Background: Social responsibility and democratic citizenship are essential outcomes of a college education. Yet limited research has examined how college experiences may relate to students' moral and prosocial development, qualities that ground responsibility and citizenship. Purpose: This research sought to identify the college experiences,…

Parents and educators commonly assume that male teachers serve as more effective disciplinarians for boys than female teachers. Do schools tend to assign male teachers to teach boys with perceived behavioral issues? Our study uses administrative data in Indiana to investigate male teacher assignment in elementary school. We find that boys with at…

Using participants from an 1-and-1/2-year longitudinal study of smoking socialization (N = 709), we examined peer smoking, and implicit and explicit attitudes on smoking initiation among initial nonsmoking adolescents. We also tested whether implicit and explicit attitudes mediated the effect of peer smoking on smoking initiation, and whether…

Community schools represent a school reform approach that purports to address the multifaceted and intertwined challenges faced by poor urban communities and schools. The community school approach includes partnering with community organizations, making the school a community hub where services are provided during and outside of the school day,…

For youth with emotional and behavioral challenges, there is a trend of minority overrepresentation in restrictive settings. "System of care" refers to an approach that emphasizes cultural competence and providing services in the least restrictive setting. This study investigated the relationship between placement restrictiveness,…

This study examined the early college success of students who graduated from an Indiana high school in 2010 and enrolled immediately in a public two-year or four-year college in Indiana. The study team identified data elements in Indiana's Student Information System that predicted the early college success of this cohort of students. Half of…

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…

This study examined whether data on Indiana high school students, their high schools, and the Indiana public colleges and universities in which they enroll predict their academic success during the first two years in college. The researchers obtained student-level, school-level, and university-related data from Indiana's state longitudinal data…

Most educational climate research is conducted among (day school) students who spend the bulk of their young lives outside of school, potentially limiting the amount of climate variance that can be captured. Boarding school students, on the other hand, spend much of their lives at school and thus offer a potentially unique perspective on…

This study investigates potential predictors of teacher-child relationships (i.e., closeness and conflict) focusing on child gender, teacher-child ethnicity match, and teacher education. Additionally, the study explores the possible moderation effect of teacher education on the associations between teacher-child relationships and child gender or…

Postsecondary education is a fundamental tool for achieving upward mobility and economic growth. Students with an associate's or bachelor's degree earn substantially more in a lifetime and experience better working conditions and job benefits than students with only a high school diploma. This study examines differences in public college…

Research has consistently revealed that released offenders, if unemployed and uneducated, would likely become recidivist offenders. This study was a 5-year follow-up study (2005-2009) of 6,561 offenders who were released from the Indiana Department of Correction (IDOC) to five metropolitan counties during the calendar year 2005. It examined the…

Nine years of results on 4.2 million of Indiana's Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress (ISTEP) mathematics (math) exams (grades 3-10) taken after the implementation of No Child Left Behind have been used to determine gender gaps and their associated trends. Sociocultural factors were investigated by comparing math gender gaps and gap…

For the four leading causes of death in the United States (heart disease, cancer, stroke and chronic respiratory disease), tobacco use is a common risk factor. Tobacco use is responsible for almost 450,000 deaths per year and impacts the health of every member of our society. Tobacco is a gateway drug for substance abuse. That role is critical to…

This study investigates adults' ability to change their phonetic systems in perception and production, specifically upon exposure to a new dialect in adulthood. It further addresses the relative importance of binary biological sex and socially constructed gender in predicting an individual's sociolinguistic variation. Perception and production…