes changes in cognitive persistence, a key measure of mastery motivation, between the ages of 10 (grade 4) and 14 (grade 8). Prior research in the field of mastery motivation has focused mainly on early childhood. No longitudinal research findings have been published about age changes in mastery motivation during the school…

In this article, Jessica Wolpaw Reyes investigates the link between lead exposure and student achievement in Massachusetts. Childhood exposure to even low levels of lead can adversely affect neurodevelopment, behavior, and cognitive performance. Using a panel dataset of cohorts of children born in the 1990s who were third and fourth graders in the…

Immigrant students may use and develop language and literacy skills differently depending on the dominance of the first and second language (L1 and L2) in the neighborhoods where they live. In this study, neighborhood effects on students' reported language use at home and with peers, and on measured language and literacy proficiency, were…