Supplemental Instruction (SI) is a voluntary, non-remedial, peer-facilitated, course-specific intervention that has been widely demonstrated to increase student success, yet concerns persist regarding the biasing effects of disproportionate participation by already higher-performing students. With a focus on maintaining access for all students, a…

Notwithstanding broad utility of COPs (classroom observation protocols), there has been limited documentation of the psychometric properties of even the most popular COPs. This study attempted to fill this void by closely examining the item and domain-level IRR (inter-rater reliability) of a COP that was used in a federally funded striving readers…

This investigation sought to determine when colleges should conduct assessments to identify first-year students at risk of dropping out. Thirty-five variables were used to predict the persistence of 2,024 first-year students from four universities in the southeastern United States. The predictors were subdivided into groups according to when they…

Given the recent rise in childhood obesity, the School Breakfast Program (SBP) and National School Lunch Program (NSLP) have received renewed attention. Using panel data on more than 13,500 primary school students, we assess the relationship between SBP and NSLP participation and (relatively) long-run measures of child weight. After documenting a…

The analysis of covariance is frequently used in observational studies to either adjust treatment comparisons for biases due to different distributions of extraneous variables or for improving the precison of the treatment comparisons. This paper discusses aspects that the researcher should keep in mind when planning such a study. In particular it…