"ACCESS", A Culture Creating Effective Systems for Success, was a three-year Investing in Innovation (i3) development grant funded by the Office of Innovation and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education. The "ACCESS" grant led the way for a district-wide redesign of educational practices based on the novel approach of…

Interest has been growing in the role of students' attitudes, beliefs, and dispositions as key factors that can support or inhibit student success. A large body of emerging evidence, including multiple randomized controlled trials, shows that interventions that target academic mindsets, attitudes, and beliefs about the nature of ability and the…

In this study, we use microdata from 12 Florida county-level school districts and a regression discontinuity design to examine the effects of early grade retention on the short-, medium-, and long-term outcomes of English learners. We find that retention in the third-grade substantially improves the English skills of these students, reducing the…

Student behavioral engagement is a key condition supporting academic achievement, yet student disengagement in middle and high schools is all too common. The current study used a randomized controlled design to test the efficacy of the My Teaching Partner-Secondary program to increase behavioral engagement. The program offers teachers personalized…

Previous studies about ELs have reported data on active English Learners--defined as those students who have not yet reached proficiency on a state English test--at a specific moment in time. This study, for the first time, analyzed the long-term trajectories of 18,000 CPS students who began kindergarten as ELs and followed their progress all the…

This report presents Year One (2010-11) school level achievement and attendance outcomes and case study findings from fall 2011 that focused on school leadership and instruction. Thirteen schools were included in the first year of Philadelphia's Renaissance Schools Initiative (2010-11). Of these schools: (1) Four K-8 schools were…

Objectives: This study examined the effects of Check & Connect (C&C) on the attendance, behavior, and academic outcomes of at-risk youth in a field-based effectiveness trial. Method: A multisite randomized block design was used, wherein 260 primarily Hispanic (89%) and economically disadvantaged (74%) students were randomized to treatment…

This article describes a study examining the effects of Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) model instruction on the academic language performance of middle and high school English language learners. The SIOP model is an approach for teaching content curriculum to students learning through a new language. Teachers employ techniques…

This study explores the effects of a Two-Way Bilingual Immersion (TWBI) program on language majority and minority students. The fundamental hypothesis was that the process of receiving instruction in two languages (English and Spanish) throughout elementary school (i.e., attendance at a TWBI school) would help the native Spanish-speaking students…

Based on NAEP data, many adolescents may not be adequately prepared for postsecondary education. This is a Year Five report from a seven-year longitudinal study of a student cohort starting in sixth grade year (n = 50). It uses a quasi-experimental design, and collects data from surveys, interviews, and reflective statements to evaluate mentoring…

A pre-post experimental design with 6-week delayed posttest was implemented to investigate the effects of reading comprehension strategy (RCS) instruction with and without attribution retraining (AR) on reading outcomes for seventh, eighth, and ninth graders with learning and other mild disabilities. Students were randomly assigned to one of three…

The school accountability movement has led to a marked increase in the use of standardized test scores to measure school and teacher productivity, yet little is known about the correlation between test score gains and improvements in long-term outcomes. In the first chapter of my dissertation, I study the impact of a school choice policy in…

The study reported in this volume adds to the growing body of evaluation studies that focus on the use of NSF-funded Standards-based high school mathematics curricula. Most previous evaluations have studied the impact of field-test versions of a curriculum. Since these innovative curricula were so new at the time of many of these studies, students…

This paper reports on three projects in California that have attempted to stem the tide of Latino dropouts and increase the college-going rates of the Latino population. Each of these three programs has tested a set of strategies aimed at increasing the educational attainment of Latino students, who now make up the largest single ethnic group in…

This paper presents a template for creating a school environment in which college is a reasonable expectation for all students. Drawing from the research literature and lessons learned from more than 4 years of partnership work between a public research university and a cluster of urban K-12 schools, the paper outlines a set of conditions that are…