This report summarizes student enrollment during the 2020-2021 school year for the cohort of students in the 2019-2020 prekindergarten partnership between Austin Independent School District, United Way for Greater Austin, and participating child development centers. Demographic information and academic performance for beginning-of-year are also…

This Perspective builds on a related RAND Corporation report that describes the implementation of Findhelp at four North Carolina community colleges in 2021 and 2022. Findhelp is an online tool to connect students to resources in their communities to help meet their basic nonacademic needs. The North Carolina Community College System, with support…

University-school collaboration can extend past the notion of simple shared resources in order to connect ideas, share talents, and solve problems mutually. It also provides fertile ground for counseling researchers to obtain, analyze and disseminate data. University-school collaborations signify a connective relationship between two vital and…

This paper is directed to researchers who conduct and report education intervention studies. Its purpose is to stimulate and guide them to go a step beyond reporting the statistics that emerge from their analysis of the differences between experimental groups on the respective outcome variables. With what is often very minimal additional effort,…

Eight inquiry-based activities, described here in sufficient detail for faculty to adopt in their own courses, were designed to teach students fundamental concepts in heat transfer. The concept areas chosen were (1) factors affecting the rate vs. amount of heat transfer, (2) temperature vs. perceptions of hot and cold, (3) temperature vs. energy…

Much talk about equity in education is about bricks and mortar--about having equal facilities and equal resources. Those factors, although extremely important, are relatively easy to quantify. What may be harder to capture are the beliefs that administrators, teachers, and students hold--beliefs that can have a striking impact on students'…

Through a synthesis of test publisher norms and national longitudinal datasets, this study provides new national norms of academic growth in K-12 reading and math that can be used to reinterpret conventional effect sizes in time units. We propose d' a time-indexed effect size metric to estimate how long it would take for an "untreated"…

Propensity score matching is a statistical technique in which a treatment case is matched with one or more control cases based on each case's propensity score. This matching can help strengthen causal arguments in quasi-experimental and observational studies by reducing selection bias. In this article we concentrate on how to conduct propensity…

For RCTs of education interventions, it is often of interest to estimate associations between student and mediating teacher practice outcomes, to examine the extent to which the study's conceptual model is supported by the data, and to identify specific mediators that are most associated with student learning. This article develops statistical…

Nationwide, close to 40 million adults lack a high school diploma or a General Educational Development (GED) credential. About a quarter of high school freshmen do not graduate in four years, and while many high school dropouts eventually do attend GED preparation classes, too few ever pass the GED exam or go on to college. Students with only a…

A portion of all students in introductory or developmental undergraduate mathematics courses find themselves at an unfortunate tipping point: the border between passing and failing. These high-stakes courses often come with high enrollments, and a recurring problem: high failure rates. The measure of success used at the author's institution, the…

Our 1997 article in "IJAIED" reported on a study that showed that a new algebra curriculum with an embedded intelligent tutoring system (the Algebra Cognitive Tutor) dramatically enhanced high-school students' learning. The main motivation for the study was to demonstrate that intelligent tutors that have cognitive science research…

The affordances of learning analytics (LA) tools and solutions are being increasingly harnessed for enhancing 21st century pedagogical and learning strategies and outcomes. However, use cases and empirical understandings of students' experiences with LA tools and environments aimed at fostering 21st century literacies, especially in the K-12…

This paper presents a comparison of online to traditional face-to-face delivery of undergraduate digital systems material. Two specific components of digital content were compared and evaluated: a sophomore logic circuits course with no laboratory, and a microprocessor laboratory component of a junior-level computer systems course. For each of…

The Communities In Schools (CIS) Model of Integrated Student Supports aims to reduce dropout rates by providing students with integrated and tiered support services based on their levels of need. The model includes preventive services that are available to all students (Level 1 services) as well as intensive, targeted, and sustained services…