This book seeks to understand the complexities of talented and high-performing Black girls and women in STEM across the P-20 trajectory. Analogously, this volume aims to understand the intersections between giftedness, its identification, and racial, gender, and academic discipline identities. The dearth of literature on this subject suggests that…

Concept Inventories (CIs) are assessments designed to measure student learning of core concepts. CIs have become well known for their major impact on pedagogical techniques in other sciences, especially physics. Presently, there are no widely used, validated CIs for computer science. However, considerable groundwork has been performed in the form…

Gifted education has a rich history and a solid if uneven research base. As policy makers and educators increasingly turn their attention to advanced students and educational excellence, the time is ripe for a dispassionate analysis of the field's conceptual and empirical strengths and weaknesses. The purpose of this special feature article…

The October 2013 special issue of "Social Education" dealt with almost all AP social studies subjects, but omitted AP European History. This is one of the most fascinating AP subjects for students and teachers alike. In this article, the author shares his experiences since hewas given the responsibility of building his school's Advanced…

In 2013, Tennessee counted nearly 7,000 students in the senior cohort whose academic skills when they entered high school suggested they were on track to earn college credits through Advanced Placement (AP) exams. Yet just over half of these students actually graduated with an AP credit, and less than a third of the economically disadvantaged…

African American students continue to attend college at much lower rates than their white, Asian, and Latino counterparts. Although researchers have examined this issue from a multitude of vantage points, the voices of students--particularly students of color--have been limited in this research. Using a counter-storytelling narrative approach,…

Over the past two decades, college and career readiness became a priority in K-12 education. While graduation rates have been rising, far too many high school graduates are not ready to succeed in college or a job. Employers note that freshly-minted employees too often need additional training to perform their roles, many are ineligible for…

There is a growing body of scholarship in mathematics education that has attended to the salience of race in mathematics teaching and learning. However, in the context of secondary classrooms with equity-oriented instruction, we know little about race and processes of racialization, and even less from the perspectives of students of color and in…

Almost one out of every three K-12 public school students in California is a Latino, Black, Native American, or Pacific Islander male--making it clear that the economic future of the state will hinge on the ability to help the millions of boys and young men in education institutions succeed in high school, college, and beyond. But in order to…

This Research Brief summarizes the performance of Miami-Dade County Public Schools (MDCPS) students participating in the International Baccalaureate (IB) program. The IB program was offered at six M-DCPS high schools in 2016-2017. The number of IB examinations taken in M-DCPS increased by five percent from 2015-2016 to 2016-2017. During the same…

This "Science Note" looks at the way that the shapes of simple molecules can be explained in terms of the number of electron pairs in the valence shell of the central atom. This theory is formally known as valence shell electron pair repulsion (VSEPR) theory. The article explains the preferred shape of chlorine trifluoride (ClF3),…

Edwin Herbert Hall (1855-1938), discoverer of the Hall effect, was one of the first winners of the AAPT Oersted Medal for his contributions to the teaching of physics. While Hall's role in establishing laboratory work in high schools is widely acknowledged, his position as chair of the physics section of the Committee on College Entrance…

AP World History is the ideal history course. It introduces students to 10,000 years of world history, and demands critical reading, critical writing, and critical thinking skills on the part of both the teacher and the students. It requires students to build their expertise in reading their textbook, and places demands on the teacher to assign…

The purpose of this Methodological Brief is to present a brief primer on logistic regression, a commonly used technique when modeling dichotomous outcomes. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88), logistic regression techniques were used to investigate student-level variables in eighth grade (i.e., enrolled in a…

Using the educational social media platform Edmodo, teachers at multiple sites developed and implemented instruction that gave their high school students a chance to talk to students across the nation about the texts they were reading and to work collaboratively to develop writing related to their understanding.