"January Undergraduate Move Ahead Program" (JUMP) uses winter break as an opportunity to prepare small groups of scholarship students with high financial need for the second semester of their first-year biology curriculum and a career in life science. A winter intersession program has challenges, but more importantly, benefits that…

Just like physical skills, cognitive skills grow rusty over time unless they are regularly used and practiced so academic breaks can have negative consequences on student learning and success. The Keeping in School Shape (KiSS) program is an engaging, innovative, and cost-effective intervention that harnesses the benefits of retrieval practice by…

Two years of disruptions to schooling, coupled with recession and other pandemic-induced effects, appear to have widened preK-12 educational inequality. In particular, low-income students of color fell further behind their higher income White peers than they were pre-pandemic, on average, with the largest declines in math achievement. High-dosage…

Catching students up who have fallen behind academically is a key challenge for educators, and can be difficult to do in a cost-effective manner. This field experiment examines the causal effect of a program designed to provide struggling sixth and seventh graders with math instruction delivered in small groups of roughly ten students by select…

Developmental interventions for reading and writing often take place at community colleges during the winter or summer. These brief, intersession workshops are examples of compressed acceleration, as they give students the opportunity to exit developmental coursework and enroll in credit bearing courses the following semester. As college readiness…

Extensive research has been conducted on summer reading loss among children from low-SES families and children who are struggling readers (Alexander, Entwisle, & Olson, 2001; Allington, et al., 2010; Compton-Lilly, Caloia, Quast, & McCann, 2016; Cooper, Nye, Charlton, Lindsay, & Greathouse, 1996; Heyns, 1978; Parker & Reid, 2017).…

Service-learning initiatives often serve as higher education's approach to achieving institutional goals of fostering students' civic growth. Alternative Spring Breaks (ASBs), defined in this study as short-term immersion trips developed to engage college students in direct service experiences, have been understudied as service-learning…

Sandwich programmes are an innovation in teacher education geared towards the production of high quality manpower. They are organized during school vacations so that teachers working full-time would also have the opportunity to advance academically and improve professionally. However, the intensive nature of the programme jeopardizes the…