Curriculum tracking creates incentives in the years before its start, and we should therefore expect test scores to be higher during those years. I find robust evidence for incentive effects of tracking in the UK based on the UK comprehensive school reform. Results from the Swedish comprehensive school reform are inconclusive. Internationally, I…

The introduction to this Special Topic Collection has two parts. To provide background and context for the articles in the collection, Part 1 tells the story of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study program at the National Center for Education Statistics. It offers an abridged history of this program and describes the designs of the two national…

It has been documented that American Indians and girls consistently underperform in STEM achievement compared to their European American and male counterparts, starting as early as adolescence. The goal of the current study was to develop a brief intervention aimed at mitigating the STEM achievement gap by shaping ethnic and gender identities to…

This report provides information on retention, graduation, and transfer rates for students entering Maryland community colleges as first-time, full-time students between 1994 and 2014. This edition includes data about student outcomes two, three, and four years after matriculation. The first section of this report contains analysis of student…

Shrinking the achievement gap in mathematics is a tall order. One way to approach this challenge is to think about how the achievement gap manifests itself in the classroom and take concrete action. For example, opportunities to participate in activities that involve mathematical reasoning and argumentation in a safe and supportive manner are…

The purpose of this analysis was to examine achievement gaps on fractions for very-low-performing students as a function of whether they receive inclusive fraction instruction or specialized fraction intervention and with the shift to Common Core State Standards (CCSS). In three randomized control trials conducted in 3 consecutive years, 203…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to argue that historical research methods offer an innovative and powerful way to examine, frame, explain, and disrupt the study of contemporary issues in educational leadership. More specifically, the authors examine how historical methodology might recast some of the questions educational leadership…

Standardized assessment tests that allow researchers to compare the performance of students under various curricula are highly desirable. There are several research-based conceptual tests that serve as instruments to assess and identify students' difficulties in lower-division courses. At the upper-division level assessing students' difficulties…

This article analyzes the factors that explain the gap in educational outcomes between the top and bottom quartile of students in different countries, according to their socioeconomic status. To do so, it uses PISA microdata for 10 middle-income and 2 high-income countries, and applies the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method. Its results show that…

With the ever-deepening economic reform and international trend of ICT application in education, the Chinese government is strengthening its basic education curriculum reform and actively facilitating the application of ICT in education. Given the achievement gap of ICT infrastructure and its application in middle and primary schools between urban…

Since the publication of the Coleman report in 1966, research on the role of schools in influencing student achievement relative to the role of family background has generated considerable interest and controversy. A large volume of international and comparative research has also been devoted to studying school effects on student achievement.…

We report results from our long-standing research partnership with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. We make two primary contributions. First, we illustrate the wide range of informative analyses that can be conducted using a state longitudinal data system and the advantages of examining evidence from multiple…

The President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH) released the results of an independent study that shows substantial gains in student achievement at schools participating in its Turnaround Arts initiative. The eight schools' in the pilot phase of the initiative, showing increases in reading and math scores, as well as an increase in…

The population of students of color has grown threefold, and there are more than 40 cultural and social student affinity groups. More impressive, the graduation rate for African American, Latino, and Native students has increased by 13 percentage points in the last decade. In this brief, the authors dig into a decade's worth of data on four-year…

In Senate Bill (SB) 2 (83rd Texas Legislature, Regular Session, 2013), the Texas Legislature added Texas Education Code (TEC) § 12.1013 (a)-(d). This legislation required that charter school performance to be compared to comparable traditional public schools. This report responds to that mandate, using Texas' P-20/Workforce Repository data for the…