An examination was conducted to explore the relationship between socially mediated artifacts (SMA), perception of high school experience, and academic performance to examine the impact of social mediation on an individual's academic performance. This investigation was based on a Vygotskian psychology perspective of social mediation. According to…

School leaders must make decisions and implement strategies to improve a school climate and student achievement, and it benefits them to understand which areas of school climate have the greatest impact on student achievement. The State of Georgia measures school climate and student achievement with its school accountability measure, the College…

Strong evidence indicates that student expectations of success in mathematics decline in middle school. The goal of the present study was to examine whether the expectations of teachers and the quality of the student-teacher relationship play a role in these declines. A total of 201 (86 boys, 115 girls) Latino/a students (M = 11.0 years) and their…

Recent evidence demonstrates that disparities by race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status in science achievement are present in the earliest grades of school. Preschool represents one potential policy solution; however, little research has explored the relationship between preschool attendance and science outcomes. This study examines whether…

The present study was aimed to investigate whether Finnish and Danish students' math achievement differed and which student-level factors, if any, explained the achievement gaps and whether teacher participation in decision making and teacher morale, among the school-level factors, explained the achievement gaps in Finland and Denmark. To this…

In the United States, women are more likely than men to enter and complete college, but they remain underrepresented among baccalaureates in science-related majors. We show that in a cohort of college entrants who graduated from high school in 2004, men were more than twice as likely as women to complete baccalaureate degrees in science,…

A wide research base has documented the unequal access to and enrollment in K-12 gifted and talented services and other forms of advanced learning opportunities. This study extends that knowledge base by integrating multiple population-level datasets to better understand correlates of access to and enrollment in gifted and talented services,…

Propensity score matching was used to compare third-grade test scores in English language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies for children who had and had not participated in Georgia's Pre-K 4 years earlier. After matching, each group included 46,262 children (mean age 8.36 years in third grade). In all subject areas, children who had…

Recent reforms in education call for science teachers to incorporate STEM concepts into their curricula. This study explores the association among student and teacher demographics, and student learning of engineering content and attitudes towards STEM after participation in an elementary or middle school engineering-based science curricula.…

The goal of the current study is to examine the impact of students' social economic status, ethnicity, and discipline infractions on their standardized test scores in Indiana, the USA. Data from this study extracted from Indiana Department of Education. ISTEP is a criterion-referenced standardized test. It consists of items that assess a student's…

The term "gender gap" refers to the significant underrepresentation of females in many subjects. In Computer Science, the gender gap exists at all career levels. In this article, we study whether there is a performance gap in addition to the gender gap. To answer this question, we analyzed statistical data on student performance in…

Achievement disparities between American Indian students and non-American Indian peers are persistent and well documented. Student engagement is a promising target for intervention given its relation to academic achievement. This study investigated the relation between specific teacher practices (opportunities to respond [OTRs], praise, and…

Educational researchers and practitioners assert that supportive school and classroom climates can positively influence the academic outcomes of students, thus potentially reducing academic achievement gaps between students and schools of different socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. Nonetheless, scientific evidence establishing directional…

"Closing the achievement gap" (i.e. reducing differences in performance across racial and ethnic groups) has been the rallying cry and holy grail for reform efforts in American education for some time. In addition to influences associated with school and teacher factors, researchers have now turned their attention to characteristics in…

The estimation of racial test score gap trends plays an important role in monitoring educational equality. Documenting gap trends is complex, however, and estimates can differ depending on the metric, modeling strategy, and psychometric assumptions. The sensitivity of summer learning gap estimates to these factors has been under-examined. Using…