Recent ucb_education_oapdeposits items

Maximizing math achievement: Strategies from the science of learning

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

To best support students' mathematical learning, it is critical to identify instructional strategies that predict achievement over time and consider how these strategies interact with individual child factors. Prior research suggests that strategies informed by the principles of the science of learning benefit children's mathematical development in early childhood. The present study extends previous findings to middle childhood, examining the relations between children's exposure to mathematics instruction informed by the science of learning principles, children's mathematics interest, and their mathematics achievement at the end of fourth grade. Participants were 4520 children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study - Kindergarten 2010-2011 (M = 10.1 years; 50 % female). Children who received more frequent mathematics instruction aligned with principles of the science of learning had higher mathematics achievement at the end of fourth grade, controlling...

Variability in Math Achievement Growth Among Students With Early Math Learning Difficulties and the Role of School Supports

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Math is a challenging subject, with many students demonstrating math learning difficulties (MD) as early as kindergarten. However, our knowledge of how these students progress in their math achievement and ways in which individual skill differences and supports facilitate math achievement for this group is limited. We used the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study - Kindergarten data set (N ∼ 18,000) to examine the patterns of math achievement growth displayed by students with MD between kindergarten and fourth grade. Using latent class growth analysis, we revealed three distinct growth classes, characterized by levels of math performance that fell very low, moderately low, and slightly low below the MD cutoff range across time. Those who displayed the lowest math performance in kindergarten also had substantially slower growth than the other classes and their non-MD peers. Students with higher initial reading achievement, cognitive flexibility, working memory, higher math skill...

Putting research into context: A paradigm shift in conceptualizing executive functions in classroom learning

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Executive functions (EFs) are related to academic performance, but interventions designed to leverage EFs to improve academic outcomes have shown inconsistent results. Academic achievement is also subject to layers of personal, social, task-relevant, and cultural contexts, all of which impact students’ EF engagement in any given task. The EF+Math Program explored the potential for EFs to positively impact math achievement by supporting inclusive research and development of EF learning approaches that are contextually embedded and attend to the needs of diverse students. Researchers, developers, and educators worked collaboratively across a portfolio of projects to co-design and evaluate learning approaches for middle school mathematics classrooms. Here we share examples of our contextualized research, and our updated conceptualizations of EFs arising from shared insights. We propose an updated, integrated framework for EF assessment and intervention in the context of middle school...

Identifying individual cognitive and motivational profiles predictive of academic growth: A combined machine learning and person-centered approach

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Identifying malleable predictors of academic achievement is critical for supporting individual differences in learning outcomes and informing targeted interventions. However, practical constraints often require reducing the number of predictors while still accounting for meaningful variance. In this study, we combined two machine learning approaches (ridge regression and lasso regression) with a person-centered technique, latent profile transition analysis (LPTA), to isolate key cognitive and motivational factors that differentiate learners and predict academic growth. Using a large, nationally representative longitudinal dataset, machine learning analyses identified three robust predictors from 14 propensity variables: prior reading skills, motivation, and working memory. Subsequent LPTA revealed five distinct profiles of learners based on different combinations of these variables, with most children remaining in stable profiles across kindergarten and first grade, though some...

Mandating Black Studies Curricula: Lessons Learned From a Black Studies Curriculum Development Project

Wed, 3 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In this qualitative study, we examined how participation in the California Black Studies Curriculum (CABSC) Project shaped the skills, practices, and mindsets of its participants. We used LaGarrett King’s Black Historical Consciousness as a conceptual framework to analyze data. We found that participants defined Black Studies both as a community-oriented field of study and as a subject area that reflects and represents the full spectrum of Black experiences. These definitions emphasized the importance of teacher-student relationship-building across all subjects. Educators reported adopting more student-centered learning pedagogies as a result of their participation in the CABSC Project. Our findings also highlighted a need for new professional development offerings by community organizations. Such opportunities can help prepare teachers to teach Black Studies effectively. Participants also discussed both enabling and constraining policies that may shape the implementation of a...

Moving beyond linguistic bordering: Utopian designs for new futures

Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We examine learning as movement as a utopian methodological approach that reorients how we shape and understand literacy learning ecologies with youth who are racialized as non-white. Understanding linguistic practice as integral to learning, and to common beliefs of what it means to be human, we consider how static notions of language are deployed as border-marking tools within settler coloniality, supporting a logic that justifies pernicious racial subordination. Within education, these ideologies frame certain learners as illegitimate and deviant, with particular implications for literacy learning. The learning sciences are uniquely positioned to re-signify what it means to be a literate body and to design learning ecologies in which youth move across these borders. Aligning ourselves with decolonial scholars, we argue that utopian methodology with a learning as movement frame allows us to forefront expansive learning design as we work alongside youth from otherized backgrounds...

When Learning as Movement meets Learning on the Move

Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Considering the special issue on learning-on-the move in light of earlier work on learning as movement, this commentary reflects on how the articles in the special issue expand the field’s theoretical matrix of the sociohistorical, cognitive, sociopolitical, sociocultural, relational, and spatial. Taken together, they tease out new subject-object, subject-subject, and culture-nature relations, and explore the significance of the movement of people and tools across and within tasks, place, everyday events, and interactions in terms of learning and development, human agency, and dignity.

Youth as historical actors in the production of possible futures

Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper, we expand the concept of historical actors to elaborate on how transformative agency has been addressed in our work with youth from nondominant communities, particularly as they leverage digital tools. First, we revisit our work with migrant students, from which the concept arose. Next, we expand this theory by proposing four indicia of the transformative nature of becoming historical actors, and offer three empirical examples to elucidate them. In our first vignette, we document how, when youth glitch during video game play, they collectively experiment with the rules, regulations, and boundaries of game design, finding ways to circumvent normative video game play and co-author their experiences. In the second vignette, we focus on siblings who take over research video cameras as their family is being filmed. We illustrate how they reshape their relation to the cameras, reorganizing participation structures through their agentive and transgressive actions. Finally,...

