Research alliances, like other research-practice partnerships (RPPs), aim to bridge the historic divide between educational research and practice and improve education in particular local contexts. Yet, although these demands reflect multiple and contested field-level logics, little prior research has examined the ways these logics impact the work…

This field study examined factors that might influence hand raising in students with high levels of shyness. Data were assessed using student self-reports of shyness and social relatedness factors (student-teacher relationship and peer relationship), observations of instructional factors (wait time, warm calling, class size, and school subject),…

Attempts to scale up instructional interventions confront implementation challenges that mitigate their ultimate impact on teaching and learning. In this article, we argue that learning about adaptation during the design and implementation phases of reform is critical to the development of interventions that can be implemented with integrity at…

This article puts forth a multidimensional framework for empirically testing the effects of teacher mentoring, focusing on interactions between formal mentors and novice teachers and the setting in which these interactions occur. Analyzing survey and administrative data from Chicago Public Schools with a multilevel propensity-score weighting…

Novice teachers' professional contexts may have important implications for their effectiveness, development, and retention. However, due to data limitations, descriptions of these contexts are often unidimensional or vague. Using 10 years of administrative data from the Los Angeles Unified School District, we describe patterns of new teacher…

Drawing on a 3-year interpretive study that followed a cohort of children from prekindergarten to Grade 1, this article presents results of a multiple case study, which demonstrated that although two children had the same teachers, classmates, and curricula over 3 years, their experiences in the three successive mathematics classrooms were quite…

The value and effectiveness of formative assessment in the classroom has gained an increasing amount of attention during the past decade, especially since the publication of seminal work by Black and Wiliam titled "Assessment and Classroom Learning." Since that time, there has been a renewed interest in describing and evaluating teacher…

In this study, I employ geospatial techniques to assess the impact of school attendance zone "gerrymandering" on the racial/ethnic segregation of schools, using a large national sample of 15,290 attendance zones in 663 districts. I estimate the effect of gerrymandering on school diversity and school district segregation by comparing the…

Current theories of novice teacher learning have not accounted for the varied influences of pedagogical training, subject matter knowledge, tools, identity, and institutional context(s) on the development of classroom practice. We examined how 26 beginning secondary science teachers developed instructional repertoires as they participated in two…

Recent efforts to define qualities of effective teaching practice have done little to capture the role of play, imagination, and creativity in classroom teaching. Drawing on theories of play and data from a two-year case study that included classroom observations, interviews, artifact collection, and surveys, the author examines the ways in which…

This research study examined whether and how professional development can help teachers design sequences of instruction that lead to improved science learning. The efficacy of three professional development programs and a control condition was compared in a cluster randomized trial involving 53 middle school science teachers from a single school…

Many U.S. public school systems now face three large demographic shifts: rising poverty, the growing number of students from immigrant families, and increasing populations of students of color. Yet, we know little about how district policymakers react to these important changes or indeed the factors that consistently shape their policymaking.…

Recent developments in cognitive science and linguistics provide strong evidence that understanding decision-making processes in higher education requires close attention to not only rational and consciously controlled dynamics but also those aspects that are less consciously controlled than previously assumed. When deciding to favor or reject…

Little research has examined the relationship between academic content coverage in kindergarten and student achievement. Using nationally representative data, we examine the association between reading and mathematics content coverage in kindergarten and student learning, both overall and for students who attended preschool, Head Start, or…

The term "diversity" seems to carry a wide array of definitions. These definitions can affect the ways teachers understand and employ the term as well as the ways in which they approach sociocultural differences in their classrooms. The current study included a survey of preservice teachers' beliefs about various identities associated with terms…