Across the country, school districts, their stakeholders, and policymakers have become increasingly concerned about suspensions, particularly about suspending students from elementary school and disproportionately suspending ethnic/racial minority students. Suspended students are less likely to graduate, possibly because they miss the…

The advancing social-communication and play (ASAP) intervention was designed as a classroom-based intervention, in which the educational teams serving preschool-aged children with autism spectrum disorder are trained to implement the intervention in order to improve these children's social-communication and play skills. In this 4-year, multi-site…

The Good Behavior Game (GBG) is a classroom management system that employs an interdependent group contingency, whereby students work as a team to win the game. Although previous anecdotal data have suggested that this arrangement may promote prosocial behavior, teachers may have concerns about its fairness and potential to evoke negative peer…

This paper discusses the implementation and evaluation of an innovative professional development program that supported 8th grade mathematics teachers in designing learning activities that assisted students in developing a conceptual understanding of mathematics. Funded by an Investing in Innovation (i3) grant from the U.S. Department of…

Prior research on mentoring relationships outside of school does point toward relationship closeness and related indicators of the emotional quality of the mentor-protégé tie as important influences on youth outcomes. There is preliminary evidence that this may also be the case for School Based Mentoring (SBM), or at least that closeness promotes…

This is the final report of a large-scale independent evaluation of the Building Assets and Reducing Risks (BARR) model in ninth grade in eleven high schools in Maine, California, Minnesota, Kentucky, and Texas. This sample of schools included large and small schools in urban, suburban, and rural areas, serving students from a wide range of…

The Building Assets, Reducing Risks (BARR) model is a comprehensive, strength-based approach to education that aims to improve achievement for all students by improving a school's effectiveness at building relationships, leveraging real-time student data, and capitalizing on the strengths of each student. The U.S. Department of Education's…

The College and Career Readiness Expansion project was a five-year, federally funded effort to implement early college strategies in comprehensive high schools. This report presents the results from a quasi-experimental impact study of the project and a mixed methods examination of its implementation. Results showed that the program increased the…

A preventive intervention for reducing physical and relational aggression, peer victimization, and increasing prosocial behavior was developed for use in early childhood classrooms. Nine classrooms were randomly assigned to be intervention rooms (N = 202 children) and nine classrooms were control rooms (N = 201 children). Classroom was the unit of…

High schools have recently become a popular source of mentors for school-based mentoring (SBM) programs. The high school Bigs program of Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, for example, currently involves close to 50,000 high-school-aged mentors across the country. While the use of these young mentors has several potential advantages, their age…

This study examined factors that relate to the persistence of first-generation undergraduate students in a 4-year public university in the Southeastern United States. Results were analyzed from a 2011 two-part survey: CARES-I (College Assessment of Readiness for Entering Students-Intent) and CARES-A (College Assessment of Readiness for Entering…

This report summarizes the findings from a national evaluation of mentoring programs funded under the U.S. Department of Education's Student Mentoring Program. The impact evaluation used an experimental design in which students were randomly assigned to a treatment or control group. Thirty-two purposively selected School Mentoring Programs and…

This study examined effects of an intervention (planned play, use of conversational social interaction strategies, and evaluation of play strategies) on the social-communicative interactions of six preschool children at risk for language delays and behavior problems. The intervention led to increases in social communicative behaviors, use of…

The cooperative elementary school model uses cooperation, particularly cooperative learning, as a philosophy for educational change. A 2-year study of the cooperative elementary school model in 2 treatment and 3 comparison schools involving 1,012 students demonstrates positive effects on academic achievement and social relations. (SLD)