Civics on the Move: The Politics of Latinx Civic Integration

Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Throughout the U.S., Latinx communities represent a growing and critical segment of local, regional, and national electorates, but they are underrepresented at the polls. Their political disengagement stems from their historical sociopolitical marginalization and a lack of investment in their political integration. To foster more civic engagement among Latinx students, we propose recognizing their communities’ past and present “lived civics,” which are the actions that address community concerns but are often forgotten or not considered as political. The conception of lived civics that we propose provides a road map for fostering Latinx agency and political efficacy, and our “civics on the move” framework aims to strengthen democratic institutions, ensuring that they represent the needs of this critical segment of the U.S. population.

When Learning Is Made Consequential: A Methodological Note on Repertoires

Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This chapter focuses on the utopian methodological approach taken up by social design-based experiments, their conceptual underpinnings, and commitments. The methods are drawn from Gutiérrez’s empirical work and detail ways of seeing and capturing human learning activity crucial to envisioning and enacting new social futures with radical possibilities for those from historically nondominant communities. It elaborates methodological commitments to seeking complexity in human learning activity as it centers equity understood as worldmaking. A review of a range of methodological tools employed across Gutierrez’s studies is presented—from an analytical focus on ensembles and the multiplicity of social spaces in learning ecologies to attending to how people’s repertoires of practices are constituted through participation in everyday activity, as they move in and across the ecologies of everyday life.

Culture and everyday learning across contexts: learning with Luis Moll / Cultura y aprendizaje cotidiano entre distintos contextos: aprendiendo con Luis Moll

Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper brings three bodies of work that share an intellectual and social history into conversation to engage several key ideas in cultural historical theories of learning and development. Anchoring the discussion around the contributions of Luis Moll, the paper highlights the intersections and shared theoretical and methodological commitments across the work of Kris Gutiérrez, Barbara Rogoff and Luis Moll. We discuss how each of us has contributed to understanding the importance of context and everyday practices in youth and children and youths’ learning, attending especially to building on the strengths of Latine children and families in learning activities. We show the relationship between Luis’ concept of households’ Funds of Knowledge and Gutiérrez and Rogoff’s concept of repertoires of practice, Rogoff’s perspective on mutually constituting processes, and Gutiérrez’s contribution focusing on how people develop repertoires of practice and Funds of Knowledge in their movement...

Down There

Fri, 1 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Down There

Understanding how micro affirmations support multiply marginalized social justice school leaders to thrive

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Purpose: This paper illuminates and amplifies enduring wisdom from the everyday experiences of thriving women of color social justice school leaders who receive and give microaffirmations as an essential part of their asset-based leadership praxis. This study contributes to the knowledge base that informs leadership scholarship and practice in service of creating the conditions that truly support and sustain a diverse educator workforce. Design/methodology/approach: This study uses a purposive case study of four women of color social justice school leaders. Information was gathered over multiple years based on four volunteers from a professional development support network. Sources include ten observations of affinity-based network meetings; eight in depth, semi-structured interviews, feedback surveys and written accounts of participants; descriptive and reflective field notes...

In their hands: Multimodal learning analytics as reflective-practice resources empowering mathematics teachers’ professional development

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Background Educational researchers have been using multimodal data (e.g., eye-tracking) to study teachers’ instructional practices. Yet, by and large, these technologies have not been handed over to teachers as resources for self-reflection. Aims This exploratory study aimed to develop and evaluate novel methodologies for supporting teachers in using multimodal data, specifically eye-tracking-overlaid multiple-point-of-view videos, as resources for deepening their understanding of learning and teaching. Sample and methods Five pre-service mathematics teachers (PSMT) participated in this study. First, they collaboratively constructed a body-scale polyhedron while wearing eye-tracking devices. In a subsequent structured reflection session, the participants collectively analyzed eye-tracking-overlaid multiple-point-of-view recordings of their construction activity. Drawing on Goodwin's Co-Operative Action theory, the researchers then qualitatively micro-analyzed the PSMTs' individual...

Patterns, Probabilities, and People: Making Sense of Quantitative Change in Complex Systems

Mon, 8 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The learning sciences community has made significant progress in understanding how people think and learn about complex systems. But less is known about how people make sense of the quantitative patterns and mathematical formalisms often used to study these systems. In this article, we make a case for attending to and supporting connections between the behavior of complex systems, and the quantitative and mathematical descriptions. We introduce a framework to examine how students connect the behavioral and quantitative aspects of complex systems and use it to analyze interviews with 11 high school students as they interacted with an agent-based simulation that produces simple exponential-like population growth. Although the students were comfortable describing many connections between the simulation’s behavior and the quantitative patterns it generated, we found that they did not readily describe connections between individual behaviors and patterns of change. Case studies suggest...

Epistemic gameplay and discovery in computational model-based inquiry activities

Mon, 8 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In computational modeling activities, learners are expected to discover the inner workings of scientific and mathematical systems: First elaborating their understandings of a given system through constructing a computer model, then “debugging” that knowledge by testing and refining the model. While such activities have been shown to support science learning, difficulties building and using computational models are common and reduce learning benefits. Drawing from Collins and Ferguson (Educ Psychol 28(1):25–42, 1993), we conjecture that a major cause for such difficulties is a misalignment between the epistemic games (modeling strategies) learners play, and the epistemic forms (model types) a given modeling environment is designed to support. To investigate, we analyzed data from a study in which ten groups of U. S. fifth graders (n = 28) worked to create stop motion animations and agent-based computational models (ABMs) to discover the particulate nature of...

