The inaccurate placement of minority students in special education programs can take various forms including overrepresentation, underrepresentation, and misidentification. First, overrepresentation occurs when the percentage of minority students in special education programs is greater than that in the school population as a whole. Second,…

Black students have been shown to receive disproportionally more discipline in schools than their White peers. At the classroom level, differences in teacher characteristics could influence the rate at which discipline referrals are written. Classroom management skills vary between teachers based upon the strengths and weaknesses individual…

The United States' Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) workforce is growing slower than in the past, in comparison to demand, and in comparison to other countries. Competitive talent conditions require the United States to develop a strong pipeline of STEM talent within its own citizens. Given the number of female college…

Currently, there are nearly a million high-achieving, low-income students in the United States. In the nation's most selective institutions of higher education, students from low-income families have been persistently under-represented. Elite colleges, in particular, have only recently begun admitting low-income students in large numbers, a result…

The results from the 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) revealed that the scores of fourth grade students in the 90th percentile showed no measurable change from the results of the first TIMSS assessment in 1995. Contrarily, the scores of the lowest performing fourth graders showed statistically significant…

In this foreword, Shirley Malcom and Lindsey Malcom speak to the history and current status of women of color in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. As the author of the seminal report "The Double Bind: The Price of Being a Minority Woman in Science", Shirley Malcom is uniquely poised to give us an insightful…

Language-in-education planning in the form of materials planning has an important role to play in achieving a society's social goals. Gender stereotyping has been found in previous language textbook studies. Although gender bias has declined, some recent studies suggest that it still exists. This study analysed the content and language of a…

Scholars have demonstrated that one of the most important factors that graduate students use to ascertain the quality of their educational experience is their relationship with faculty. Research on faculty-graduate student mentoring relationships has provided valuable insights about effective practices that foster the success of graduate students.…

The purpose of this study was to examine disproportionality in transition services for students with disabilities. The authors predicted that students' transition services and secondary programs would be driven not only by their postschool goals, but also by their gender, ethnicity, disability, and school setting. To test this hypothesis, the…

Although a great deal of research assesses the value of both diversity and spirituality in the university setting, little research addresses the experience of underrepresented students and their spiritual development in an environment that is defined by a mission committed to spiritual growth. Utilizing data from the College Students' Beliefs and…

Disproportionate representation of children from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds in special education has been a longstanding concern that the 2004 reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) sought to address. The IDEA contains new requirements related to the provision of early intervening services designed to…

The focus of research on disproportionality to date has been culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students with emotional/behavioral and learning disabilities and mental retardation. There is a dearth of research on the representation of CLD learners with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Using data from the Minnesota Department of…

The National Consortium for Specialized Secondary Schools of Mathematics, Science, and Technology (NCSSSMST) has long been concerned with assisting member schools in meeting the needs of the under-represented populations in their communities. This article presents a condensed report that summarizes a major project that has continued relevance…

Hispanic students are significantly over-represented in community colleges compared to White and Black students. This paper uses a powerful but underutilized statistical technique, the Oaxaca decomposition, to explore the impact of social capital, as manifested through college financial information, on Hispanic student enrollment in 4-year and…

African American children with autism are seriously under-represented in existing genetic registries and biomedical research studies of autism. We estimated the number of African American children with autism in the St. Louis region using CDC surveillance data and present the outcomes of a concerted effort to enroll approximately one-third of that…