Children enter school with vastly different skill levels and formal schooling often magnifies these disparities over time. Widening achievement gaps between high- and low-income children have grown substantially in the last 50 years. Further, the opportunity gap facing most low-income students contributes to a host of academic and social…

The Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act of 2006 (Perkins IV) is the principal source of federal funding to states for the improvement of secondary and postsecondary career and technical education programs. States are provided with funds for distribution to local educational agencies (LEAs) and postsecondary institutions for…

Classroom projects that explore culture and globalization enhance the curriculum and help students see how geography directly connects to their lives. These authors contend that a project-based approach can supplement the teaching of an AP Human Geography course, and visualize this course as an essential tool for students to truly understand how…

Behavioral parent training has proven effective in improving the skill performance of foster caregivers and biological parents of dependent children during role-play assessments. To date, however, no studies have examined the impact of behavioral parenting skills training on child placement outcomes. We conducted a quasi-experimental archival…

Evidence-centered design (ECD) is an orientation towards assessment development. It differs from conventional practice in several ways and consists of multiple activities. Each of these activities results in a set of useful documentation: domain analysis, domain modeling, construction of the assessment framework, and assessment…

This study reports on language outcomes at eight years from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, a randomized controlled study of foster care. We previously have shown that children placed in foster care by age two have substantially stronger preschool language outcomes than children placed later and children remaining in institutional care.…

The ACT College Readiness Benchmarks are the minimum ACT® college readiness assessment scores required for students to have a high probability of success in credit-bearing college courses--English Composition, social sciences courses, College Algebra, or Biology. This report identifies the College Readiness Benchmarks on the ACT Compass scale…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to analyze the Advanced Placement exams that Hispanic students complete and to compare their overall performance with the performance of White students from 2000 to 2012. A second purpose was to determine which Advanced Placement exams were the most difficult exams for Hispanic students and which Advanced…

This brief aims to catalog accelerated learning options available within and across secondary and postsecondary education. As we strive to create an education system that is responsive to the needs of all, we must foster pathways that afford students the opportunity to move through secondary and postsecondary education at an individualized pace…

This dissertation is composed of three distinct chapters, each of which addresses issues of estimating treatment effects. The first chapter empirically tests the Value-Added (VA) model using school lotteries. The second chapter, co-authored with Michael Wood, considers properties of inverse probability weighting (IPW) in simple treatment effect…

This autoethnographic research is based on the personal experiences of the researcher whose purpose was to explore the issues and challenges of educating deaf children. This genre of qualitative research makes use of the researcher's experiences to explore the culture(s) involved through an insider's perspective. The primary source for data in…

This report examines the placement of Teach for America (TFA) teachers and examines their impact on the learning gains of their students during 2012-13. TFA is an organization that recruits and trains recent college graduates/professionals to teach for two years in selected communities. Sets of eligible TFA teachers were identified in 2012-13…

This report examines the placement of Teacher for America (TFA) teachers and examines their impact on the learning gains of their students during 2011-12. TFA is an organization that recruits and trains recent college graduates/professionals to teach for two years in selected communities. Sets of eligible TFA teachers were identified in 2011-12,…

The present article focuses on the growing emphasis on international dimensions of the curriculum in the UK. Educators and policymakers increasingly grapple with the thorny issue of how best to prepare future generations for life in a world changing so rapidly that no-one is able to predict precisely what knowledge and skills will be relevant for…

The challenge of teaching AP Human Geography to high school students is to make geography relevant, engaging and "real world." Often the pace of teaching AP classes constrains the ability of teachers to do creative projects and truly engage students until after the exam is over in May. In this lesson plan, the author suggests using "Petites…