An emerging trend in educational research is the use of social network theory and methodology to understand how teacher collaboration can support or constrain teaching, learning, and educational change. This article provides a critical synthesis of educational literature on school social networks among educators to advance our understanding of the…

This article presents an analysis showing how collegial interactions can augment the mechanism of teachers' learning from professional development. The analysis relies on social network data and self-reports of writing instructional practices from teachers in 20 different schools that were part of a longitudinal study of the National Writing…

Social network analysis is increasingly used in the study of policy implementation and school leadership. A key question that remains is that of instrument validity--that is, the question of whether these social network survey instruments measure what they purport to measure. In this paper, we describe our work to examine the validity of the…

A middle school language arts teacher reflects on his experience in utilizing a school-housed online social network to create avenues for authentic audience, purpose, and response to student writing. With many technology proponents advocating a 21st century education, the fact that interacting with the Web 2.0 environment is essentially a reading…

Sports participation and elite sporting success are fundamental to Australian culture and a prominent source of national pride. As sport is a major part of day-to-day living in Australia, it is not surprising that many young people aspire to careers as sportspersons. While such aspirations are often dismissed as fanciful and unattainable, the…

Causal inference under treatment interference is a challenging but important problem. Past studies usually make strong assumptions on the structure of treatment interference in order to estimate causal treatment effects while accounting for the effect of treatment interference. In this article, we view treatment diffusion as a concrete form of…

This study examined whether a university outreach program featuring peer mentoring and offering a social support network can impact college-going aspirations. Study participants were middle school students of color and low SES students and their university student mentors. Purposeful selection was used to identify six mentors and six proteges and…

This paper explores the identity construction of multilingual and multidialectal middle school students in a semester-long youth participatory action research (YPAR) project. In particular, it moves beyond an emancipatory discourse that views youth identity development from a point of marginalization by drawing on Foucauldian notions of discourse,…

This exploratory study examined gender differences in the patterns of drug offers among a sample of 71 American Indian middle school students. Participants responded to an inventory of drug-related problem situations specific to the cultural contexts of Southwestern American Indian youth. They were asked to consider the frequency of drug offers…

Prevalent approaches to classroom languaging and bilingual education interpret the practices of multilingual groups of people through a monolingual lens that obscures the fluid languaging and semiotic practices of contemporary communities who engage in dynamic semiotic and linguistic practices, rather than 'add' one language to another in the form…

Objectives: To investigate whether smoking prevalence in grade-level networks influences individual smoking, suggesting that peers are important social multipliers in teen smoking. Methods: We measured gender-specific, grade-level recent and life-time smoking among urban middle-school students who participated in Project Northland Chicago in a…

A randomized control trial was conducted to evaluate the impact of the Rural Early Adolescent Learning Program (Project REAL) on teachers' awareness of peer groups at the beginning of the 1st year of middle school. Two schools were randomly assigned to the intervention condition and 2 to the control condition. Thirty-nine teachers and 466 students…

This paper attempts to answer this question: what should ecoliteracy mean in a biocapitalist society? The author situates his analysis of this question within the general context of the neoliberal reconstruction of education in the US. Specifically, focus is given to the shared model of governmentality GE food industries and education policies…

Dynamic features of peer network experiences (membership fluidity and network interconnectedness) were examined for their role in African American and White early adolescents' sense of belonging in mathematics classrooms. Because these dynamic features are naturally present in adolescents' peer group affiliations, attention to them provides a more…

The authors evaluated how a group-based career intervention affected career network ties among Finnish adolescents as they made educational choices and prepared for their transition to secondary education. They examined the career-related network ties of 868 students during their last year in comprehensive school (junior high school) in a…