Despite well-established health disparities between transgender and cisgender youth, state bills restricting gender-inclusive school supports and health care have dramatically expanded since 2019. While parental support for transgender youth strengthens healthy development, unsupportive parents contribute to suicidality and homelessness. This…

The number of children who are obese and overweight continues as a public health challenge despite decades of research. The purpose of this article is to describe trends in body mass index (BMI) percentile data collected from 11- to 14-year-old school children in 2008-2009 and 2015-2016 in rural Wisconsin. The BMI percentiles from 1,347 students…

A gender gap currently exists in college STEM majors, with a lower percentage of females entering math intensive fields. One possible explanation is the advice students receive in high school. We conduct a survey of high school guidance counselors, soliciting their advice regarding hypothetical high school students' college and major choices. We…

Hmong Americans are originally a preliterate, seminomadic, and agrarian ethnic hill tribe from Southeast Asia and have now been in the United States for the last four decades. From the 1960s to the mid 1970s, the Hmong joined forces with the U.S. during the Secret War in Laos. After the U.S. pulled out of Laos in 1975, the new Laotian regime began…

Using data from the 2015 "Dane County Youth Assessment" (n = 12,886 students, 22 high schools), we identified disparities between students with Individualized Education Programs (IEP) and without IEPs across multiple post-high school aspirations. We identified significant IEP status × grades earned interactions in predicting students'…

This paper draws on data collected from two of the most extensive longitudinal studies of care leavers in the US. The Midwest Study (2003-2011) included 732 youths in foster care in three Midwestern states, and the CalYOUTH Study (2012-present) includes 727 youths in California foster care. The paper has three objectives: (1) describe trends in…

This technical appendix provides additional information about the sample, data, and estimation strategy used for a series of American Educator Panels (AEP) Data Notes published by the RAND Corporation in 2019. The Data Note series is intended to provide brief but incisive analyses of teacher and school leader survey results that may be of…

This study examined growth trajectories of teacher-reported adaptive behavior in a diverse sample of adolescents with autism spectrum disorder. The participants were 244 adolescents between the ages of 14 and 21 years who were assessed at up to four time points across two and a half years of high school. Demographic variables (age, sex, race,…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine physical activity (PA)/fitness knowledge and its association with PA and sedentary behavior in youth. Method: Eighth grade students from five schools (N = 660) in a midwestern state completed a PE Metrics written test and the Youth Activity Profile to assess PA/fitness knowledge, PA (at school and…

Most educational climate research is conducted among (day school) students who spend the bulk of their young lives outside of school, potentially limiting the amount of climate variance that can be captured. Boarding school students, on the other hand, spend much of their lives at school and thus offer a potentially unique perspective on…

Although many studies have documented developmental change in mathematics motivation, little is known about how these trends predict math performance. A sample of 288 participants from the United States reported their perceived math ability, math utility value and math interest in 5th, 7th and 9th grades. Latent growth curve models estimated…

Prior research shows that rural students' education expectations and aspirations, as well as their postsecondary enrollment and persistence rates, tend to be lower than those of nonrural students. However, much of that prior research may not apply to today's students because it uses old data or focuses on individual states or purposive samples.…

Student enrollment in online courses has increased in the past 15 years and continues to grow. However, little is known about students' education experiences or online course outcomes. These are areas of particular interest to the Midwest Virtual Education Research Alliance, whose goal is to understand how to support student success in online…

Scholarship regarding adolescent resilience has typically defined resilience as the absence of negative outcomes rather than the existence of positive outcomes. This study drew on the challenge model of resilience, which anticipates a curvilinear relationship between stress exposure and adaptive functioning, to test whether adolescents reporting…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether or not a significant difference existed in the overall academic performance of athletes when compared to non-athletes at one rural high school in Wisconsin. The study was important to the field of educational leadership because in the current environment of accountability, educational leaders need…