How Teachers Envision Using Data Visualization Discussion Tasks in Classroom Instruction

Mon, 8 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A growing number of teaching materials invite students to discuss the complex mathematical, contextual and social aspects of data visualizations. Orchestrating such discussions can be difficult, as this requires teachers to balance a variety of learning goals and student perspectives. This paper examines how teachers interact with data visualization discussion tasks—specifically, those that engage visualizations’ social complexities—as they consider using them in their own classrooms. Drawing from semi-structured clinical interviews with six U.S.-based teachers as they reviewed discussion tasks called Data Story Bytes, we explore: How did these teachers envision using these data visualization discussions in their classrooms? And, What mathematical, contextual, and/or social aspects of visualizations did teachers emphasize when engaging with the discussion task materials? We found that all teachers envisioned using data visualization discussions as lesson openers or routine activities,...

Toward Ontological Alignment: Coordinating Student Ideas with the Representational System of a Computational Modeling Unit for Science Learning

Mon, 8 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Computational modeling tools present unique opportunities and challenges for student learning. Each tool has a representational system that impacts the kinds of explorations students engage in. Inquiry aligned with a tool’s representational system can support more productive engagement toward target learning goals. However, little research has examined how teachers can make visible the ways students’ ideas about a phenomenon can be expressed and explored within a tool’s representational system. In this paper, we elaborate on the construct of ontological alignment—that is, identifying and leveraging points of resonance between students’ existing ideas and the representational system of a tool. Using interaction analysis, we identify alignment practices adopted by a science teacher and her students in a computational agent-based modeling unit. Specifically, we describe three practices: (1) Elevating student ideas relevant to the tool’s representational system; (2) Exploring and...

A Call for a Humanistic Stance Toward K–12 Data Science Education

Mon, 8 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There is growing interest in how to better prepare K–12 students to work with data. In this article, we assert that these discussions of teaching and learning must attend to the human dimensions of data work. Specifically, we draw from several established lines of research to argue that practices involving the creation and manipulation of data are shaped by a combination of personal experiences, cultural tools and practices, and political concerns. We demonstrate through two examples how our proposed humanistic stance highlights ways that efforts to make data personally relevant for youth also necessarily implicate cultural and sociopolitical dimensions that affect the design and learning opportunities in data-rich learning environments. We offer an interdisciplinary framework based on literature from multiple bodies of educational research to inform design, teaching and research for more effective, responsible, and inclusive student learning experiences with and about data.

Right but wrong: How students' mechanistic reasoning and conceptual understandings shift when designing agent‐based models using data

Mon, 8 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract When learning about scientific phenomena, students are expected to mechanistically explain how underlying interactions produce the observable phenomenon and conceptually connect the observed phenomenon to canonical scientific knowledge. This paper investigates how the integration of the complementary processes of designing and refining computational models using real‐world data can support students in developing mechanistic and canonically accurate explanations of diffusion. Specifically, we examine two types of shifts in how students explain diffusion as they create and refine computational models using real‐world data: a shift towards mechanistic reasoning and a shift from noncanonical to canonical explanations. We present descriptive statistics for the whole class as well as three student work examples to illustrate these two shifts as 6th grade students engage in an 8‐day unit on the diffusion of ink in hot and cold water. Our findings show that (1) students develop...

Balancing Curricular and Pedagogical Needs in Computational Construction Kits: Lessons From the DeltaTick Project

Mon, 8 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

To successfully integrate simulation and computational methods into K–12 STEM education, learning environments should be designed to help educators maintain balance between (a) addressing curricular content and practices and (b) attending to student knowledge and interests. We describe DeltaTick, a graphical simulation construction interface for the NetLogo modeling environment designed to make computational model construction a more accessible and responsive part of science and mathematics curricular activities through domain‐specific, customizable construction libraries. With DeltaTick, learners assemble and reassemble predefined sets of “behavior blocks” to build simulations that represent a particular domain of study. When needed, blocks can be added, adjusted, or replaced to better reflect student knowledge, interests, or questions. We present coding analyses and vignettes from DeltaTick enactments in middle and high school classrooms to illustrate ways these features allowed...

Mapping the Conceptual Foundation(s) of ‘Data Science Education’

Mon, 8 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Mapping the Conceptual Foundation(s) of ‘Data Science Education’

Exploring Climate Change Through Students’ Place Connections and Public Data Sets

Mon, 8 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Climate change is a pressing societal challenge. It is also a pedagogical challenge and a worldwide phenomenon, whose local impacts vary across different locations. Climate change reflects global inequity; communities that contribute most to emissions have greater economic resources to shelter from its consequences, while the lowest emitters are most vulnerable. It is scientifically complex, and simultaneously evokes deep emotions. These overlapping issues call for new ways of science teaching that center personal, social, emotional, and historical dimensions of the crisis. In this article, we describe a middle school science curriculum approach that invites students to explore large-scale data sets and author their own data stories about climate change impacts and inequities by blending data and narrative texts. Students learn about climate change in ways that engage their personal and cultural connections to place; engage with complex causal relationships across multiple variables,...

The co-construction of epistemological framing in clinical interviews and implications for research in science education

Mon, 8 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Science educators demonstrated that students’ framings – their expectations of what is going on – influence how they participate, and what science knowledge they reveal, in clinical interviews. This paper complements research that explores how interviewers are likely to affect student framings, by exploring how subtler interactions can lead students to change their framings, and thus their behaviour, in unexpected ways. We present data from interviews with two students, Sarah and Omar, as they reasoned about evaporation and condensation. Sarah demonstrated spontaneous changes in how she participated over the course of the interview, whereas Omar demonstrated subtler changes that existing methods may not capture. These changes affected the nature of scientific knowledge and reasoning demonstrated by each participant, but could not be fully explained by response to interviewer behaviour. We use the constructs of footing and positioning theory to examine how students participated...

