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Instructional practices
Embrace, Contradiction, or Prohibition: A National Scan of State Policies for Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceThis qualitative document review is a national scan of state policies pertaining to culturally responsive and sustaining education (CRSE) as of September 2025. We present a typology of states—CRSE Forward, CRSE Conflicted, CRSE Limited, and CRSE Prohibitive—reflecting how CRSE is taken up in… more →
Practice-Based, Online Modules for Expediting Teacher Skill Development
Julie Cohen, Nathan Jones, Vivian C. Wong, Alexa Quinn, Steffen Erickson, Hallie Parten, Marissa Pilger Suhr.Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentThe time available for preservice teacher education is increasingly limited. Teacher preparation programs must find innovative ways to develop teachers’ skills within contracted timeframes. One approach is to cover content with online modules. However, most modules teach about skills but do not… more →
Americans’ Attitudes about Political Neutrality in Public Schools
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceThis paper presents the results of a study of Americans’ attitudes about political neutrality in public schools. Using data from a nationally representative survey conducted in March of 2025, I find that Americans across the political spectrum largely oppose schools attempting to promote either… more →
The Consequences of Cellphone Restrictions in Classrooms
Topics: Student LearningSchools are increasingly restricting cellphones worldwide amid concerns about achievement and mental health, yet causal evidence on school-level bans remains mixed. We examine cellphone restrictions in Chile before the pandemic, where teacher discretion over cellphone use generated classroom-… more →
Classroom Composition Affects Teacher Performance Ratings
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentTeacher evaluations should reflect teaching performance rather than the characteristics of the students assigned to a teacher. Exploiting naturally occurring year-to-year variation in classroom composition within teachers, this paper examines whether teacher performance ratings assigned by… more →
Learning to Work Towards Goals: A Sequential Evaluation of the Effect of Goal-Setting Course on Academic and Soft Skills
Topics: Student LearningThis study sequentially evaluates a soft-skills course implemented in Ugandan and Kenyan primary schools that replaced academic review time with lessons on goal-setting and related skills as students prepared for high-stakes primary school-leaving exams. An exploratory evaluation in Uganda… more →
Behind the Scenes: Faculty-Staff Collaboration in a Student Success Effort
Interventions to improve postsecondary student success often involve supports that are external to the college classroom, although there is growing evidence that faculty involvement in interventions can improve student outcomes. This paper explores the challenges that arise when faculty and… more →
The Power of Personalized Attention: Comparing Pedagogical Approaches in Small Group and One-on-One Early Literacy Tutoring
Topics: Student LearningTutoring has played a significant role in pandemic-related learning recovery, supporting student learning and engagement. A recent randomized controlled trial estimated that one-on-one virtual early literacy tutoring was nearly twice as effective as two-on-one tutoring for improving student… more →
Toward More Equitable Learning Environments: Insights from Digital Trace Data on Inclusive Instructional Design Features
Topics: Student LearningSeminal teaching and learning theories converge on the critical role of instructional design in promoting equity and inclusivity in higher education. However, large-scale evidence remains limited as to which specific design features promote more equitable outcomes across diverse student… more →
Leveraging IEPs to Understand Special Education Services at Scale
7.5 million (15%) U.S. public school students have Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) that guide $14 billion in special education services. However, the content of IEPs remains unexplored, primarily because they have been historically inaccessible to researchers at scale. In this study, we… more →
Education and Climate Change: Synthesizing the Evidence to Guide Future Research
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceThe effects of climate change are becoming increasingly visible across all aspects of the U.S. PreK-12 education system. Schools are both vulnerable to climate change and uniquely positioned to be part of the solution. We synthesize interdisciplinary research and data to illustrate the bi-… more →
Impacts of Michigan Transitional Kindergarten Through Third Grade
Topics: Student LearningTransitional Kindergarten (TK) is a relatively new model of early childhood education, with little evidence on whether and how it affects children’s development. This study provides new evidence using data from Michigan, which has the nation’s second-largest TK program. Using survey data (N=171… more →
Separation of Church and State Curricula? Examining Public and Religious Private School Textbooks
Tags: Belonging, Culturally responsive schooling, Curriculum, Elementary schools, Human capital, Instructional design, Instructional practices, Instructional technology, Race, ethnicity, and education, Reading and literacy education, Science education, Social studies educationCurricula impart knowledge, instill values, and shape collective memory. Despite growing public funding for religious schools through U.S. school choice programs, little is known about what they teach. We examine textbooks from public schools, religious private schools, and home schools,… more →
From Sentence-Corrections to Deeper Dialogue: Qualitative Insights from LLM and Teacher Feedback on Student Writing
Topics: MethodsEffective writing feedback is a powerful tool for enhancing student learning, encouraging revision, and increasing motivation and agency. Yet, teachers face many challenges that prevent them from consistently providing effective writing feedback. Recent advances in generative artificial… more →
Does Increased Agency Improve the Effectiveness of Self-Directed Professional Learning for Educators?
Dorottya Demszky, Heather C. Hill, Eric S. Taylor, Ashlee Kupor, Deepak Varuvel Dennison, Chris Piech.Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentThe role of teacher agency in professional learning has been the subject of several qualitative studies but has not yet been tested in an experimental setting. To provide causal evidence of the impact of teacher agency on the effectiveness of professional learning, we conducted a preregistered… more →
Improving College Readiness in Mathematics in the Context of a Comprehensive High School Reform
This mixed methods experimental study examined the impacts of the Early College High School model on students’ college readiness in mathematics measured by their success in college preparatory mathematics courses in the 9th through 11th grades, and disaggregated for academically prepared and… more →
Same Idea, Shifting Standards: An Experimental Study of Racial-Ethnic Biases in Ambitious Math Teaching
Topics: MethodsTeacher expectations and judgments about student capabilities are predictive of student achievement, yet such judgments may be influenced by salient dimensions of student identity and invite biases. Moreover, ambitious math teaching may also invite teacher biases due to the emphasis on student-… more →
Tutor CoPilot: A Human-AI Approach for Scaling Real-Time Expertise
Topics: Student LearningTags: Generative artificial intelligence (AI) in education, Instructional design, Instructional practices, Student engagement, Student supportsGenerative AI, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), can expand access to expert guidance in domains like education, where such support is often limited. We introduce Tutor CoPilot, a Human-AI system that models expert thinking to assist tutors in real time. In a randomized controlled trial… more →
Asset-Based Implementation of Structured Adaptations in an Online Third-Grade Content Literacy Intervention
Jackie E. Relyea, Joshua B. Gilbert, Mary A. Burkhauser, Ethan Scherer, Douglas M. Mosher, Zhongyu Wei, Johanna N. Tvedt, James S. Kim.Topics: Student LearningScaling up evidence-based educational interventions presents challenges, particularly in adapting to new contexts while maintaining fidelity. Structured adaptations that integrate the strengths of experimental science (high fidelity) and improvement science (high adaptation) represent a novel… more →
The Decline in Teacher Working Conditions During and After the COVID Pandemic
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentWe study changes to teacher working conditions from 2016-17 to 2022-23, covering school years before, during, and after the COVID pandemic. We show working conditions were improving leading into the pandemic but declined when the pandemic arrived. Perhaps more surprisingly, the peak of the… more →