The Readiness Projects—a partnership of the Forum for Youth Investment, the National Urban League, and AIR—advances work informed by science and grounded in practice. In this Q&A, Jill Young, senior researcher at AIR, discusses how the Readiness Projects can support equitable opportunities for thriving youth. ...
Susan Muenchow is a principal researcher at AIR. She has experience in research and technical assistance in the area of child development, with a special focus on state and local initiatives related to early learning and care.
Read our conversation with Susan Muenchow about early childhood care costs and choices
Muenchow's recent ...
This spotlight takes a look at the history of Title I, how the program has changed over time, and how it affects children, schools, families and education policy. Experts weigh in on the program's past and future in interviews, briefs, and blogs.
One-third of the 400,000 children in foster care enter the system before age five, just as they should be making the transition from preschool to kindergarten. Seventy-five percent of kids in foster care must change schools, often multiple times, which means they tend to fall behind their classmates, miss more ...
Cecilia Xuning Zhang is an interdisciplinary researcher with years of mixed-methods research experience and a wide breadth of content knowledge in the areas of Early Childhood Education (ECE) and Technology-Based Learning Supports. She has rich technical expertise in collecting and analyzing extant data to inform enrollment trends and population estimates, leading user ...
Margarita Olivera-Aguilar is a senior researcher at AIR. She has extensive experience developing and validating cognitive and social and emotional learning (SEL) assessments and applying quantitative research design and statistical methods (such as structural equation modeling and multilevel modeling). Her research interests include the measurement of cognitive and SEL skills, the ...
The National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) is a joint project of AIR and scholars at Duke University, Northwestern University, Stanford University, the University of Missouri, the University of Texas at Dallas, and the University of Washington.
Between 2001 and 2010, Massachusetts recorded 639 homicide victims aged 14 to 24. In response, the state implemented a variety of violence reduction programs, most recently through the Safe and Successful Youth Initiative, which AIR and its partners are evaluating.
This study compares the mathematics frameworks and item pools used in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) with the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and vice versa. In addition to that, differences in item features between the two assessments are described.
A team of experts for AIR played a key role in producing "The 2010 Condition of Education," an annual statistical portrait of the state of education in the United States. The report was released by the federal government’s National Center on Education Statistics (NCES).