Decades of research evidence have consistently suggested teachers are the most important in-school factor related to student learning and achievement. Being taught by an effective teacher has important consequences for students' academic outcomes as well as longer-term impacts on postsecondary success and lifetime earnings. Yet how to measure…

While randomized experimental designs are the gold standard in education research concerned with causal inference, non-experimental designs are ubiquitous. For researchers who work with non-experimental data and are no less concerned for causal inference, the major problem is potential omitted variable bias. In this presentation, the authors…

Evidence is clear that discipline in high school is associated with negative outcomes across the life course. Not only are suspensions related to declining academic trajectories during high school in the form of attendance and academic achievement, students suspended once are also more likely to be suspended again and also substantially increase…

A positive school climate is characterized by a supportive, orderly, and fair interpersonal climate. Children's perceptions of interpersonal climate and school safety are associated with several academic and behavioral adjustment outcomes. The current study has two goals: (1) to better understand the contribution of school interpersonal climate to…

The purpose of this project is to demonstrate the practical methods developed to utilize a dataset consisting of both multivariate and multilevel effect size data. The context for this project is a large-scale meta-analytic review of the predictors of academic achievement. This project is guided by three primary research questions: (1) How do we…

The present study evaluates the effectiveness of Check & Connect (C&C) in a randomly assigned sample of students who were all receiving Communities in Schools (CIS) services. The research questions for the study include: Are there differences in attendance, academics, and behavior for CIS students who also receive C&C compared to…

A growing body of research has shown that high quality early care and education (ECE) is positively related to the development of children's social and academic skills (e.g., Barnett, 2011; Lamb & Ahnert, 2006; NICHD ECCRN, 2006). There is evidence that high quality ECE experiences can improve children's levels of social adjustment (Bierman et…

Over the past 20 years, gaps in students' educational aspirations have shrunk considerably (Roderick et al., 2008; Roderick, Nagaoka, & Coca, 2011; Kao & Tienda, 1998; Avery & Kane, 2004; Turner, 2007; Deil-Amen & Tevis, 2010). Similarly, racial and ethnic gaps in college enrollment have shrunk. The one area in which postsecondary…

Educators have long used test scores to make educational decisions, but only within the last decade has the availability of data been systematic (Abelman, Elmore, Even, Kenyon, & Marshall, 1999). In recent years, interest has spiked in data-driven decision making in education (Marsh, Pane, & Hamilton, 2006). With technological advances and…

The criteria for determining the student outcomes that define a school as having "turned around" are not well defined, and the definition of turnaround performance varies across studies. Although current policy initiatives offer guidelines for identifying CLP schools, there is no standard definition or methodology in common usage. This…