In the United States high school students may take college level courses that count for credit in both high school and college, often called dual enrollment. Students may take courses at their high school from certified instructors or at a local college. We investigate possible differences between these two groups of students using student level…

This study examined the relationship between school mobility for Colorado students in foster care and educational attainment outcomes, specifically earning high school diploma, a high school equivalency diploma (e.g., through examination such as a GED), or exiting the K-12 system without a credential. Multinomial logistic regression was utilized…

The rapid expansion of charter schools reflects a growing interest in education reform and school turnaround efforts across the United States. However, national research on charter school performance remains inconclusive. Of particular debate is the impact of transferring from a traditional public school to a charter school on student achievement…

Honors directors and deans know or presume that retention and graduation rates of honors students substantially exceed those of non-honors students. In our research, we have attempted to better determine what portion of this success is attributable to the academic and other benefits of honors programs as opposed to the background characteristics…

The Pittsburgh Promise is a scholarship program that provides $5,000 per year toward college tuition for public high school graduates in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania who earned a 2.5 GPA and a 90% attendance record. This study used a difference-in-difference design to assess whether the introduction of the Promise scholarship program directly…

As part of an ongoing investigation of students' learning in first semester upper-division quantum mechanics, we needed a high-quality conceptual assessment instrument for comparing outcomes of different curricular approaches. The process of developing such a tool started with converting a preliminary version of a 14-item open-ended quantum…

This study leveraged the complementary nature of confirmatory factor (CFA), item response theory (IRT), and latent class (LCA) analyses to strengthen the rigor and sophistication of evaluation of two new measures of the Air Force Academy's "leader of character" definition--the Character Mosaic Virtues (CMV) and the Leadership Mosaic…

The Bunkum Awards are a sort of beauty contest for ugly people. Bestowed by the National Education Policy Center housed at the University of Colorado at Boulder, they reward the most "nonsensical, confusing, and disingenuous" studies of education published each year. Contestants are drawn from reports critiqued by the Think Tank Review…

The first U.S. charter school opened in 1992, and the scale of the charter movement has since grown to 4,000 schools and more than a million students in 40 states plus the District of Columbia. With this growth has also come a contentious debate about the effects of the schools on their own students and on students in nearby traditional public…

This report describes how an innovative curriculum promoted the civic development of high school students along with parents by stimulating news media attention and discussion in families. Evidence is based on a three-year evaluation of Kids Voting USA, an interactive, election-based curriculum. Political communication in the home increased the…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the only nationally representative and continuing assessment of what students in the United States know and can do in various academic subjects. The 1996 NAEP in mathematics assessed the current level of mathematical achievement as a mechanism for informing education reform. In 1996, 44…

In 1990, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) included a Trial State Assessment which, for the first time in the NAEP's history, made voluntary state-by-state assessments. This 1992 mathematics report marks the first attempt of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to shift to standards-based reporting of National…