To help guide school mental health policy and practice, we evaluated patterns of mental health help-seeking across lifetime adversity among sixth-grade adolescents. An ethnically/socioeconomically diverse sample of sixth-graders (N = 751) self-completed assessments of help-seeking and indicators of lifetime adversities: violence victimization,…

This study examined differences in middle school English Language Arts (ELA) proficiency between pre-pandemic (2019) and post-pandemic (2022) assessments to understand the COVID-19 impact on learning, particularly among vulnerable groups. Grounded in adaptive leadership theory, the research focused on free and reduced-price lunch (FRL) and English…

Service learning has been established as a promising method of teaching and learning that engages youth as change agents in their schools and communities. But service learning has not been widely implemented or studied in rural K-12 schools. This study explores the case of a service learning curriculum, the Working Together Project (WTP), in a…

Background: Cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) plays a significant role in health and academic performance in youth. The purpose of this study was to examine the longitudinal relationship between CRF and academic performance from fifth to eighth grade among a large, diverse, and state-wide cohort of students, and to determine the extent to which the…

Homeless and low-income students share multiple overlapping risk experiences; however, some studies report little to no observed differences in outcomes between these students. From the cumulative risk perspective, homelessness is perched at the extreme edge of economic insecurity, suggesting that homeless students encounter additional hardships…

Purpose: The purpose of this journal-ready dissertation was to determine the primary reasons that students are assigned exclusionary discipline consequences. Another purpose involves ascertaining the degree to which differential consequences are present by student ethnicity/race in the discipline consequence assigned for the same misbehavior.…

Music and the arts are of growing interest in promoting success in school and psychological development of young people in general. However, there are few studies focused on the relationship between music and, more specifically on school engagement of vulnerable students. Thus, this exploratory study aims to understand the perceived impact of…

This study examined the impact of knowledge-building curricula on raising reading achievement for students from high-poverty backgrounds. The overall purpose of the study was to contribute to our understanding of curricula that may be effective in closing achievement gaps for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds compared to…

Purpose: The overall purpose of this journal-ready dissertation was to determine the degree to which economic status was related to the number of days that students were assigned to an exclusionary discipline consequence. In the first study, the effect of economic status (i.e., Not Poor and Poor) on the number of days that Grade 5 and 6 Asian,…

As students return to in-person instruction in the 2021-2022 school year, local education agencies (LEAs) must develop resource allocation strategies to support schools in need. Federal programs have provided resources to support restart and recovery. However, there is little consensus on how LEAs can target resources to support those schools most…

As students return to in-person instruction in the 2021-2022 school year, local education agencies (LEAs) must develop resource allocation strategies to support schools in need. Federal programs have provided resources to support restart and recovery. However, there is little consensus on how LEAs can target resources to support those schools most…

This is the technical index for the research brief "Education's Long COVID: 2022-23 Achievement Data Reveal Stalled Progress toward Pandemic Recovery." Using data from 6.7 million U.S. public school students currently in grades 3-8, the study examined academic gains in the 2022-23 school year relative to pre-pandemic years. It also…

This study explores the association between school-level poverty rates and young peoples' perceptions of student empowerment, drawing on survey and administrative data from a large urban district. Participants included 29,318 diverse youth in grades 6-12 from 211 schools. We used multilevel linear regression models to estimate the relationships…

New research, using data from 7 million students in grades 3-8 in 25,000 schools who took MAP Growth reading and mathematics assessments between 2020-21 and fall 2022, continues NWEA's ongoing research agenda examining how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected student achievement in reading and math. At the start of the 2022-23 school year, we…

The purpose of this technical appendix is to share more detailed results and to describe more fully the sample and methods used in the research included in the brief, "Progress toward Pandemic Recovery: Continued Signs of Rebounding Achievement at the Start of the 2022-23 School Year" (ED627355). The two main research questions…