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Belonging
Family Language Transmission Under Institutional Language Regimes Shapes Adolescent Mental Health Through Peers
Topics: Student Well-BeingIn many societies, institutional languages shape participation, recognition, and belonging, while families transmit language backgrounds across generations. These inherited backgrounds may contribute to children’s communication and, once children enter shared peer environments, to the… more →
First Impressions Matter: Instructor Gender and Women’s Persistence in Economics
Using near-random assignment of students to instructors in introductory economics at a broad-access public university, we study how instructor gender affects women’s persistence in economics. Female instructors close roughly 40 percent of the gender gap in advanced economics course-taking, with… more →
Student and Faculty Same-Race Matching at Research Universities
Racial disparities in college persistence and completion remain substantial, yet relatively little evidence exists on how student–faculty interactions contribute to these gaps in research universities. This study examines the prevalence and consequences of student–faculty same-race matching… more →
Making the Implicit Explicit: An Experiment with Implicit Gender Stereotypes and College Major Choice
We study whether making college students aware of their implicit gender–STEM stereotypes affects their pursuit of a STEM degree. In a field experiment at a large, selective U.S. university, over 800 undergraduates completed a gender–STEM Implicit Association Test (IAT) and a detailed survey on… more →
Can Peer Group Design Improve Engagement in Online STEM Courses? The Role of Motivation to Lead
Topics: Student LearningPeer interaction is important for student engagement and success in higher education and becomes even more critical in online STEM education, where limited interaction can undermine motivation and belonging—key factors for success in rigorous STEM coursework. Despite the widespread use of peer… more →
Separation of Church and State Curricula? Public Standards, Private Values, and Textbook Content
Tags: Belonging, Culturally responsive schooling, Curriculum, Elementary schools, Equity, Generative artificial intelligence (AI) in education, Human capital, Instructional design, Instructional practices, Instructional technology, LGBTQIA+ students, Parenting, Race, ethnicity, and education, Reading and literacy education, School reform, Science education, Social studies educationCurricula are a critical site of cultural transmission, yet we know little about the values conveyed in textbooks across educational settings or the forces that shape them. We examine textbooks from Texas and California public schools and religious-private and home schools spanning 1980-2022,… more →
The Role of School Climate in School Turnaround
Topics: Student Well-BeingSchool climate is critical to school effectiveness, but there is limited large-scale data available to examine the magnitude and nature of the relationship between school climate and school improvement. Drawing on statewide administrative data linked with unique teacher survey data in Michigan,… more →
Does High School Size Affect Rates of Risky Health Behaviors and Poor Mental Health Among Low-Income Teenagers? Evidence from New York City
Topics: Student Well-BeingThere is increasing concern about risky behaviors and poor mental health among school-aged youth. A critical factor in youth well-being is school attendance. This study evaluates how school organization and structure affect health outcomes by examining the impacts of a popular urban high school… more →
What we teach about race and gender: Representation in images and text of children’s books
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceBooks shape how children learn about society and norms, in part through representation of different characters. We introduce new artificial intelligence methods for systematically converting images into data and apply them, along with text analysis methods, to measure the representation of skin… more →
Can Adolescents Acquire Cultural Capital Through Social Capital Access and Exposure? Longitudinal Experimental Evidence of the Impact of Ties to College-Educated Adults
Scholarly debate focuses on whether cultural capital reproduces existing inequalities or provides a path to upward mobility. Most research, however, focuses only on cross-sectional associations and is unclear about how disadvantaged adolescents can increase their amounts of cultural capital.… more →
The Dynamic Effects of a Summer Learning Program on Behavioral Engagement in School
The evidence that student learning declines sharply (or stagnates) during the summer has motivated a substantial interest in programs that provide intensive academic instruction during the summer. However, the existing literature suggests that such programs, which typically focus on just one or… more →
The Effects of a Comprehensive College Transition Program on Psychosocial Factors Associated with Success in College
Tatiana Melguizo, Francisco Martorell, Elise Swanson, W. Edward Chi, Elizabeth Park, Adrianna Kezar.We examine the effects of a comprehensive college transition program (CCTP) on four psychosocial outcomes associated with postsecondary success: sense of belonging, mattering, and academic and social self-efficacy. The CCTP operates on three four-year campuses and includes a range of supports,… more →