Emerging practices in both K-12 and higher education hold great promise in the establishment of equity frameworks. The use of finely disaggregated data, the effort to track additional student groups, and related work, all help to establish policies and tools to monitor the impact of reform efforts to address inequities. State programs and…

Using data from 11 institutions, the authors investigate enrollments in intermediate microeconomics to determine characteristics of successful and unsuccessful students and follow the retake behavior of unsuccessful students. Successful students are significantly different from unsuccessful ones, and unsuccessful students differ by type…

The Early Fractions Test is a paper-pencil test designed to measure mathematics achievement of third- and fourth-grade students in the domain of fractions. The purpose, or intended use, of the Early Fractions Test is to serve as a student pretest covariate and a test of baseline equivalence in the larger study. In this report, we discuss our…

Survey data were gathered from college and university faculty, staff, and administrators at Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) regarding Hispanic culture and Hispanic students as part of an NSF-funded investigation that focused on the characteristics and programming of HSIs as well as the background and experiences of their students. Two surveys…

Federal policymakers have interest in three specific areas of postsecondary career and technical education (CTE): associate degrees and certificates awarded in CTE, skills and training obtained through noncredit courses, and industry-recognized certifications. Research and data are readily available on students earning degrees and certificates in…

Best practice in the field of communication, especially intercultural communication, emphasizes seeking to understand and enter your interlocutor's perspective. This practice would seem directly applicable to college faculty and staff when they interact with students, especially given the cultural and ethnic diversity in college student…

Properly defining a population ensures that resources, such as funding and access, meet the needs, expectations, and intended outcomes for those represented. Ethical concerns arise when a target population, such as the English Language Learner population, is defined in numerous yet incomplete ways, and differently in research and in state policies…

The Pittsburgh Promise is a scholarship program that provides $5,000 per year toward college tuition for public high school graduates in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania who earned a 2.5 GPA and a 90% attendance record. This study used a difference-in-difference design to assess whether the introduction of the Promise scholarship program directly…

Despite the prevalence of charter schools in the United States, few experimental studies evaluate the impact of charter school attendance on students in the early elementary grades. Using data from a randomized lottery in which kindergarten students and their parents applied to two oversubscribed and well-established charter schools in Denver,…

This Race to the Top - Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) annual performance report for the year 2014 describes Colorado's accomplishments, lessons learned, challenges, and strategies Colorado will implement to address those challenges. As outlined in the grant statement of work, Colorado is implementing the following projects and has identified…

This publication provides a snapshot of the rules for including student growth data in evaluations of teacher performance in selected Race to the Top grantees. The information was collected in response to a technical assistance request to the Reform Support Network (RSN) from the Georgia Department of Education, where education leaders charged…

Now that all 50 states and the District of Columbia are building statewide longitudinal data systems, the next step is to ensure that the information in these systems is used to improve student learning. The Data Quality Campaign (DQC) has identified 10 actions that states can take to ensure that the right data are available and accessible and…

Despite the growing popularity of interdistrict choice plans over the past decade, the policy assumptions underlying their adoption have been subjected to very little empirical research. This study situates school choice within one metropolitan region, Denver, and examines the ways in which choice patterns relate to existing patterns of…

The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) documents dimensions of quality in undergraduate education and provides information and assistance to colleges, universities, and other organizations to improve student learning. Its primary activity is annually surveying college students to assess the extent to which they engage in educational…

Every day, we learn what works so students can make greater progress. Six years after No Child Left Behind's passage--and midway to the nation's goal of having students on grade level or better in reading and math by 2014--we have collected more data than ever before about the academic performance of our students and schools. This information…