Project OCCAMS (Online Curriculum Consortium for Accelerating Middle School) is a collaboration between the Center for Talent Development at Northwestern University, the Center for Gifted Education at The College of William & Mary, and Columbus Public Schools with a goal of providing accelerated learning in language arts aimed at increasing…

Year after year, in every state and community in our nation, students from low-income families are less likely than other students to reach advanced levels of academic performance, even when demonstrating the potential to do so. These income-based "excellence gaps" appear in elementary school and continue through high school. It is a…

The purpose of this within-group experimental study was to find out to what extent ninth-grade students improved their science performance beyond their middle school science performance at one Georgia high school utilizing a freshman academy model. Freshman academies have been recognized as a useful tool for increasing academic performance among…

Talent Development Middle Grades Program (TDMG) is a whole school reform approach for large middle schools that face serious problems with student attendance, discipline, and academic achievement. The program includes both structural and curriculum reforms. The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) identified 17 studies of TDMG that were published or…

Racial and ethnic disproportionality in gifted education is a persistent and perennial inequity in many school districts. This report describes the root causes of this disproportionality and discusses ways in which this issue can be addressed. Whereas most of the attention has been paid to assessment, specifically the use of nonverbal tests to…

The Talent Development High School (TDHS) reform model, with career academy programs, was introduced at Randolph High School. Three academies were implemented, one called the Arts and Humanities Academy (A&H) focused on careers in creative arts, law, and public service; another titled the Business and Industrial Technology Academy (BAIT) was…

Describes how the Family Resource Center (FRC), one component of a School-Family-Community Partnership Program (SFCPP), was created and implemented to assist with institutionalizing SFCPP linkages at urban high schools. Data from surveys, focus groups, and observations highlighted four positive impacts (e.g., increasing visits to the FRC and…

This article reports on the first 4 years of an effort to develop comprehensive and sustainable mathematics education reforms in high poverty middle schools. In four related analyses, we examine the levels of implementation achieved and impact of the reforms on various measures of achievement in the first 3 schools to implement the Talent…

This descriptive study investigated two areas: (a) perceived changes in gifted and talented (G/T) programming in Iowa from the time a state mandate was implemented to the time of the study, and (b) perceived effects of the mandate on G/T programming in Iowa. Perceptions of middle-level teachers of gifted and talented students (n = 111) were…

This report summarizes the responses of students in two Philadelphia high schools to the second year of implementation of the Talent Development comprehensive school reform model. Both schools served low-income, predominantly African American and Hispanic American students. The Talent Development model was intended to improve schools facing…