Exploring variability during data preparation: a way to connect data, chance, and context when working with complex public datasets

Mon, 8 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Data preparation (also called “wrangling” or “cleaning”) – the evaluation and manipulation of data prior to formal analysis – is often dismissed as a precursor to meaningful engagement with a dataset. Here, we re-envision data preparation in light of calls to prepare students for a data-rich world. Traditionally, curricular statistics explorations involve data that are derived from observations that students record themselves or that reflect familiar, relatively closed systems. In contrast, pre-constructed public datasets are much larger in scope and involve temporal, geographic, and other dimensions that complicate inference and blur boundaries between “signal” and “noise.” As a result, students have fewer opportunities to consider sources of variability in such datasets. Due to these constraints, we argue that data preparation becomes an important site for students to reason about variability with public data. Through analyses of repeated task-based interviews with five pairs...

Who creates our computational worlds? A review of Critically Conscious Computing: Methods for secondary education

Mon, 8 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Despite growing attention to the social and ethical dimensions of Computer Science (CS), few practical resources exist to teach and learn CS through the lens of social responsibility. In Critically Conscious Computing, Ko and colleagues provide a comprehensive overview of foundational computing concepts with a sharp and needed critical perspective. In this review, we attend not only to the content of the book, but also to its format as a free, online, “living” text. The book is commendable for its tight integration of technical and socio-critical aspects of computing, approachable conversational style, and collection of flexible and practical resources for teachers. It would benefit from refinement of the integration chapters and a more explicit model for how educators themselves can approach new or different CS concepts through a critical frame. Overall, we strongly recommend this book for CS Educators at all levels for its balance of depth and practicality.

What’s the Technology For? Teacher Attention and Pedagogical Goals in a Modeling-Focused Professional Development Workshop

Mon, 8 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This paper explores the role that technology can play in engaging pre-service teachers with the iterative, “messy” nature of model-based inquiry. Over the course of 5 weeks, 11 pre-service teachers worked in groups to construct models of diffusion using a computational animation and simulation toolkit, and designed lesson plans for the toolkit. Content analyses of group discussions and lesson plans document attention to content, representation, revision, and evaluation as interwoven aspects of modeling over the course of the workshop. When animating, only content and representation were heavily represented in group discussions. When simulating, all four aspects were represented to different extents across groups. Those differences corresponded with different planned uses for the technology during lessons: to teach modeling, to engage learners with one another’s ideas, or to reveal student ideas. We identify specific ways in which technology served an important role in eliciting...

Situating Data Science: Exploring How Relationships to Data Shape Learning

Mon, 8 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The emerging field of Data Science has had a large impact on science and society. This has led to over a decade of calls to establish a corresponding field of Data Science Education. There is still a need, however, to more deeply conceptualize what a field of Data Science Education might entail in terms of scope, responsibility, and execution. This special issue explores how one distinguishing feature of Data Science—its focus on data collected from social and environmental contexts within which learners often find themselves deeply embedded—suggests serious implications for learning and education. The learning sciences is uniquely positioned to investigate how such contextual embeddings impact learners’ engagement with data including conceptual, experiential, communal, racialized, spatial, and political dimensions. This special issue demonstrates the richly layered relationships learners build with data and reveals them to be not merely utilitarian mechanisms for learning about...

How to be “Choosy”: Wrangling big datasets for the classroom

Thu, 4 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract Educators are being encouraged to teach with “big” datasets that have more cases and attributes than are typically used in the classroom. When introduced carefully, these types of datasets can allow students to engage in complex and self‐directed reasoning, develop data management and inquiry skills, and experience data analysis in a way that is more authentic to professional practice. However, “big data” is also often unwieldy. It can overwhelm students, overload their software tools, and interfere with planful analysis. How can we make such datasets manageable? This paper presents pedagogical strategies and technical methods for educators, educational designers, and young investigators to reduce the number of cases or attributes in a large dataset in ways that do not unduly compromise their analyses. We illustrate these strategies with interactive demonstrations in two freely‐available open source tools: the Choosy plugin in CODAP, and a Python Jupyter notebook.

Toward an Enhanced Understanding of the Dual-Factor Model of Mental Health

Thu, 4 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Various studies and methodological approaches have been used to examine indicators of distress and wellness aligned with a dual-factor model (DFM) of mental health. Through a review of the DFM literature and this study’s analyses, this paper aims to gain a deeper understanding of DFM and enhance its value as a resource for research and practical implementation in schools. Latent profile analysis (LPA) techniques were applied and replicated using two large population size samples (Sample A: N = 17,358; Sample B: N = 17,927), randomly drawn from a larger sample of 538,527 California adolescents in grades 6–12. The LPA used the California Student Wellness Index (CSWI), which was developed, co-normed, and intended for use within the DFM framework. Three ordered latent profiles were identified (i.e., flourishing, moderate, and troubled) with expected associations with distal outcomes of depressed and hopeless mood, suicidal thoughts, school connectedness, academic grades, and school...

Fostering Culturally Responsive Social-Emotional Learning Practices in Rural Transitional Kindergarten Classrooms

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Despite the positive impact of culturally responsive social emotional learning (CR-SEL) in enhancing students' academic achievement and emotional resilience, less is known about how it is employed in rural school settings. We employed a case study design to explore how rural transitional kindergarten (TK) teachers in California practice CR-SEL in their classrooms. Ten TK teachers from seven California rural schools were individually interviewed online. Results of the thematic analysis showed three major themes of CR-SEL practices: multicultural and critical perspective development, inclusive environment, and family engagement. Participants identified different strategies to teach CR-SEL practices in their classrooms. Findings extend our understanding of CR-SEL in practice, and provide practical and research implications for school psychologists, educators, and policymakers.

