Successful mentoring relationships allow mentees to gain the confidence and knowledge they need to reach their goals, but students from populations generally underrepresented in science and health fields have been shown to receive less mentorship than their well-represented peers. In highly competitive processes, like medical school admissions,…

We document patterns and trends in school segregation in North Carolina between 1998 and 2016, a period of rapid immigration in this racially diverse state. As in other states of the South, the period of court orders enforcing racial balance has given way not only to tacit acceptance of residentially based school segregation but also to policies…

This update to "SAT Wars" provides new evidence in the case against standardized college entry tests, including the experiences of test-optional colleges. "The Scandal of Standardized Tests" sheds significant light on key problems such as: (1) Are the tests stronger proxies for race and family income today than they were 20…

This article shows that the traditional narrative of Black-White high school graduation gaps is inverted among economically disadvantaged female students. Two nationally representative surveys and statewide administrative data demonstrate that low-income White females graduate at rates 5 to 6 percentage points lower than Black peers despite having…

The primary purpose of the 2016-2017 North Carolina (NC) Pre-Kindergarten (NC Pre-K) Evaluation study was to examine variability in enrollment practices within the statewide Pre-K Program. Four major categories of enrollment practices were examined: recruitment, application, placement, and waitlist. The study involved all 91 local NC Pre-K Program…

In the current article, we contrast 2 analytical approaches to estimate the relation of parenting to executive function development in a sample of 1,292 children assessed longitudinally between the ages of 36 and 60 months of age. Children were administered a newly developed and validated battery of 6 executive function tasks tapping inhibitory…

The central research question is the extent to which gifted programming effects student academic outcomes of gifted as compared to not-gifted students and how this differs by race/ethnicity and/or poverty status. Since the identification of elementary school students as gifted is not random, propensity score matching is used to remove this bias in…

A myriad of treatment options are available for children with autism spectrum disorders, yet little is understood regarding characteristics of parents (e.g., education) and children (e.g., severity of autism symptoms) that influence types and numbers of therapies utilized. Interviews from 70 caregivers were analyzed to determine potential…

National and regional trends mask important variation among states in the supply of high school graduates. This profile provides brief indicators for North Carolina related to: current levels of educational attainment, projections of high school graduates into the future, and two common barriers to student access and success--insufficient academic…

The current study is one of the first prospective examinations of longitudinal associations between observed father caregiving behaviors and child cortisol reactivity and regulation in response to emotional arousal. Observations of father and mother caregiving behaviors and child cortisol levels in response to challenges at 7 months and 24 months…

The racial achievement gap has been at the center of the educational debate for decades in the United States. Although disparities in educational outcomes have declined in part of the 20th century, the process has stalled in this decade. For instance, in mathematics the gap in raw scores for students aged 13 has decline from 41 points in 1978 to…

Recent studies have used increasingly complex methodologies to estimate the effect of peer characteristics--race, poverty, and ability--on student achievement. A paper by Hanushek, Kain, and Rivkin using Texas state testing data has received particularly wide attention because it found a large negative effect of school percent black on black math…

Examining the relationship between urban to rural migrants and household income, 2,118 respondents representing urban and rural populations stratified across different labor markets within 8 counties in the northeastern Coastal Plains of North Carolina were surveyed. The variables employed were: households by race, female head, absence of 1974…

A representative sample of about 2,500 third-graders took the Cultural Arts Test, a perception survey which was part of the 1973-74 State Assessment of Educational Progress in North Carolina. The test dealt with students' perceptions of their own competence, interests, preferences, and happiness in the cultural arts; of their teachers. and…

In the 1973-74 North Carolina State Assessment approximately 2,500 third-graders took a health test and a physical education test. The students were randomly selected to represent the third-grade population in the state as a whole and in the three geographic regions: Mountains, Piedmont, and Costal Plains. Both sexes were about evenly represented.…