This study examines changes in religious service attendance over time for a contemporary cohort of adolescents moving from middle to late adolescence. We use two waves of a nationally representative panel survey of youth from the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) to examine the dynamics of religious involvement during adolescence. We…

This study identified peak periods of the onset, prevalence, and correlates of early adolescent substance use, and evaluated the feasibility of implementing a brief student survey at a high school in the southeastern United States. A brief survey was self-administered and 791 students with a mean age of 16.2 years (SD = 1.24) provided complete…

This report describes characteristics of AISD students from the Class of 2014 who graduated on time, dropped out, or continued in high school. The report also includes demographic information and data for dropout risk factors identified in previous research.

Since the first charter school law passed in Minnesota in 1991, over 40 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws allowing the publicly funded, privately managed, and semiautonomous schools of choice. Ever since the first charter school opened in Minnesota in 1992, the battle for fair funding has raged across the land. On the one hand,…

Educators and policymakers have become increasingly concerned about the issue of student absenteeism in general and, in particular, chronic absenteeism. This is because chronic absenteeism can have lasting effects on students' economic and social development. Children who are chronically absent have lower levels of school readiness upon entering…

Transfer has become increasingly complex as higher education and student demographics change. Shifts in the racial and ethnic composition of the transfer student population are important to understand but challenging to measure because race and ethnicity variables are sometimes missing from national datasets. Research that does not allow for the…

As special education inclusion policies become more widespread, classroom compositions are changing in ways that affect all students. The present study fills a critical gap in the literature by documenting the extent to which having a classmate with an emotional disturbance (ED) is linked to kindergarteners' absences. Because having a classmate…

This brief highlights the importance of using a measure like chronic absenteeism, rather than average daily attendance, in order to identify concerning patterns in elementary attendance rates. The chronic absenteeism measurement is better able to shine a light on the number of individual students struggling with attendance. Subsequent briefs in…

Low schooling, high non-attendance and school dropout rates are critical phenomena within disadvantaged groups, especially among the Gypsy community. For example, in the UK, 10%-25% of Gypsy children do not attend school regularly and have significantly higher levels of overall absence from school (percentage of half-day sessions missed) than…

Background/Context: Chronic school absenteeism is a pervasive problem across the US; in early education, it is most rampant in kindergarten and its consequences are particularly detrimental, often leading to poorer academic, behavioral and developmental outcomes later in life. Though prior empirical research has identified a broad range of…

Both anecdotal and systematic evidence points to the importance of teachers for students' long-run success. Previous research on effective teachers has focused almost exclusively on student test score gains in math and reading. For this study we are able to link middle and high school teachers to the class-attendance of students in their…

Students who drop out of high school are at increased risk of a range of negative social and economic consequences, including lower earnings and poorer health. To reduce dropout rates and lessen these negative consequences, districts around the country are using early warning indicators to identify and provide supports for students at risk of…

The Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA) has synthesized key data on English learners (ELs) into two-page PDF sheets, by topic, with graphics, plus key contacts. This document presents highlights relating to English learners and absenteeism, retention, and suspension for school year (SY) 2013-2014. The topics for this report include: (1)…

The Creative Learning Initiative (CLI) is a community-wide effort to bring creative learning and the arts to each and every student in Austin. Lead by MINDPOP, the City of Austin, and the Austin Independent School District (AISD), CLI designs systemic and sustainable programs that integrate creativity, creative teaching strategies, and the arts…

An understanding of how missed class and work are influenced by psychosocial factors is important. The authors collected data from 303 college students through self-report questionnaires. Moderation analysis indicated that with higher perceived stress, students were more likely to miss class if they were less satisfied with social support and less…