The nation's community colleges play a central role in producing a more educated workforce and promoting social mobility. They serve about 40 percent of all college students and, not surprisingly, they serve a disproportionate number of low-income and underrepresented students. But most students who enter these colleges do not graduate--only about…

Studies have shown that math skills in early childhood are uniquely and strongly predictive of later outcomes across a range of domains and well into adulthood, including the likelihood of graduating from high school and college completion. The Making Pre-K Count and High 5s studies were designed to rigorously test the short- and long-term effects…

This study adds to the currently limited evidence base on the efficacy of interventions targeting non-college-ready high school students by examining the impact of Kentucky's Targeted Interventions (TI) program. We focus on interventions that students received under TI in the senior year of high school based on their 11th grade ACT test scores.…

School-Wide Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (SWPBIS) relies on effective implementation of Tier 1 practices to ensure accurate identification of students in need of more intensive supports at Tier 2 or Tier 3. While measures of school-level fidelity are widely used, measures of classroom-level implementation of Tier 1 supports are…

The College Possible program provides intensive coaching by near-peer mentors, peer group support, and opportunities for academic and non-cognitive skill building to low-income students through an intensive two-year curriculum in junior and senior years of high school. The goal of the program is to close the achievement gap between low-income…

Parents play an important role in creating home language environments that promote language development. A nonequivalent group design was used to evaluate the effectiveness of a community-based implementation of LENA Start™, a parent-training program aimed at increasing the quantity of adult words (AWC) and conversational turns (CT). Parent-child…

School mental health (SMH) services are widespread but are often not well integrated into school settings, based on evidence for effectiveness, or efficiently delivered. This paper presents results of a pilot study of a brief (4 session) assessment, engagement, triage, and initial intervention strategy for SMH clinicians working in high schools.…

Making the successful transition to adulthood has become increasingly difficult for many young people in the United States, particularly for those without a college education. Those without a high school degree face even tougher prospects, with especially high unemployment rates and falling wages. A typical worker without a high school diploma…

Opportunity Works was a three-year effort led by Jobs for the Future to help opportunity youth--young people ages 16 to 24 who are not in school or meaningfully employed--access postsecondary and career pathways. Based on the Back on Track framework, seven cities across the country undertook collective impact approaches with diverse partners to…

This ex-post-facto quasi-experimental research design was conducted by selecting a convenient sample of approximately 2,000 3rd grade ELLs who took the regular reading and math English STAAR test during the 2014-15 school year in an urban southern Texas school district. This study was conducted using a quantitative research method of data…

Math performance continues to be an important focus for improvement. Many districts adopted educational technology programs to support student learning and teacher instruction. The ASSISTments program provides feedback to students as they solve homework problems and automatically prepares reports for teachers about student performance on daily…

Many community colleges consider non-academic supports as a way to improve student retention and achievement. Past studies on the effects of coaching, mentoring, advising, and other non-academic supports yielded evidence for the effectiveness of these interventions to promote student outcomes. In addition, some suggested that the effects were…

This article contributes to the literature on school turnaround by examining the effect of the North Carolina Transformation (NCT) initiative, which was implemented in 75 low-performing schools after the state's efforts to turn around the lowest performing schools under Race to the Top ended, on student reading score growth in grades K-3. Reading…

Reading Recovery is a first-grade literacy intervention program with notable short-term benefits, but there are sustainability studies that highlight inconclusive evidence of its enduring success. It was unclear if formerly enrolled Reading Recovery students continue to have long-term literacy skill retention after exiting the literacy…

The Good Behavior Game (GBG), a well-researched classroom group contingency, is typically played for brief periods of time, which raises questions about the effects on subsequent contexts. This study used a multiple baseline design and showed that when the GBG was implemented in one context, behavior improved in only that context. Behavior…