School choice options offer potential educational gains for disadvantaged students, but do they take advantage of such options? I study the sorting patterns of students with prior child welfare reports (12 percent of incoming kindergartners) across traditional public, magnet, charter, and private schools in a mid-sized city. These students are…

Medicine has long been recognised as one of the most difficult and competitive professions to access, particularly for those from the lowest socio-economic backgrounds. As the Government looks to train more doctors through the "NHS Long Term Workforce Plan," the report "Unequal Treatment?" looks at access to medical school…

The issues that social researchers study and policymakers address are partly determined by how they think about the world around them. Their view of the social world often depends on their position within it. What their research reveals and their policies propose are, in part, a reflection of where they choose to look and how they interpret the…

This present study aimed to explore the relationship between upward social comparison, relative deprivation, belief in a just world, and delay discounting by surveying 614 college students. The results showed the following: (1) upward social comparison could significantly and negatively predict individuals' delay discounting; and (2) belief in a…

This paper aims to raise questions about the role that cultural capital might have to play in English schooling. With the term being used by both the Department for Education and the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted, the English schools' inspectorate) as a means of describing certain key characteristics of a school's curriculum, the…

In the last twenty years, there has been a consensus around the world that effective science education is vital to economic success in the emerging knowledge age. It is also suggested that knowledge of science and scientific ways of thinking is essential to participation in democratic decision-making. Students may recognise differences and…

Vulnerable and disadvantaged young people are often disengaged from mainstream education and lack the substantive capacity and opportunity to benefit from nature-focused activities without support. Ecotherapeutic out-of-classroom environmental education (EE) programmes hold the potential to benefit such young people, although research involving…

Background: Two hundred and fifty million children under five in low- and middle-income countries are at risk of not achieving their developmental potential. High-quality milestone guides can help mitigate these risks but are often not contextually appropriate for countries like South Africa, because of unavailable resources and its…

The paper considers what can be done to develop equitable education systems by describing and analyzing a three-year initiative that took place across a city in Scotland. Set in a particularly challenging context, with high levels of socio-economic disadvantage, the study involved a design-based implementation research methodology within which…

Despite the continued global prevalence of discourses of educational inclusion, young people across local, national and international contexts continue to be educated outside of mainstream schools. In England, a diverse market of providers--known as alternative provision (AP)--cater for many of these young people. Unlike the mainstream school…

Parents are crucial to children's educational success, but the role of parental education in fostering academic excellence remains underexplored. Using longitudinal administrative data covering all North Carolina public school students, we document five facts about first-generation excellence gaps. We find large excellence gaps emerge by 3rd grade…

The problem addressed in this study was that many educational institutions have not fully integrated digital technology into online teaching strategies during the school shutdowns. Digital technology enables both synchronous and asynchronous communication between teachers and students, allowing access to learning materials and supporting…

We estimate the effect of universal free school meal access through the Community Eligibility Program (CEP) on child body mass index (BMI). Through the CEP, schools with high percentages of students qualified for free or reduced-priced meals can offer free breakfast and lunch to all students. With administrative data from a large school district…

Improving educational performance, including narrowing equity gaps, is frequently touted as a matter of improving the quality of teachers in the lowest performing, often disadvantaged, schools. However, the assumption that teaching is of poorer quality in disadvantaged schools is largely unsubstantiated. Using the Quality Teaching Model of…

The purpose of this study was to examine the dispositions of Sierra Leone's higher education stakeholders toward using a community college system as an alternative model for expanding postsecondary accessibility in Sierra Leone. The study was prompted by a high number of students failing to gain admissions into universities in Sierra Leone every…