Understanding How a Leaders of Color Network Supports the Retention of a Diverse Leader Workforce

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Research suggests that diversifying the educator workforce has a strong positive influence on students, particularly vulnerable and historically underserved groups. This article presents an intrinsic case study of a Leaders of Color Network that provided promising design elements to reduce professional and racial isolation, promote collective sense making, and develop coalitions. It also highlights how employers must do more than hire leaders of color. They must create systematic strategies to uplift, empower, and amplify the needs of diverse leaders.

Cultivating Resilience During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Voices from Principals in the U.S.

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

At the height of pandemic-era procedures amidst great changes and uncertainty, school principals across the world were challenged to navigate and restructure ways to lead their schools. While leveraging crisis management leadership, principals needed to be attentive and adaptive to the emotional wellbeing and health of their employees. Today scholars are beginning to understand how school principals navigated the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic and to explore the tensions principals experienced as they attempted to balance equity, excellence, and accountability while being mindful of both the wellbeing of students, families, and teachers, and their schools’ outcomes. However, there is still limited research examining principal wellbeing alongside resilience factors during the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to understand ways in which principals build resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper examines the perceptions of work-related stressors of public-school...

Designing Professional Learning to Support District and School Administrators of Color

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

While a growing body of scholarship has examined professional learning communities for teachers of color, only a paucity of research has explored a community of practice (CoP) for district and school building leaders of color. This study investigated a 1.5-year CoP for traditional public school district and charter management leaders (n = 27) across five geographic regions in the United States. We drew on the Equity Action Conceptual Framework and used a pre-, mid-, and post-professional learning community survey and two rounds of semi-structured interviews to understand how these leaders reported and described learning dispositions and skills to support their school systems’ most historically resilient and marginalized students. We analyzed survey responses both across the professional learning community (PLC) and within the five geographic regions. Across the CoP, participants reported learning how to assess the organization’s will, skill, knowledge, and capacity to disrupt...

Rogue Jotería Platformization: co-constructing queer futurities in Latinx digital drag ecologies

Wed, 5 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This paper explores Latinx Queer digital praxis and how drag performance can function as pedagogical and world-making acts of resistance. Building on previous work on Cyborg Jotería Pedagogies and platform studies, we use digital ethnography and multimodal discourse analysis to examine how Latinx drag artists and audiences coconstruct learning ecologies that transform platform economies intro spaces of relationality, care, and critique. We identify two practices: 1) “Estás en tu casa” (you are in your home) where belonging is enacted through linguistic play and hospitality; and 2) “Como mugre y uña” (like dirt under a fingernail) where performer-audience boundaries are blurred through co-creation. These practices illuminate how Latinx Queer communities leverage digital drag to resist linguistic imperialism, capitalist impetus of platforms, and mainstream sanitization of drag culture. We argue that Rogue Jotería Platformization operates as a speculative and utopian methodology...

MCA editorial - vol 31 issue 3-4

Wed, 5 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

MCA editorial - vol 31 issue 3-4

Feminisms in education: struggles and solidarities in a time of regressive social change

Wed, 5 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article serves as the introduction to the special issue, “Beyond Now: Feminist Politics, Policy, and Research Futures in Education.” As co-editors, we came together as colleagues to examine how the field engages feminist thought and what this means for advancing critical inquiry, theorizing, and research praxis. We begin by situating our work within a period representing widespread cultural and political change, and in doing so, offer a chronicling of feminist situatedness to such historical moments—a looking back to reenvision research considerations for those who engage this work. After discussing the urgency of feminisms in education, we present an overview of nine articles by authors who advance a range of critical theoretical and methodological frameworks. We curated this special issue across diverse disciplinary, epistemic, generational, geographic, and professional backgrounds to contemplate necessary political, policy, and research futures beyond now—a horizon of...

District Demographic Predictors of Anti-“CRT” and Anti-LGBTQ Disruptions

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Purpose: This research quantitatively examines what predicts anti-“CRT” and anti-LGBTQ political issues and educational disruptions in US school districts. Our study builds upon prior work that finds educational disruptions to be prevalent in suburbs and adds to an existing body of literature that is largely qualitative and theoretical. Research Methods/Approach: Using a nationally representative sample of district leaders from the 2022 American School District Panel, we conducted a series of logistic regressions and a battery of robustness checks to investigate district characteristics that increase or decrease the odds of districts experiencing political issues or educational disruptions. Findings: We find (1) district affluence rather than racial composition to be a stronger predictor of actual educational disruption; (2) reduced likelihood of issues and disruptions in small school districts potentially due to the social cohesion and homogeneity in these places; and (3) educational...

Growing Minds, Diverging Paths: Psychological Suzhi Trajectories and Adolescent Adjustment in China

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Psychological suzhi is a culturally rooted construct that emerged from China’s quality-oriented educational reform, aiming to promote positive adolescent development. It integrates cognitive, individuality, and adaptability qualities, forming a dynamic internal system that supports resilience and mental health in Chinese contexts. Despite its theoretical prominence in Chinese educational discourse, research on its developmental trajectory and long-term implications for adolescent adjustment remains limited. This three-year longitudinal study (six waves) followed 1812 middle school students (Mage = 12.56 years, SD = 0.73, 51.4% boys) and 2482 high school students (Mage = 15.43 years, SD = 0.60, 49.6% boys). Latent growth models revealed a general decline in psychological suzhi among middle school students and a gradual increase among high school students. Latent class growth models identified four distinct trajectory profiles for each developmental stage—middle school: top/stable...

