The Yellow Ribbon Suicide Prevention Program has gained national and international recognition for its school- and community-based activities. After the introduction of Yellow Ribbon to a Denver-area high school, staff and adolescents were surveyed to determine if help-seeking behavior had increased. Using a pre-post intervention design, staff at an experimental school and comparison school wer...

This dissertation research focuses on assessing student behavior, academic emotions, and knowledge from a middle school online learning environment, and analyzing their potential effects on decisions about going to college. Using students’ longitudinal data ranging from their middle school, to high school, to postsecondary years, I leverage quantitative methodologies to investigate antecedents ...

beliefs. Concrete attitudes are grounded in people’s material realities and in the forces of race, ethnicity, and social class that shape their experiences. Adolescents’ concrete attitudes, then, are expressions of their lived cultures—cultures produced in ongoing interactions with other societal institutions on terrains wherein class, race, and gender meanings and conflicts are lived out. Conc...

The current emphasis on performance outcomes in schools has threatened to eclipse the importance of social connectedness as an antecedent to student success. Presented is an instrument designed to measure student sense of connectedness with school based on relevant dimensions provided in the literature: student sense of belonging, engagement, expected learning, and trust. Drawing on data from o...

The study examined the impact of high school English teachers’ awareness of pedagogical competence on student learning. A psychometric measurement instrument of English language teachers' pedagogical competence (ELTPC) was first developed through factor analysis with 320 high school teachers in Guilan, Northern Iran. Based on the developed instrument, 36 teachers were divided into two groups of...

The purpose of this study was to explore individual- and school-level policy characteristics on student smoking behavior using an ecological perspective. Participants were 24,213 (51% female) Grade 10-11 students from 81 schools in five Canadian provinces. Data were collected using student self-report surveys, written policies collected from schools, interviews with school administrators, and s...

The eighth-grade student assignment project is an initiative of the School District of Philadelphia that assigns students to high school academic programs based on student preferences, academic preparation, program capacity and desegregation requirements. This paper describes recent modifications to the eighth-grade student assignment process that resulted in: a comprehensive, realistic descrip...

Target Audience Strategic Learning Initiatives (SLI) is a 23-year old nonprofit with proven results in accelerating adult and student learning. Our overall goal in the Transformation Process is to accelerate improved student and adult performance by levering systemic change focused on improving school culture, principal and teacher effectiveness, and family/community engagement, the primary dri...