The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine if the outcome of two different types of referendums, operating fund and construction, could be more accurately predicted by using certain predictor variables. Furthermore, if the outcome could be more accurately predicted, which predictor variables were statistically significant in that…

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…

Higher levels of civic and community engagement in higher education are positively associated with students' academic performance and they also build upon citizenship skills such as informed voting. Yet, while these are worthy and important outcomes of higher education, students from disadvantaged backgrounds can have more difficulty navigating…

The extent to which social norms (injunctive and descriptive) are associated with collegiate alcohol use--including binge drinking--has been examined at length, but studies examining the efficacy of interventions derived thereof have reported mixed outcomes. This study examines data from 5,124 college students at 13 different colleges collected by…

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…

Previous studies have shown that state performance funding policies do not increase baccalaureate degree production, but higher education scholarship lacks a rigorous, quantitative analysis of the unintended consequences of performance funding. In this article, we use difference-in-differences estimation with fixed effects to evaluate performance…

Legislation has mandated that secondary schools provide services for students with disabilities that prepare them for independent living, employment, and/or post-secondary education (IDEA, 2004). This study examined the perceptions of special education directors, assistant directors/program coordinators, and secondary special education teachers…

Variation in test performance among examinees from different regions or national jurisdictions is often partially attributed to differences in the degree of content correspondence between local school or training program curricula, and the test of interest. This posited relationship between test-curriculum correspondence, or "alignment,"…

Critical to many science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) career paths is mathematical modeling--specifically, the creation and adaptation of mathematical models to solve problems in complex settings. Conventional standardized measures of mathematics achievement are not structured to directly assess this type of mathematical…

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…

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,…

Our study adds to prior work on Indiana's Twenty-first Century Scholars(TFCS) program by focusing on whether participating in--rather than completing--the program affects the likelihood of students going to college and where they initially enrolled. We first employ binary and multinomial logistic regression to obtain estimates of the impact of the…

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…

Purpose: Dog owners represent 40% of the population, a promising audience to increase population levels of physical activity. The purpose of this study was to develop and test the psychometric properties of a new instrument to assess social-cognitive theory constructs related to dog walking. Method: Dog owners ("N" = 431) completed the…

The purpose of this exploratory study was to analyze how high school principals approached developing a collaborative culture and providing collaborative leadership in a large high school setting. The population sample for this study was 82 principals of large comprehensive high schools of grades 9 through 12 or some combination thereof with…