Retention and graduation rates for engineering disciplines are significantly lower than desired, and research literature offers many possible causes. Engineering learning communities provide the opportunity to study relationships among specific causes and to develop and evaluate activities designed to lessen their impact. This paper details an…

In this study, we tested the outcomes of access to a Response to Intervention (RtI) model in kindergarten or in first grade on end-of-Grade-2 reading achievement and placement in special education. Across five schools, 214 students who began having access to Tier 2 intervention in kindergarten or first grade were compared in Grades 1 and 2 with…

This qualitative study examines the experiences of Latinas/os in community college English and math developmental education courses. Critical race theory in education and the theory of validation serve as guiding frameworks. The authors find that institutional agents provide academic validation by emphasizing high expectations, focusing on social…

Developmental education, also termed remedial education, refers to curricula intended to improve the academic skills and knowledge of students who are underprepared for undergraduate coursework, particularly in the areas of mathematics, reading, and writing. Many practitioners and researchers agree that developmental education should be improved,…

A significant challenge in higher education is to narrow the educational attainment gap between academically prepared and unprepared students. To this end, developmental or remedial education is intended to improve the academic skills and knowledge of students who are unprepared for undergraduate coursework, particularly in the areas of…

In this conceptual article, we integrate existing literature on early school transitions, ecological systems theory, and student-teacher relationships to propose a framework for investigating the transition to school for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). A review of the literature suggests that the quality of early student-teacher…

This study explores how girls currently enrolled and recently graduated from Miss Porter's School, Farmington, Connecticut, define success and the role gender plays in their definition(s). Data were collected from semi-structured student interviews, written responses by the students to a prompt designed to elicit personal conceptions of success,…

This study was born from the idea that valid comparison research can be conducted with students who are placed into and exempt from required developmental reading courses and that these groups do contain students with similar reading ability. This overlooked population consists of students with placement test scores that hover tightly on either…

Within the U.S. public school system, English Language Learners (ELL) represent the fastest growing student population. Many of these students struggle to access grade-level content due to Limited English Proficiency (LEP). Although policy regarding LEP status varies state-to-state, most states impose a short time limit on how long a student can…

Following Messick's definition of validity as a multi-faceted construct that includes contextual, substantive, structural, generalizable, external, and consequential dimensions, this study examined an established directed self-placement (DSP) system that had been functioning for ten years at a large university. The goal was to determine the extent…

The extensive literature on classroom-based second language learning makes little attempt to situate the classroom itself in social and multilingual sociolinguistic space, in the complex and iterative networks of encounters and interactions that make up daily life. Daily life is routinely evoked and "brought into" the classroom as a…

Inspired by the work of Ernest Boyer and the Boyer Commission, the Scholarship of Engagement for Politics project was an attempt to adapt their demands for research-based undergraduate learning opportunities to the British context through the pedagogy of placement learning. This article explores the project's attempts to make placement learning…

Non-random assignment of students to teachers can bias value added estimates of teachers' causal effects. Rothstein (2008a, b) shows that typical value added models indicate large counter-factual effects of 5th grade teachers on students' 4th grade learning, indicating that classroom assignments are far from random. This paper quantifies the…

The design of the New York City (NYC) High School match involved tradeoffs among efficiency, stability and strategy-proofness that raise new theoretical questions. We analyze a model with indifferences--ties--in school preferences. Simulations with field data and the theory favor breaking indifferences the same way at every school--single tie…

This paper analyzes the impact of voucher design on student sorting, and more specifically investigates whether there are feasible ways of designing vouchers that can reduce or eliminate student sorting. It studies these questions in the context of the first five years of the Milwaukee voucher program. Much of the existing literature investigates…