Parents, teachers, schools, districts, states, and especially students all want schools that prepare graduates to thrive in the 21st century. In this blog post, Anne Mishkind asks what it means to be "college and career ready."
The Native American and Alaska Native Children in School discretionary grants program aims to reduce the persistent achievement gap between Native American and Alaska Native youth and their peers in reading and English language arts and college readiness in reading. This qualitative study examined the types of activities grantees funded, ...
Informing practice with the best research and making research more relevant to practice are easier said than done. Making a tangible difference in people’s lives is harder still. In this series of short commentaries, AIR experts reflect on ways to meet the challenge.
Ashu Handa is an economist whose work centers on global poverty, health, and human development in sub-Saharan Africa. At AIR, he works to expand Equity Initiative work internationally and supports AIR’s global poverty research and policy efforts. He has been a professor at the University of North Carolina for 20 ...
Student agency, or the ability to manage one’s learning, can have significant effects on academic achievement as students take an active role in seeking and internalizing new knowledge. The purpose of this study was to identify the instructional practices that may be useful for the development of different aspects of ...
Given persistent failure rates and mounting student debt, how prepared students are to enter and succeed in college is suddenly everyone’s business. According to Mark Schneider, in this blog post, ACT data shows many students ready to leave for college are not ready academically in at least one area. ...
The case for using toilets—less fecal pollution leads to better health—might seem self-evident, but 2.5 billion (according to United Nation’s estimates) of the world’s poorest still don’t have them. And it’s harder to press that case than might be imagined. After all, the causal link between fecal contamination ...
In his final State of the Union address, President Obama said, “We live in a time of extraordinary change… and whether we like it or not, the pace of this change will only accelerate.” In this blog post, AIR’s Peter Cookson says the key to dealing with this change is ...
A federal higher education grant program designed to improve postsecondary educational opportunities, particularly for underserved populations, is meeting and sometimes exceeding its goals, according to a study of the program completed by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) for the U.S. Department of Education. ...
At 21, many foster youth “age out” of financial benefits and supports from the child welfare system—before they even finish college. Given the challenges they face, it’s not surprising that only 3 to 10 percent of them earn undergraduate degrees compared with 34 percent of young adults who weren’t in ...