In 2014, urban wildlife refuge managers throughout Southern California responded to a challenge issued by United States Fish and Wildlife Service's (USFWS) leadership to connect the urban dwelling population in the region with wildlife and urban refuges. Five years later, the SoCal Urban Wildlife Refuge Project's reach and impact are significant.…

Research shows that dual enrollment--a practice in which high school students take college courses while they are still in high school--has multiple benefits for student success in both systems. To capitalize on those benefits, California and other states have moved in recent years to increase high school students' access to college courses. In…

The purpose of the study was to examine the quality of high school programs for students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in the United States. The Autism Program Environment Rating Scale-Middle/High School (APERS-MHS) was used to rate the quality of programs for students with ASD in 60 high schools located in three geographic locations in the…

Women in physics and engineering continue to remain underrepresented in higher education. To illuminate underlying processes, we used data from undergraduate Physics students (N= 338) enrolled in an introductory physics course to investigate the development of field belonging and its association with gender and perceived competence. Latent change…

Supporting college and career readiness among youth who encounter significant academic and life challenges requires innovative strategies to help them envision their futures, leverage their strengths and develop dispositions that promote positive trajectories. For youth development professionals who develop and implement novel programmatic…

Schools are an essential setting for mental health supports and services for students. To support student well-being, schools engage in universal mental health screening to identify students in need of support and to provide surveillance data for districtwide or statewide policy changes. Mental health data have been collected via anonymous and…

The assessment of psychosocial strengths in children and adolescents has predominately focused on the measurement of single traits and constructs, such as grit (Christopoulou, Lakioti, Pezirkianidis, Karakasidou, & Stalikas, 2018), optimism (Oberle, Guhn, Gadermann, Thomson, & Schonert-Reichl, 2018), hope (Pedrotti, 2018), and gratitude…

Objective: To develop novel, scalable, and valid literacy profiles for identifying limited health literacy patients by harnessing natural language processing. Data Source: With respect to the linguistic content, we analyzed 283 216 secure messages sent by 6941 diabetes patients to physicians within an integrated system's electronic portal.…

Our UC Santa Barbara research team engages in ongoing efforts to enhance and validate the Social Emotional Health Surveys (Primary, Secondary, and Higher Education). The initiative to enhance the secondary version is supported by an Institute of Education Sciences grant (#R305A160157, 2016-2020), which provides funding to refine, standardize, and…

Science education has experienced a significant transition over the last decade, catalyzed by a re-envisioning of what students should know and be able to do in science. That re-envisioning culminated in the release of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in 2013. The new standards set off a chain reaction of standards adoption and…

These appendices accompany the report "Final Report of the i3 Impact Study of Making Sense of SCIENCE, 2016-17 through 2017-18." Science education has experienced a significant transition over the last decade, catalyzed by a re-envisioning of what students should know and be able to do in science. That re-envisioning culminated in the…

This research summary accompanies the report "Final Report of the i3 Impact Study of Making Sense of SCIENCE, 2016-17 through 2017-18." Science education has experienced a significant transition over the last decade, catalyzed by a re-envisioning of what students should know and be able to do in science. That re-envisioning culminated in…

In this multi-year study, we taught English/Language Arts teachers of students with Learning Disabilities in middle school to incorporate 15 minutes of daily vocabulary activities with students in their intact special education English/Language Arts classes. During Year 1, teachers taught 48 words to their sixth grade students, who learned and…

Background: Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate highly variable writing skills. Few studies have examined if engagement during writing assessments may differ for children with ASD and if task engagement is related to their writing assessment performance. This study examined narrative writing and broad task engagement in…

Few studies have considered academic vocabulary interventions for students who have learning disabilities (LD) and also are English Learners (EL). This research explored the effects of the third year of the CHAAOS (Creating Habits that Accelerate the Academic Language of Students) vocabulary intervention for eighth grade students who received…