The Guam Department of Education ("GDOE") presents this report in compliance with Guam Public Law ("P.L.") 26-26 that specifically requires the Department to report on the following information in the Annual State of Public Education Report ("ASPER"): (1) Demographic information on public school children in the…

The Pennsylvania Department of Education's (PDE's) Office for Safe Schools partnered with REL Mid-Atlantic to conduct a study using data from PDE's school climate survey. This survey, which is available on a voluntary basis to any school in the state, provides a way to track school climate and identify schools that need additional support to…

This study examined how high school course-taking patterns (i.e., career and technical education [CTE] vs. academic vs. no concentration), personal characteristics embedded in a social cognitive theory framework (e.g., self-efficacy, academic expectations), and contextual variables (e.g., parental expectations, socioeconomic status [SES]) interact…

These are the appendixes for the full report, "Changes in School Climate during COVID-19 in a Sample of Pennsylvania Schools." The REL study analyzed changes in scores from a pre-pandemic year (2018/19) to the 2020/21 and 2021/22 school years, both of which were affected by COVID-19 and related policy changes. These technical appendixes…

Anti-scientific attitudes can impose substantial costs on societies. Can schools be an important agent in mitigating the propagation of such attitudes? This paper investigates the effect of the content of science education on anti-scientific attitudes, knowledge, and choices. The analysis exploits staggered reforms that reduce or expand the…

In this paper, we investigate how student enrollment in public schools is different after the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the pandemic--between the 2018-19 and 2021-22 school years--about 12 percent of public elementary schools and 9 percent of middle schools experienced more than a 20 percent decline. This is a significant change from before the…

A mixed-methods study including 22 Sino-Nova Scotian school principals in China has established that preparation for leadership in that context requires the consideration of many salient factors. While many North American standards of leadership are an important foundation, effective communication within the multidimensional system is of paramount…

Success of curriculum reforms calls for both collaborative learning and unlearning processes. Focusing on the latter, school doubting process, an innovative term, is used in this paper as an active framework for organisational unlearning through which educators question their existing mind-sets and unfreeze old approaches to teaching and learning.…

Through a sense-making lens, this qualitative study explores high school principals' considerations while they perceive and enact additional resources within a national reform implementation. Principals' allocation of resources, especially as part of a national reform, is a complex matter for schools' effectiveness in an era of accountability.…

This study aimed to capture the development of interaction among the components of pre-service chemistry teachers' enacted PCK throughout the school experience course. Data were collected from four pre-service teachers using content representation (CoRe), observations, field notes, and semi-structured interviews. Secondary analysis was conducted…

In contrast to prior federally mandated school reforms, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) allows states more discretion in reforming their lowest performing schools, removes requirements to disrupt the status quo, and does not allocate substantial additional funds. Using a regression discontinuity design, we evaluate a state turnaround…

Purpose: The first-aid courses organized by the Youth Red Cross Carinthia (Austria) had a quality problem, necessitating a professionalization in teaching and time structure. This research aimed to enhance the quality and effectiveness of these courses by implementing modified lesson studies with non-professional trainers. The paper presents the…

The purpose of this study was to examine the validity of teacher evaluation scores that are derived from an observation tool, adapted from Danielson's Framework for Teaching, designed to assess 22 teaching components from four teaching domains. The study analyzed principals' observations of 713 elementary, middle, and high school teachers in…

In contrast to prior federally mandated school reforms, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) allows states more discretion in reforming their lowest performing schools, removes requirements to disrupt the status quo, and does not allocate substantial additional funds. Using a regression discontinuity design, we evaluate a state turnaround…

Purpose/Objectives: With the purpose of addressing childhood obesity, the U.S. Congress passed the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act (HHFKA) 2010, which strengthened the mandate and regulations for schools to develop and implement school wellness policies (SWPs) to promote students' health. Transparency and accessibility of SWPs among schools and…