The School District of Philadelphia (SDP), established in 1818, is the eighth largest school district in the United States, with a student enrollment of 184,560 K-12 students. Like most of the other large urban school districts in the United States, its student population consists of more minority students than non-minority students. As the white…

Relatively little research has explored whether schools differ in their effectiveness for different group of pupils (e.g. by ethnicity, poverty or gender), for different curriculum subjects (e.g. English, mathematics or science) or over time (different cohorts). This paper uses multilevel modelling to analyse the national test results at age 7 and…

Breastfeeding is a key public health measure to protect and promote the health of one of the most vulnerable groups of the population--infants and children. Northern Ireland, however, has one of the lowest breastfeeding rates in the world. This paper reports the results of a questionnaire survey of 120 mothers attending mother and toddler groups…

Prospective foreign language teachers need to have an accurate knowledge and a positive perception of the target language and target culture so that they can help their students gain further insight on culture by and large. Hence, by means of a questionnaire, prospective English language teachers' (n = 412) perceptions of the target language and…

Over 2,000 teachers in the state of Washington received reduction-in-force (RIF) notices across the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years. We link data on these RIF notices to an administrative dataset that includes student, teacher, school, and district variables to determine the factors that predict the likelihood of a teacher receiving a RIF notice.…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether or not teachers would predict differing educational outcomes for students based on cultural and social capital measures--drawn from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and the field of cultural reproduction theory. To this end, surveys were distributed within a large urban district within North Carolina.…

The main purpose of the present study was to investigate the importance of task persistence in young adolescence for successful educational and occupational attainment in middle adulthood. Data from age 13 (N = 1,092) and adult age (age 43 for women, N = 569 and age 47 for men, N = 393) were taken from the Swedish longitudinal research program…

Research has often found that, when high school grades and SAT scores are used to predict first-year college grade-point average (FGPA) via regression analysis, African-American and Latino students, are, on average, predicted to earn higher FGPAs than they actually do. Under various plausible models, this phenomenon can be explained in terms of…

Children's participation in after-school physical activity can attenuate the overweight and obesity rates among rural, low socioeconomic status (SES) children. Children's individual determination, as well as social and environmental factors, can influence their behaviors. Purpose: The purposes of this study were to determine if a difference…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship of "self-efficacy" for "Enlisting Social Resources, Self-Regulatory Efficacy, self-efficacy" for "Self-Regulated Learning," and "self-efficacy" for "Academic Achievement" (Bandura's Children's "Self-Efficacy Scale," 2006) of urban…

Years of research on the effect of inclusive placements on the academic performance of students with disabilities has been notable for its inconsistent and contradictory findings. This study examined the performance of 651 elementary, middle, and high school students with disabilities in a large urban school district in a plains state on state…

This study used Multilevel Modeling (MLM) with a sample of over 1300 students with disabilities between the ages of six and nine years old nested within 180 school districts. A sample from the Pre-Elementary Education Longitudinal Study (PEELS) dataset (Institute of Education Sciences) was used to explore the relationship between hours in general…

This paper provides a detailed analysis of different aspects of public attitudes towards faith schools in Britain. It examines two questions relating to government policy on this issue and two questions that ask about the perceived outcomes of this type of school. After discussing existing public opinion on this issue it uses data from the British…

Findings on the relation of maternal verbal teaching strategies to children's effortful control (EC; i.e., self-regulation) are limited in quantity and somewhat inconsistent. In this study, children's EC was assessed at 18, 30, and 42 months (ns = 255, 229, and 209, respectively) with adults' reports and a behavioral measure. Mothers' verbal…

Some pupils already show unexcused, illegal, surreptitious absences in elementary education or the first years of secondary education. Are weak social bonds (see also Hirschi, 1969) and a lack of self-control (Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990) indicative of truancy at an early age? Of the children in our sample, 5% were persistent truants in late…