The Use and Validity of Standardized Achievement Tests for Evaluating New Curricular Interventions in Mathematics and Science

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We investigated the use and validity of standardized achievement tests for summative evaluation of 78 educational intervention projects funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) math and science education program. Investigators from 46 projects evaluated curricular interventions with standardized achievement tests as outcome measures. Twenty-five of the projects had potential validity problems related to a misalignment between the achievement test and the intervention. A closer analysis of 11 of those projects flagged as high risk for validity problems showed that only 6 projects attended to the validity of the test, and only 1 project provided adequate validity evidence. We conclude that there is widespread inappropriate use of achievement tests that threatens the validity of educational evaluations. To better support innovation, evaluators must dedicate more attention to the validity of the outcome measures they use.

Examining the Effects of a Peer-Learning Research Community on the Development of Students’ Researcher Identity, Confidence, and STEM Interest and Engagement

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Examining the Effects of a Peer-Learning Research Community on the Development of Students’ Researcher Identity, Confidence, and STEM Interest and Engagement

Correction to: Cultural sensitivity of early childhood assessments based on learning progressions: a Rasch person fit analysis

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Correction to: Cultural sensitivity of early childhood assessments based on learning progressions: a Rasch person fit analysis

Bayesian Identification, Estimation, and Evaluation of Growth Mixture Models

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Growth Mixture Models (GMMs) are widely used in education and psychology to model individual differences in developmental trajectories through discrete latent classes and continuous random effects. Despite their capability to represent complex longitudinal structures, effectively identifying, estimating, and evaluating GMMs poses significant methodological challenges. This dissertation addresses these challenges through theoretical analysis, empirical demonstrations, and simulation studies.The first chapter investigates problematic behaviors in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimation caused by degenerate nonidentifiability in finite mixture models. It identifies underlying causes, introduces diagnostics to detect such issues, and demonstrates through simulations that using more informative priors significantly reduces these problems. An application of GMMs to data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), analyzing reading skill development from ages 6 to 14, illustrates...

Educational Change through Bureaucratic Effectiveness: The Role of Mid-level Networks

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Studies of networks for educational change often focus on webs of teachers, school leaders, policymakers, and philanthropists, with little attention to staff at the middle level, who arguably have immense potential to effect change. This article explores an initiative for educational change through mid-level staff using the case of a nonprofit that places its members in large, public education bureaucracies in a developing country. I explore a mechanism for how the strategic patchwork of staff can support change through improved bureaucracy. First, staff are intentionally placed, reputationally distinct, and purposely connected. Second, these individuals influence bureaucratic effectiveness through coordinated policies, reduced organizational friction, and informal information sharing. Third, the improved coordination supports policy creation, program implementation, and candid evaluation of processes on the ground. Integrating studies of education, state bureaucracy, and civil...

Improving Teacher Retention by Addressing Teachers' Compassion Fatigue

Thu, 5 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Improving Teacher Retention by Addressing Teachers' Compassion Fatigue

Does working memory moderate the effect of fading on math performance?

Wed, 4 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

BACKGROUND: Cognitive load theory suggests that novice learners may have limited working memory capacity; thus, difficult materials may impose cognitive load and prevent learning. To remedy this, proponents have suggested using various forms of worked examples to reduce cognitive load, such as fading or sequentially removing steps of a problem until the learner is solving it on their own. However, it's unclear how working memory may moderate the effect of these instructional strategies. AIMS: This study examined whether working memory influences performance on faded worked examples. METHODS: In the current study, 6th-grade participants (N = 114) were randomly assigned to (1) worked examples with self-explanation prompts, (2) fading with self-explanation prompts, (3) fading, and finally (4) problem-solving only conditions and assigned three links of homework (pretest, 3 days of the intervention, posttest) on geometry problems. An online computer tutor, ASSISTments, administered...

The Ecology of US Education Nonprofits

Wed, 21 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Ecology of US Education Nonprofits

Mapping Organizational Theory With SCRIPTS

Wed, 7 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Organizational theory has developed in numerous directions that have been difficult to integrate. This review synthesizes them into seven perspectives, with theories focused within and beyond the organization (i.e., intra- and extra-organizational dynamics). It proposes the acronym SCRIPTS: structure, culture, relations, institutions, professions, transformation, and social conflict. Within organizations, structure focuses on theories of bureaucracy, management, routines, and decision-making while culture focuses on shared values, identity, climate, and sensemaking. Relations involve studies of interpersonal and interorganizational networks. Institutions focus on the macro-dynamics of fields and isomorphism, and micro-dynamics of entrepreneurship and inhabited institutions. Professions refer to psychological factors shaping individual performance and sociological factors shaping work and occupations. Transformation involves episodic and gradual changes within organizations and...

Violence Directed Against Teachers During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Social–Ecological Analysis of Safety and Well-Being

Tue, 8 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Violence against teachers is a public health crisis that has devastating effects on school personnel well-being, health, and retention, as well as students' educational outcomes. In collaboration with national organizations, the American Psychological Association Task Force on Violence against Educators conducted the first national survey on educator victimization that included 4,136 pre-K through 12th-grade teachers from all 50 U.S. states and Puerto Rico during the pandemic. In the current study, 43.7% of teachers reported experiencing at least one verbal threat, physical assault, and/or property damage, with verbal threats being the most prevalent form of victimization during the pandemic. Using a social-ecological framework and logistic regression analyses, characteristics of teachers, school climate, and school organizational and community factors were examined as predictors of teacher victimization (i.e., verbal threats, physical, property violence) during the pandemic....

