The goal of this article is to contribute to understanding the interplay between students' disciplinary engagement and their identity construction. The term appropriation, borrowed from scholars in linguistics and education, was chosen to capture this broader sense of productive learning that sits at the nexus of disciplinary engagement and…

This article reports findings from a "meta-review" and synthesis of research on variables related to learning, including both cognitive and affective schooling outcomes. Results confirm that distal policy variables are less important to schooling outcomes than quantity and quality of instruction, home environment, or student characteristics. (IAH)