With support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, researchers and experts in mathematics education developed the Mathematics Design Collaborative (MDC) as a strategy to support the transition to Common Core State Standards in math. MDC provides short formative assessment lessons known as Classroom Challenges for use in middle and high…

Ninth Grade Academies (NGAs)--also called Freshman Academies--have attracted national attention as a particularly intensive and promising approach for supporting a successful transition for high school freshmen. An NGA is a self-contained learning community for ninth-graders that operates as a school within a school. NGAs have four core structural…

Our study adds to prior work on Indiana's Twenty-first Century Scholars(TFCS) program by focusing on whether participating in--rather than completing--the program affects the likelihood of students going to college and where they initially enrolled. We first employ binary and multinomial logistic regression to obtain estimates of the impact of the…

Ninth grade is a pivotal year for students. Numerous studies find that academic performance in 9th grade often sets the student's trajectory throughout the high school years, as well as the probability of graduation. The Building Assets Reducing Risks (BARR) model is a comprehensive approach that addresses developmental, academic, and school…

From 2000 to 2011, the number of children out of school worldwide has decreased from 102 million to 57 million--a reduction of almost 50 percent (Millennium Development Goals Report, 2013). However, many children in developing countries do not complete primary or secondary cycles once they enroll; out of the 137 million children who entered first…

The Portland Schools Foundation's (PSF) Ninth Grade Counts initiative is a network of more than twenty independent summer transition programs targeting Academic Priority (or "at-risk") students. These programs share a common focus on providing academic support, enrichment, and career/college exposure for students who show early warning…

A quasi-experimental study designed to provide evidence of the effectiveness of the "Jamestown Reading Navigator" ("JRN") program for students in grades 9-10 was conducted in the Miami Dade Public School District (MDCSD). "Jamestown Reading Navigator" is a reading intervention program developed by McGraw-Hill…

This study was designed to examine the effectiveness of a ninth grade transition program at a suburban high school in Louisiana. Student data were analyzed from two groups of first time freshmen who indicated a need for help in mathematics: one without a transition program and one with a transition program. Academic data included standardized test…