Public interest in social-emotional learning is growing -- and the opportunities under the Every Student Succeeds Act have led many states and districts to consider the role of these skills in schools. As state and local leaders consider and commit to social-emotional learning programming in schools, they also have a responsibility to be…

Academic outcomes and health outcomes are interconnected and reciprocal and school climate has emerged as a way to capture some of this relationship. An increasing trend in education policy is using multiple measures of school success, including school climate, such as California's Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF). As school climate evolves as…

The Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative, which was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was a multiyear effort to improve student outcomes--particularly high school graduation and college attendance among low-income minority students--by increasing student access to effective teaching. The RAND Corporation worked…

In educational contexts where many domains subject to improvement are interdependent and causal evidence is frequently lacking it is difficult, if not impossible, for policymakers and educational practitioners to decide which domain should be invested in. This paper proposes a new method that uses Conditional Mean Independent Correlations (CMIC)…

In addition to excelling in subjects such as science, math, arts, and social studies, students must also develop skills like resiliency, adaptability, and collaboration in order to truly succeed in the world. But how do schools effectively measure those skills when they so often rely on standardized assessments? This article provides a thorough…

Measures of student disadvantage--or risk--are critical components of equity-focused education policies. However, the risk measures used in contemporary policies have significant limitations, and despite continued advances in data infrastructure and analytic capacity, there has been little innovation in these measures for decades. We develop a new…

This study applies a diagnostic errors framework to identify and classify mistakes that were made in a psychoeducational assessment of a bilingual student who was misidentified as a person with autism. Findings of diagnostic errors were categorized under four domains--faulty knowledge, faulty data gathering, faulty data processing, and faulty…

In 2013, the National Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islander Research in Education (CARE) and the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (WHIAAPI)--with support from ETS and Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy (AAPIP)--began an Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) data quality campaign.…

Libraries have become increasingly interested in studying the use of spaces within their buildings. Traditional methods for tracking library building use, such as gate counts, provide little information on what patrons do once they are in the library; therefore, new methods for studying space usage are being developed. Particularly promising are…

Educators and experts alike have come to a growing realization that academic factors alone do not tell the whole story of what it means to successfully navigate the educational system through high school and into higher education or the workplace. This national report from "Education Week" investigates the role that student engagement…

The purpose of the "District Self-Assessment Tool" is to provide school district and community stakeholders with an approach for assessing district capacity to support a college readiness indicator system and track progress over time. The tool draws on lessons from the collective implementation experiences of the four College Readiness…

The first step in the Validity and Reliability Study summarizes the history and purpose of California's quality rating and improvement system (QRIS), reviews findings from other QRIS evaluation studies, and describes the approach to validating the system in California. The majority of this report focuses on providing context for the California…

College completion rates in the U.S. are stubbornly low despite the large and rising returns to a college degree. Efforts to increase student success in college have largely ignored a potentially key factor: the instruction that students receive in the sequence of courses that add up to a college education. Improving the quality of instruction may…

In this article, we examine classroom observations from a 3-year large-scale randomized trial in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to investigate the extent to which a professional development initiative in inquiry science influenced teaching practices in in 4th and 5th grade classrooms in 73 schools. During the course of the study,…

While new teacher mentoring has traditionally focused on socio-emotional support and professional socialization, understanding mentors' role in developing novices' content teaching is needed given new educational reforms. Few researchers have explored a knowledge/practice base for content-focused mentoring. Therefore, we ask: what do content…