The Research Apprentice Program is a pre-college, summer enrichment program that seeks to recruit underrepresented students into the field of agriculture and the College of ACES at the University of Illinois. The program has been in operation for more than thirty years and has reported many successes. Among these successes are a recruitment rate…

In 2019, the Texas legislature passed a historic education finance bill that included an initiative to add up to 30 days to the school-year calendar. One way districts can do this is to offer a voluntary summer learning program. In 2020, the American Institutes for Research, with support from The Wallace Foundation, launched the six-year Texas…

Can summer programs, as remedial supplements to regular schooling, extend learning opportunities and other benefits to disadvantaged students? To frame this question, we compare logics from "social reproduction" and "partial compensation" perspectives, and then apply them to a large mixed method study of four kinds of summer…

Universities across the U.S. have increasingly emphasized internationalization, leading to rising numbers of international students attending U.S. institutions of higher education. However, these students tend to gravitate toward larger research-intensive universities with many other institutions seeing no increase in international student…

This rich, longitudinally descriptive study provides an examination of program outcomes, student characteristics, and workforce outcomes of the Houston-Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (H-LSAMP) program. Utilizing data from the University of Houston's Education Research Center, this study offers a detailed analysis of the long-term…

The proportion of underrepresented minority (URM) students graduating with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) degrees, matriculating to graduate programs, and entering the STEM workforce continues to be significantly low. The Virginia-North Carolina Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (the VA-NC Alliance)…

Many public school districts are seeking to expand or launch voluntary summer learning programs, especially for children from low-income families. These children experience setbacks over the summer compared to their more affluent peers. Most studies have found that students from low-income families learn less during the summer than do students…

There is a growing belief that access to academic opportunities during the summer can help close the achievement gap between low-income students and their higher-income peers. But while significant research is emerging on summer programs for school-age children, information on the preschool period is limited. The Expanding Children's Early…

Research shows that during summer, low-income and non-white students fall behind academically compared with their more-affluent and white peers. To understand whether and how district-led voluntary summer learning programs can improve outcomes for low-income students, The Wallace Foundation initiated the National Summer Learning Project in 2011 in…

A shortage of highly qualified math and science teachers pervades the U.S. public school system. Clearly, recruitment of talented STEM educators is critical. Previous literature offers many suggestions for how STEM teacher recruitment programs and participant selection should occur. This study investigates how early STEM majors who are not already…

Minnesota's Intervention for College Attendance Program (ICAP) is a program of competitive grants awarded to postsecondary institutions, professional organizations and community-based organizations. Funded programs focus on increasing the access and success of groups traditionally underrepresented in higher education by strengthening their…

This study describes the collaboration among a school counselor, a school counselor intern, an Advanced Placement Psychology teacher, and a counselor educator to improve African-American access to Advanced Placement (AP) coursework and increase success on the AP Psychology national examination. The team initiated a process that recruited African…

The Urban Institute conducted an implementation and participant-outcomes evaluation of the Alaska Native Science & Engineering Program (ANSEP). ANSEP is a multi-stage initiative designed to prepare and support Alaska Native students from middle school through graduate school to succeed in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM)…

Teach For America (TFA) and the Teaching Fellows programs are an important and growing source of teachers of hard-to-staff subjects in high-poverty schools, but comprehensive evidence of their effectiveness has been limited. This report presents findings from the first large-scale random assignment study of secondary math teachers from these…

Teach For America (TFA) and the Teaching Fellows programs are an important and growing source of teachers of hard-to-staff subjects in high-poverty schools, but comprehensive evidence of their effectiveness has been limited. This report presents findings from the first large-scale random assignment study of secondary math teachers from these…