Violence and Aggression Against Educators and School Personnel, Retention, Stress, and Training Needs: National Survey Results

Mon, 7 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Aggression and violence against educators and school personnel have raised public health concerns that require attention from researchers, policymakers, and training providers in U.S. schools. School aggression and violence have negative effects on school personnel health and retention and on student achievement and development. In partnership with several national organizations, the American Psychological Association (APA) Task Force on Violence Against Educators and School Personnel administered two national, multi-informant, cross-sectional surveys. Time 1 data were collected in 2020-2021 from 14,966 respondents; participants reflected on their experiences of violence and aggression before COVID-19 and during COVID-19 restrictions in this survey. One year later, in 2022, 11,814 respondents completed the Time 2 survey after COVID-19 restrictions ended. Participants included teachers, school psychologists, social workers, counselors, staff members, and administrators from all...

School Safety Concerns and Solutions: A Qualitative Analysis of U.S. School Psychologists’ Perspectives

Wed, 2 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In the present study, we analyzed qualitative survey data from 538 school psychologists across schools in the United States regarding their perceptions of school safety issues and potential strategies to address school safety. There are only a few studies exploring the experiences and perspectives of school psychologists that have been based on large-scale qualitative data. Using inductive coding, three themes for safety concerns emerged: (a) aggressive behaviors from students, (b) mental and behavioral needs, and (c) limited staffing. Three themes also emerged for potential solutions: (a) professional development/training, (b) school-family-community relationships, and (c) threat assessments. These findings from school psychologists have implications for addressing structural issues to prevent school violence in research and practice. Policy recommendations to inform resource allocation and improve school safety are discussed.

Risk Profiles of Korean Adolescents in Relations With Contextual Factors: Implications for Multi-Tiered Systems of Support

Wed, 2 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction: Although prior studies have supported the effectiveness of Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) on addressing social, emotional, behavioral, and academic challenges faced by youth at-risk, educators using MTSS often do not consider contextual factors which may also influence youth at-risk and the interventions targeting them. This study thus aimed to identify youth at-risk who should be referred to targeted instructions within MTSS by examining the risk profiles of Korean adolescents. Based on the identified risk profiles, we also tried to investigate the effect of contextual factors on deciding youth at-risk and confirm whether and/or what contextual factors should be considered when implementing targeted interventions for them. Method: To accomplish the research goal, a latent profile analysis on risk factors of Korean adolescents was performed, using the first year data of "Korean Children and Youth Panel Study (KCYPS) 2018." Results: Four risk profiles were...

From Accountability to Algorithms: Interorganizational Learning and the Transformation of Quantification in Education

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract: While studies often explore the intended and unintended consequences of technologies, few have theorized how and why they change. One crucial transformation in quantitative technologies is the shift from evaluative accountability to predictive algorithms, such as in schools that use dropout prediction systems. Using the case of ninth-grade early warning indicators, I argue that the transformation of quantification resulted from interorganizational learning, or the acquisition of new knowledge through the interaction of different organizations. In particular, I show how technology changes gradually from organization-level evaluation to individual-based prediction to systems-focused improvement. Pivotal to such changes were new forms of knowledge that emerged (1) as “instructing” organizations directed changes and “receiving” organizations resisted them; (2) as organizations in various fields reciprocally collaborated; and (3) as similar organizations...

Walking the number line: towards an enactive understanding of integer arithmetic

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Early mathematics education presents middle-school students with the challenge of adding and subtracting negative integers. This paper reports on results from the experimental implementation of a proposed educational design for integer arithmetic that utilized the number-line (NL) form as a resource for students to enact simple addition and subtraction problems under two conditions: (1) a body-scale floor-based NL, where arithmetic operations are enacted by walking; and (2) a regular desk-based NL supplemented with an action-figure for re-enacting the floor-based solutions. This design is the first iteration of a design-based research project and was developed based on the experience of the first author’s five years teaching in this topic. 15 Grade 7 students participated in the project’s pilot study that centered on how students coordinate procedurally analogous calculation activities across the large and small NL. The activity elicited students’ implicit confusions surrounding...

How school policies, strategies, and relational factors contribute to teacher victimization and school safety

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In this study, we examined how school policies and strategies (i.e., positive discipline, hardening strategies, and positive behavioral strategies) affect teacher relational factors and teacher reports of victimization and safety. Specifically, we examined the mediational roles of teacher support of student learning, maltreatment of students by teachers, and teachers' differential treatment of students in schools. Using a sample of 6643 pre-K-12th-grade teachers, path analysis results revealed that positive behavior strategies, hardening strategies, and positive discipline were indirectly associated with teacher victimization and sense of safety. Additionally, teachers' perceptions of other teachers maltreating students had the greatest contributions to their sense of safety and victimization by students. Positive discipline was directly and indirectly associated with teacher victimization and safety. Implications and directions for future studies are discussed.

Addressing Violence Against Educators: What Do Teachers Say Works?

Fri, 7 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

School personnel safety and well-being have received increased attention via national outlets; however, research is limited. The current investigation is the first to examine the reported use and perceived effectiveness of commonly used school-based intervention approaches for addressing school violence, specifically violence against teachers in U.S. schools. A sample of 4,471 prekindergarten-12th grade teachers was asked to rate the use and perceived effectiveness of common school-based approaches, namely exclusionary discipline (e.g., suspensions), school hardening (e.g., metal detectors, school police), prevention (e.g., school climate improvement, social-emotional learning, classroom management), and crisis intervention practices (e.g., de-escalation, physical restraint) to address verbal/threatening, physical, and property violence against teachers. Findings revealed that teachers rated prevention practices as most effective in reducing violence against teachers. The use...

