The current quasi-experimental design study explored how students' choice of learning location model (either predominantly remote or hybrid) impacted their outcomes on academic assessments, school day attendance, and chronic absence in the 2020-2021 school year in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Analyzing the student sample across three middle…

Personalized Learning is a teaching and learning philosophy that aims to meet the individual needs of each student by utilizing personal learning profiles, personal learning paths, competency-based learning, flexible learning environments, mentoring, and a culture of growth mindset. For the purpose of this study, a Personalized Learning school is…

An administrative rule allowed students who failed an exam to retake it shortly after, triggering strong `teach to the test' incentives to raise these students' test scores for the retake. We develop a model that accounts for truncation and find that these students score 0.14 standard deviations higher on the retest. Using a regression…

Younger siblings take more advanced high school course end of year exams when their older siblings perform better in those same exams. Using a regression discontinuity and data from millions of siblings who take Advanced Placement (AP) exams, we show that younger siblings with older siblings who marginally "pass" an AP exam are more…

Lauren A. Turner and A. J. Angulo explore how institutional theory can be applied to explain variance in higher education organizational strategies. Given strong regulatory, normative, and cultural-cognitive pressures to conform, they ask, why do some colleges engage in high-risk decision making? To answer this, they bring together classic and…

This report presents a question-driven exploration of growth and achievement data using SAS EVAAS reports. The purpose of this exploration was to bring additional data, information, and ways of thinking about student growth to ongoing district conversations about the measurement of campus-level student growth.

During the transition period between the use of exclusively old SAT® scores and the use of exclusively new SAT scores, college admission offices will be receiving both types of scores from students. Making an admission decision based on new SAT scores can be challenging at first because institutions have methods, procedures, and models based on…

The use of merit criteria in awarding institutional aid has grown considerably and, some argue, is supplanting need as the central factor in awarding aid. Concurrently, the accountability movement in higher education has placed greater emphasis on retention and graduation as indicators of institutional success and quality. In this context, this…

Student retention models were tested via structural equation modeling to examine the interrelations and predictability among socioeconomic status, psychosocial, and student success variables with a sample of 445 undergraduate students attending a large Hispanic serving institution. The proposed theoretical model included socioeconomic status…

Though measures of long-term academic performance trends are valuable to education policy analysts and policymakers, they have been hard to come by at the state level, where most education policy is made. Such data are either nonexistent prior to 1990 or are unrepresentative of statewide student populations. A continuous series of state mean SAT…

Assessment is a crucial component of gifted education. Not only does it facilitate the recognition of the potential and specific needs of gifted students, it also monitors the progress and growth of gifted students, and allows for the evaluation of gifted education programs. In the present review, we synthesize the literature on assessment in…

This study examined the psychometric properties of the Personal Well-being Index for Adults (PWI-A), a measure of subjective well-being. The study used data from 533 high-ability American college students: honors students and participants in an early college entrance program. In earlier studies using the PWI-A, the instrument appeared to show…

This paper presents the results of a model that simulates the effects of varying preferential admissions policies on the academic profile of a set of 35 small liberal arts colleges. An underlying assumption is that all schools in the set use the same ratio of preferential to non-preferential admissions. The model predicts that even drastic changes…

When missing values are present in item response data, there are a number of ways one might impute a correct or incorrect response to a multiple-choice item. There are significantly fewer methods for imputing the actual response option an examinee may have provided if he or she had not omitted the item either purposely or accidentally. This…

Critical to many science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) career paths is mathematical modeling--specifically, the creation and adaptation of mathematical models to solve problems in complex settings. Conventional standardized measures of mathematics achievement are not structured to directly assess this type of mathematical…