As a ministry of the Catholic Church, Catholic schools are charged with educating students' hearts and minds. Multiple standardized academic tests and other student assessments are available for monitoring both student and teacher outcomes in Catholic schools, but fewer measures exist for considering the school's faith-related mission. Although…

The goal of this article is to explore relations between adolescent values, interests in activities, and their bonding to school. This article presents survey research findings that examine 1,928 sixth- and seventh-grade students' responses to survey prompts about 15 terminal values adapted from Rokeach's (1973) theory of values, prompts about 11…

Background: Socioeconomic status (SES) influences students' school perceptions and affects their performance, engagement, and personal beliefs. This study examined the effects of school population SES and school resources on the association between student SES and student perceptions. Methods: School liking, classmate social relationships, family…

For the past three years, SELF (Sports, Education, Life Skills, and Faith) has focused on improving academic, behavioral, and social skills of students at Key, Revere, and Meyerland middle schools in the Houston Independent School District (HISD). Tutorials, an essay contest, character-building lessons, sports, a high-school bridge program, and…

The motivation for this paper is the authors' recent work on several randomized control trials in which they found the primary result, which averaged across subgroups or sites, to be moderated by demographic or site characteristics. They are led to examine a distinction that the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) makes between "confirmatory"…

This report identifies the different settings in which summer programs for disadvantaged youth most commonly take place--schools, parks and recreation departments, community--and faith-based organizations, and child-care programs-- and examines the limitations and opportunities presented by each in building better programming. It reviews broadly…

This report is based on the discussions of the February 2008 "Teaching by Choice: Beyond 2 + 2" conference, convened by the American Association of Community Colleges to focus on the growing role of community colleges as providers of teacher education and source of professional development for elementary, middle and secondary teachers of science,…