Teacher-Directed Violence and Anxiety and Stress: Predicting Intentions to Transfer and Quit

Mon, 3 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Teacher well-being and experiences of violence have become issues of national concern, and teacher shortages have increased since the onset of COVID-19. In this national study, we examined verbal and physical violence against teachers from multiple aggressors and the role of anxiety and stress in predicting intentions to transfer positions or quit the profession. The majority of the sample of 9,370 pre-Kindergarten-12th grade teachers was White (79%) and female (79%). Descriptive analyses revealed that 25% of teachers reported intentions to transfer schools and 43% of teachers reported intentions to quit teaching. Structural equation model results indicated pre-COVID-19 verbal and threatening violence from students, parents, colleagues, and administrators predicted teacher anxiety and stress and intentions to transfer schools (R² ranged from .18 to .23) and quit the profession during COVID-19 (R² ranged from .34 to .36). Anxiety and stress significantly mediated...

Infect, Attach or Bounce off?: Linking Real Data and Computational Models to Make Sense of the Mechanisms of Diffusion

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This study explores how the interplay between data and model design shifts 6th graders' students' ideas about diffusion as they build a range of models (“paper and pencil” and computational models). We present a new web-based environment and approach that integrates model-based and data-based features in the same display which facilitates the comparison of models and real-world data. Further, we illustrate how this environment and approach lead students to converge on one canonical scientific model.

Dancing geometry: imagining auxiliary lines by reflecting on physical movement

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Constructing auxiliary lines is an important component skill in solving geometry problems, and yet it is difficult to teach, precisely because these lines are ‘invisible’ until they are actually drafted. Is there any intuitive resource that geometry students could possibly draw on to develop this skill? Is there any domain of human activity where we all naturally entertain imaginary lines, even if we are not aware of doing this? And yet, if so, how would these tacit imaginary lines come forth to be geometrical auxiliary lines? It turns out that dancers spontaneously imagine linear structures, known as attentional anchors, to help them enact their movements. These attentional anchors are drawn out in the dancer's subjective perception and are, therefore, invisible to others. Notwithstanding, we have used an embodied design-based research framework to create a gridded floor mat where students can render their covert dance-oriented attentional anchors as overt geometry-oriented auxiliary...

Administrator Turnover: The Roles of District Support, Safety, Anxiety, and Violence from Students

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Researchers have examined the importance of school administrative support for teacher safety, victimization, anxiety, and retention; however, studies to date have rarely focused on school administrators' perceptions of support by their district leaders, and its relation to administrators' anxiety/stress, safety, and their intentions to transfer or quit their jobs. In the current study of 457 PreK-12th grade school administrators in the United States, structural equation modeling was used to examine relations between administrators' perceptions of support from their district leaders and their anxiety/stress, safety, and intentions to transfer or quit their jobs. Administrator experiences of violence by student offenders served as a moderator. Results indicated that administrators' perceptions of district leaders' support were associated with lower intentions to transfer or quit their positions both directly and indirectly as a function of decreased anxiety/stress. District support...

The Role of Gender Norms on Intimate Partner Violence Among Newly Married Adolescent Girls and Young Women in India: A Longitudinal Multilevel Analysis

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Gender norms have been posited to impact intimate partner violence (IPV), but there is scant evidence of the longitudinal association between community-level gender norms and IPV. Using longitudinal data on 3,965 married girls surveyed in India, we fitted mixed-effects ordinal and binary logistic regression models for physical IPV intensity and occurrence of sexual IPV. We found a 26% increase in the odds that women experience frequent physical IPV per one unit increase in greater community-level equitable gender norms. We did not find an association between community-level equitable gender norms and sexual IPV. Findings suggest that the relationship between gender norms and physical and sexual IPV differs, indicating the need for tailored interventions for different types of IPV.

Latent profiles of home behaviour problems in Trinidad and Tobago

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Caregivers who interact with children at home can provide a critical, complementary perspective on a child's behaviour functioning. This research used a parent-administered measure of problem behaviours to study perceptions of child behaviours across home situations. We applied latent profile analysis to identify subgroups of children with common behavioural tendencies in a nationally representative sample (N = 709) of 4- to 13-year-old children in Trinidad and Tobago. This study (a) identified latent profiles of children's over- and underactive behaviour problems in varied home settings and (b) examined how profile membership predicted academic skills and teacher-observed problem behaviours. The best-fitting four-profile model included one profile of adjusted behaviours (56%), one of the elevated attention-seeking behaviours (21%), a profile featuring withdrawn and disengaged behaviours (15%) and a relatively rare profile emphasising aggressive behaviours (8%). Children classified...

Demonstration of Sympathetic Orchestra: An Interactive Conducting Education System for Responsive, Tacit Skill Development

Thu, 5 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Demonstration of Sympathetic Orchestra: An Interactive Conducting Education System for Responsive, Tacit Skill Development

Disparities in Food Insecurity and Academic Achievement Among California Public University Students: An Intersectional Approach

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Background/Objectives: Historically racialized status (HRS) and low socioeconomic position (SEP) are independent risk factors for food insecurity and poor academic achievement among college students. Despite increased enrollment of students from historically racialized groups and low SEP, little is known regarding the intersectional experience of these contemporary student characteristics with food security status or academic achievement. The purpose of this study was to examine the intersections of racialized status and SEP with food insecurity and academic achievement among undergraduate students attending a public university system in California. Methods: This cross-sectional study included 1170 undergraduates who utilized their campus food pantry between June and August 2019 at nine University of California campuses. Racialized status and SEP were used to construct four distinct intersectional positions: (1) White, not low SEP (i.e., traditional students; reference),...

Hybrid teaching intelligence: Lessons learned from an embodied mathematics learning experience