In an era of accountability focused primarily on academic outcomes, it may be useful to reconsider the other original aim of U.S. schools: citizenship development. Using longitudinal, nationally representative data (Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement Study [AHAA] and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health [Add Health]), we…

Human, financial, and social capital from several contexts affects child and adolescent well-being. Families and schools are among the most important, and research is increasingly studying how effects of capital across such contexts affect child and adolescent academic and social outcomes. Some research suggests that families may be more powerful…

The articles in this special issue make two important contributions to our understanding of the impact of accommodations on test score validity. First, they illustrate a variety of methods for collection and rigorous analyses of empirical data that can supplant expert judgment of the impact of accommodations. These methods range from internal…

This special section was inspired by the recent increased interest and methodological advances in the assessment of context-specificity in child and adolescent social development. While the effects of groups, situations, and social relationships on cognitive, affective and behavioral development have long been acknowledged in theoretical…

We review research on families and health published between 2000 and 2009 and highlight key themes and findings from innovative, methodologically rigorous studies. Whereas research in prior decades focused primarily on whether family structure affects child and adult health, contemporary research examines the contextual and processual factors that…

This paper analyzes a puzzling aspect of retirement behavior known as "unretirement." Nearly 50 percent of retirees follow a nontraditional retirement path that involves partial retirement or unretirement, and at least 26 percent of retirees later unretire. I explore two possible explanations: (1) unretirement transitions result from failures in…

In response to increased performance expectations, schools and districts are turning to nonsupervisory, school-based, instructional teacher leader roles to help improve teachers' instruction and enhance student learning. Increased opportunities to learn about teacher leadership may facilitate the implementation and institutionalization of…

College algebra is a required course for most majors, but is viewed by many as a gatekeeper course for degree completion by students. With almost half a million students taking college algebra each year, faculty are experimenting with new course lengths of time that might result in higher success, completion, and retention rates for college…

Two experiments tested whether differences in problem-solving strategies influence the ability of people to monitor their problem-solving effectiveness as measured by confidence judgments. On multiple choice problems, people tend to use either a constructive matching strategy, whereby they attempt to solve a problem before looking at the response…

This study explores the contextual factors that influence a school counselor's decision to actively integrate multicultural diversity in his/her work. Through using the Integrating Multicultural Diversity Questionnaire (IMDQ) the effectiveness of multicultural diversity training, the types of multicultural diversity practices that are used with…

The students' difficulty which was found is in the problem of understanding, drawing diagrams, reading the charts correctly, conceptual formal mathematical understanding, and mathematical problem solving. The appropriate problem representation is the basic way in order to understand the problem itself and make a plan to solve it. This research was…

Background: For decades, scholars have argued that teaching and learning depend fundamentally on the quality of relationships between teachers and students, yet there is little research about how teachers develop relationships with students or how teacher education prepares teachers to do this work. Arguably, articulating the relational practices…

The aim of the present study, based on data from 20 countries, is to identify the pattern of variables (at country, school and student levels), which are typical of students performing below the low international benchmark compared to students performing at the advanced performance benchmark, in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study…

In this analysis of promising practice, we demonstrate how social studies methods instructors can incorporate data analysis of the 2010 United States History National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP-USH) to facilitate pedagogical aims, engage teacher candidates in critical discourse, and investigate the contexts of teaching and learning.…

Design-based learning (DBL) is an educational approach grounded in the processes of inquiry and reasoning towards generating innovative artifacts, systems and solutions. The approach is well characterized in the context of learning natural sciences in secondary education. Less is known, however, of its characteristics in the context of higher…