Background: Promoting engagement and motivation in early engineering experiences is important for fostering interest and retention in engineering. One method that has been effective for doing so is facilitating transformative experiences (TEs), which occurs when students apply academic content to everyday experience. Our goal was to explore the…

Background: Most United States schools include school-based physical fitness testing (SB-PFT), yet little evidence shows how it is implemented, perceived, and used. Purpose: 1) Explore stakeholders' experiences with SB-PFT; 2) identify: challenges in analyzing fitness data, ways schools can use fitness data, and predictors of meeting fitness…

Introduction: The aim of the study was to describe the teachers' views on the professional development activities, the frequency of the teachers' participation to such activities and effectiveness of these professional development (PD) activities. What's more, it was aimed to analyse the relationship between PD activities that the teachers…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between visits to college campuses by middle school and high school students and postsecondary enrollment rates, where campus visits are classified as both formal college visits and also informal campus visits. Specifically, Traditional Campus Visits and Educational Campus Field Trips are…

Social-emotional and character development (SECD) programs promote the development of youth's social-emotional skills (e.g., empathy) and cultivation of pro-social character virtues (e.g., gratitude). When provided universally within the school context, these interventions have been shown to increase students' social-emotional learning (SEL) and…

Implementation of evidence-based, Tier 1 social-emotional learning (SEL) programming that supports healthy relationships skills is recognized as a key mental health promotion and violence prevention strategy for youth. However, work specifically exploring how to support the high-quality implementation of such programming with Canadian teachers and…

To improve children's academic achievements, parents often try to provide them with adequate nutrition or/and send them to attend extracurricular tutoring classes. The effect of extracurricular tutoring on students' performance has been well explored, whereas no rigorous empirical study was conducted to observe the relationship between breakfast…

Research has identified several factors that contribute to the effectiveness of professional development opportunities in schools including improvement of participants' knowledge, administrator support, incorporation of active learning activities, duration, fostering coherence, and timing. The current case study examined how these six factors…

Imagine Math® is a standards-aligned, adaptive, interactive online mathematics program designed to supplement in-class instruction for students. This evaluation report examined the fidelity of implementation of Imagine Math® and the associations between its use and student achievement in Houston Independent School District (HISD) secondary schools…

In this study, longitudinal data from 708 schools across five states in the continental United States were analyzed to measure the time between initial training and adequate implementation of Tier I Schoolwide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports over 5 years and the extent to which it varied by school characteristics. Results indicated…

Bullying against lesbian and gay adolescents continues to be a problem in Western societies. Interventions to reduce homonegative attitudes could help to address bullying. We evaluated the effectiveness of a workshop against homonegativity in adolescents (N = 214) aged between 14 and 16 years in a pretest, posttest, follow-up design with a control…

Prognostic statements are a standard component of assessments for adolescents at risk for language-learning disabilities, but there is limited evidence on the validity of prognostic indicators. In two studies, we collected measures of language ability and candidate prognostic indicators from adolescents age 12 to 13. We conducted an expository…

Vocabulary.com is an online adaptive game that teaches students words by systematic exposure to a variety of question types and activities and by understanding all the word meanings and nuances as they are learned. Vocabulary.com teaches 14,000 words using over 208,000 questions. It has been implemented with the Houston Independent School…

Data from a large-scale math intervention program were used to evaluate the degree to which implementation fidelity (IF) and interventionist content knowledge were associated with student outcomes. Data were available for 33 interventionists serving 658 students in Grades 4-6 across one school year. A series of multilevel models were fit to the…

This study investigated the relationships between social and emotional learning factors and course failure for 9,308 7th-9th graders. Student self-report measures of social and emotional learning (SEL) and biographical factors (ACT® Engage® Grades 6-9) were analyzed through multiple regression models with propensity score weighting techniques. The…