The author begins this discussion by thanking Larry Hedges, the editor of the journal, for giving him an opportunity to provide a commentary on this stimulating article. He also would like to congratulate the authors of the article for their insightful discussion on causal mediation analysis, which is one of the most important and challenging…

Policymakers are implementing reforms with the assumption that students do better when attending high-achieving schools. In this article, we use longitudinal data from Chicago Public Schools to test that assumption. We find that the effects of attending a higher performing school depend on the school's performance level. At elite public schools…

The three purposes of this study were to (a) describe fraction ordering errors among at-risk fourth grade students, (b) assess the effect of part-whole understanding and accuracy of fraction magnitude estimation on the probability of committing errors, and (c) examine the effect of students' ability to explain comparing problems on the probability…

Purpose: Health warnings printed on cigarette packets are an important vehicle in that they demonstrate and inform people of the threats and health risks related to smoking. Increasing the effectiveness of this vehicle is one of the purposes of this study. Research Methods: Since this research aims to describe the associations between dependent…

Interactive learning environments with body-centric technologies lie at the intersection of the design of embodied learning activities and multimodal learning analytics. Sensing technologies can generate large amounts of fine-grained data automatically captured from student movements. Researchers can use these fine-grained data to create a…

Underrepresented students have been identified as being less likely to attain a college degree than their majority counterparts. Service-learning (SL) offers students an opportunity to engage in community work and improve skills that might contribute to their educational success in college. The present study aimed to investigate the impact of SL…

This paper analyses admission decisions when students from different high school tracks apply for admission to university programmes. I derive a criterion that is optimal in the sense that it maximizes the graduation rates of the university programmes. The paper contains an empirical analysis that documents the relevance of theory and illustrates…

Purpose: This paper assesses the drop-out rate among disadvantaged students within vocational education and training. The purpose of this paper is to examine the probability of dropping out after school-based training for child welfare clients--a particularly disadvantaged group of youth. Child welfare clients' drop-out rate is compared with…

We analyse the prevalence and effectiveness of out-of-school-time (OST) study programmes among secondary aged students, focusing on their potential for reducing socio-economic gaps in educational achievement. Compared to several extant studies, including the only prior study for Britain, whose findings could be affected by heterogeneous…

Effectively educating the large English learner population requires policymakers to ensure developmentally appropriate settings and services throughout the time students are learning English, as well as during their transition to fluent English proficient status--a process termed "reclassification." Using longitudinal student-level data…

Beginning in 2002, with the election of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York City's Department of Education undertook an unprecedented overhaul of the largest school district in the United States. Over the next 10 years the Department of Education closed more than 25 large, underperforming high schools, and created almost 200 new, small high schools,…

Many American states require that students lacking basic reading proficiency after third grade be retained and remediated. We exploit a discontinuity in retention probabilities under Florida's test-based promotion policy to study its effects on student outcomes through high school. We find large positive effects on achievement that fade out…

Recent research suggests that the use of student search services is an effective part of a college's student marketing and recruitment strategy. What is not clear, however, is whether participating in a search service is an effective part of a student's college search strategy. To address this question, we exploit a recent change in the choice…

Can student performance on computer-based tests (CBT) and paper-and-pencil tests (PPT) be considered equivalent measures of student knowledge? States and school districts are grappling with this question, and although studies addressing this question are growing, additional research is needed. We report on the performance of students who took…

When performing a meta-analysis unexplained variation above that predicted by within study variation is usually modeled by a random effect. However, in some cases, this is not sufficient to explain all the variation because of outlier or unusual studies. A previously described method is to define an outlier as a study requiring a higher random…