In 2007, the Legislature passed Senate Bill 5097, which required the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) to convene a task force to examine how gangs are affecting school safety. The task force must annually report its findings and recommendations to the education committees of the Legislature. The Gangs in Schools Task Force…

Students across the nation are encountering more and more difficulties in their transition to high school. Not only are a significant number of students dropping out, but those who stay are also leaving high school without the skills they need to become productive citizens. Several intervention strategies are recommended to help students make a…

The concept of "implementation fidelity" is broadly used to capture the extent to which an intervention is executed as intended by the designers of the intervention (Century, Rudnick, & Freeman, 2010; Huntley, 2005, McNaught, Tarr, & Sears, 2010, Munter, 2010). Though implementation fidelity instruments are often used to assess…

Anxiety disorders are prevalent in the school-aged population and are present across cultural groups. Scant research exists on culturally relevant prevention and intervention programs for mental health problems in the Aboriginal populations. An established cognitive behavioral program, FRIENDS for Life, was enriched to include content that was…

Communities That Care (CTC) is a prevention system designed to reduce adolescent substance use and delinquency through the selection of effective preventive interventions tailored to a community's specific profile of risk and protection. A community-randomized trial of CTC, the Community Youth Development Study, is currently being conducted in 24…

The purpose of this case study was to explore the perceptions and experiences of one class of sixth grade middle students enrolled in a Title I reading class. The class consisted of 15 students. Through instrumental case study, qualitative data were collected over 24 weeks through (a) interviews, (b) observations, and (c) documents: student…

This is the first of two reports that summarize the findings from an impact evaluation of a violence prevention intervention for middle schools. This report discusses findings after 1 year of implementation. A forthcoming report will discuss the findings after 2 years and 3 years of implementation. In 2004, the U.S. Department of Education (ED)…

An ethnically diverse sample of 6th-grade students completed peer nomination procedures that were used to create subgroups of students with reputations as victims, aggressors, aggressive victims, and socially adjusted (neither aggressive nor victimized). Self-report data on psychological adjustment, attributions for peer harassment, and perceived…

Much has been written about the value of teacher research for inservice teachers. Despite the existence of several studies affirming these words, studies that richly describe how student teachers learn to do teacher research and then investigate the impact of inquiry on student teachers and teacher educators, particularly in culturally and…

Background: Sport Education (SE) and Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) are two curriculum models that were developed to help students participate in fair and equitable ways and challenge their thinking beyond the replication of techniques and skills. Given that the general aim of both models is to employ more democratic pedagogies and…