Therapy dogs can improve the social and mental health outcomes for children and adolescents. School-based interventions that address social and emotional learning (SEL) can promote children's overall wellbeing and educational outcomes. This study used a qualitative approach to explore children's perceptions of a 12-week therapy dog-assisted SEL…

Purpose: The purpose of this journal-ready dissertation was to determine the degree to which the economic status and ethnicity/race of Texas Grade 4 boys and girls in special education are related to their mathematics performance on Texas state-mandated assessment. In the first article, the purpose was to ascertain the effect of the economic…

Research on the big-fish-little-pond effect demonstrates that class-average achievement negatively affects students' academic self-concept via social comparison processes. The neighborhood-effects literature reports positive effects of advantageous socioeconomic neighborhood conditions on students' academic development via collective socialization…

Increasingly, teachers are using consciousness raising pedagogies such as culturally relevant, responsive, sustaining, and social justice pedagogies. However, little attention has been paid to teachers engaging in this work with students of privileged backgrounds (e.g., white, affluent students) and in mathematics. The present study addresses this…

Recent research provides evidence that an intersectional approach to defining reference and focal groups results in a higher percentage of comparisons flagged for potential DIF. The study presented here examined the generalizability of this pattern across methods for examining DIF. While the level of DIF detection differed among the four methods…

Background: Socioeconomic characteristics are persistently and systematically related to academic outcomes, despite long-standing efforts to reduce educational inequality. Ireland has a strong policy focus on alleviating educational disadvantage and has seen significant improvements in mathematics and science performance in recent years. This…

The purposes of this action research study were to: investigate the ways I was able to support my students' self and social transformation through their analysis of the inequities in the literature and unearth how I used my leadership role to promote and foster conditions necessary for a teacher in my grade level to adopt culturally relevant…

Both in academia and in everyday discourse, the belief in the (re)production of national ideology and related civil culture(s) within state schools has remained strong. This idea(l) has also become salient among a growing number of educational specialists, anti-colonial activists and policymakers on Sint Maarten, the Dutch or southern side of the…

Via care ethics and culturally relevant pedagogy, this article explores the events observed in fifth grade science classrooms of two Mexican American teachers. The participants were observed expressing dichotomous emotional struggles with their feelings towards their Mexican American students. The struggle consisted of a genuine caring attitude…

This study is one of the first evaluations of independent (i.e., self-guided) practice in math in a developing country. We randomly assigned 4,461 students in grades 4-7 in "unaided" private schools across seven Indian cities who were using a computer-assisted learning software to: (a) a control group, in which they moved from one unit…

This paper presents an ethnographic study analyzing the influence of students' social backgrounds on students' entitlement and agency in relation to floor rights. Classroom interactions were video-recorded, and interviews were conducted in a socially diverse fifth-grade in Israel. Descriptive statistics and micro-analyses of participation patterns…

The present study examined the effects of children's perceptions about the members of different geographical regions of Turkey on their social inclusion judgments. Children evaluated vignettes including protagonists coming from eastern and western regions of Turkey, which are namely easterners vs. westerners. Children demonstrated established…

In this paper, we present a closer look at the student achievement trends in the District of Columbia between 2006-07 and 2012-13. We have three main conclusions. First, we find that overall, math scores in the District have improved. The improvements in reading scores during this time frame, however, were primarily limited to the first year after…

This article investigates how affluent students made sense of social justice issues that were embedded in mathematics learning activities. I present 2 case studies of such activities at the intermediate and secondary levels in 2 different schools. The analysis draws on video records and classroom artifacts and applies the theoretical framework of…

This report focuses on the extent to which students who are academically far off track in fourth or eighth grade in Kentucky catch up by eighth or eleventh grade. We studied three recent cohorts of Kentucky students whose eighth-grade ACT Explore® scores were more than one standard deviation below the ACT Explore benchmark scores associated with…