National college completion rates for men of color at open- and broad-access postsecondary institutions (including community colleges) lag behind completion rates for White students and for female students of any race or ethnicity. Research points to several broad factors to explain these unequal outcomes, including precollege environments that do…

Over the last decade, The California Endowment (TCE) has invested in 14 communities that have historically been marginalized and denied opportunities for their residents to thrive. The initiative, known as Building Healthy Communities (BHC), focuses on creating places where children are healthy, safe, and ready to learn. Del Norte and Tribal Lands…

Schools, working together with local health departments, have an important role in slowing the spread of diseases and protecting vulnerable students and staff, to help ensure students have safe and healthy learning environments. This guidance will help public and private child care programs, K-12 schools, and their partners understand how to help…

This white paper offers an approach for using a theory of action as an outline to develop the State Systemic Improvement Plan (SSIP) Phase II evaluation questions and plan that will guide the SSIP work in Phase III and beyond. Key areas of focus include generating evaluation questions at each level of outcomes, identifying essential steps and…

Making college accessible to all includes making it affordable to lower-income families. A growing policy strategy at the state level is to provide individual students with need-based financial aid to offset tuition and living expenses. This strategy inherently presents challenges in choosing which income levels are eligible to receive aid,…

Sacramento City Unified School District's (SCUSD) college and career readiness initiatives, as cited in the "2016-2021 Strategic Plan," only equip students with half of the skills and requirements necessary for graduates to succeed in their post-secondary options (Conley, 2012). Namely, SCUSD fails to assess critical soft skills, such as…

High-quality teacher-student relationships are instrumental to the success of social and emotional learning interventions. Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory (1986), is a theoretical framework that focuses on self-efficacy, collective efficacy, vicarious learning, and triadic reciprocal determinism (i.e., behavior, personal factors, and…

Multi-Tiered System of Supports is a comprehensive framework that unites colleagues of various backgrounds together in pursuit of a common goal to support students with evidence-based interventions to meet their individual needs in the school setting. The problem addressed in this study was the lack of professional development training teachers…

Research over the last decade has indicated that active learning and student-centered instruction lead to better learning outcomes in undergraduate biology courses than traditional methods such as lecturing. This shift in pedagogical approach has been applied to both high-enrollment lecture-based courses as well as smaller laboratory courses. In…

Building partnerships with academic programs and campus divisions can advance a communication center's goal of enhancing students' communication competencies while also expanding the reach and visibility of the center. This paper explicates a process for establishing and executing such collaboration effectively--from advocating for the center's…

School-based character education (CE) programs provide an opportunity to increase the moral fortitude of adolescents. This study is a preliminary evaluation of Inspire Aspire, a CE program that was implemented with 13- to 14-year-olds in Scotland. A relational developmental systems meta-theoretical approach and person-centered analyses were…

Implementing targeted (Tier 2) interventions for youth at risk of developing behavioral health concerns is critical for a comprehensive approach to school mental health. Given challenges in school-based implementation of targeted interventions, identifying factors associated with their implementation may contribute to a better understanding of…

There has been increased interest in recent years regarding the utility of imported universal prevention and promotion (P&P) programmes in UK schools, many of which have a coaching model attached. However, there have been relatively few studies exploring the cultural transferability and social validity of these models, even though evidence…

Traditional module delivery in higher education often follows a linear structure, which is not always conducive to understanding concepts and the many possible relationships between them. In this paper we introduce an online visual interactive learning resource called ViLO designed to address this problem. We describe the principles guiding the…

This article examines the Common Core State Standards Initiative and provides a policy analysis of issues concerning its implementation as a policy initiative to achieve education reform in the U.S. Aside from highlighting developments concerning this policy initiative, it examines the origins of this movement toward adopting common core state…