As state, district, and school leaders begin work under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) to identify and intervene in low-performing schools and among under-achieving groups of students, this report offers action steps and research-backed solutions to guide their work. Under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), states and districts chose from…

Lorain County Community College (LCCC) was designed for access, however, not necessarily completion. The college was unprepared for students who wanted to earn a degree but then often didn't make it to graduation. In 2011, LCCC retained fewer than six in ten students. Its three-year graduation rate was 8 percent. For African American students, it…

This study examined relationships between instructor autonomy support, academic self-efficacy, academic problems and academic achievement among student service members/veterans (SSM/V). Participants included veterans, active duty or National Guard/Reservists of the US military (N = 172) enrolled in a postsecondary institution. Online surveys…

Learning a new language and culture may be particularly difficult for families in the United States supported by migrant workers, who typically work long hours and live a mobile lifestyle. The purpose of this phenomenological study is to describe the interaction patterns (i.e. use of the Spanish and English languages) among native-Spanish-speaking…

Students with chronic illness generally have higher school needs than their healthy peers. The research to date examining school support for these needs has been limited to qualitative methods. We collected quantitative data to compare the school needs and supports received by 192 students with chronic illness and 208 students without chronic…

This study challenges prior evidence on the impact of Korea's high-stakes school accountability policy as a tool to improve overall achievement and close achievement gaps. Applying difference-in-differences method, the study compares Korean high school students' reading and math test score trends before and after the policy based on the National…

We examine bachelor's degree completion in the British Columbia post-secondary system, which is noted for its multiple pathways to graduation and ethnically diverse student population. Employing an administrative longitudinal dataset, we compare how the probability of degree completion by students enrolled at research-intensive,…

Researchers consistently find a correlation between low literacy levels and high school dropout rates, expulsion, reading achievement, and failing grades for African American males. Low literacy achievement in African American males may result from multiple factors, including dialectic linguistic differences and/or phonological awareness…

College is one of the most reliable routes to economic security for parents and their children. College credentials are linked to increased earnings, higher rates of employment, lower poverty rates, and improved economic and educational outcomes among the children of college graduates. Student parents and their families stand to gain…

Background: Previous studies have suggested that when reading texts, lower achievers are more sensitive than their stronger counterparts to surface-level cues, such as graphic illustrations, and that even when uninformative, such concrete supplements tend to raise the text's subjective comprehensibility. Aims: We examined how being led astray…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between school principals' sense of efficacy and their involvement with the Arkansas Leadership Academy's (the Academy) School Support Program (SSP). Design/methodology/approach: Data were collected from participating SSP principals to explore differences in mean principal…

Mathematics teachers often give cumulative final exams, but little research has been done on the effects that cumulative exams given throughout the semester have on student grades and content knowledge. This study went beyond a cumulative final exam, and investigated the benefits of cumulative versus non-cumulative semester exams on students'…

Established literature suggests that language problems lead to lower attainment levels in those subjects that are more language dependent. Also, language has been suggested as a main driver of ethnic minority attainment. We use an original dataset of 2,020 secondary school students to show that ethnic minority students in Cyprus underperform…

Much has been written about the controversy surrounding performance-based school closures, but there has been no rigorous assessment of their impact on student achievement. Does the closure process harm students who are enrolled in a school while it is being phased out? Are future students better-off because a low-performing option has been…

This paper revolves on the premise that teachers' adoption of developmental model is more likely to improve student learning and performance as compared to the utilization of deficit approach. Deficit or clinical approach to learning has the tendency to focus on things that students cannot do, thus followed by teacher prescriptions of a…