Expressive writing (EW), or writing about one's thoughts and feelings, has been posited to reduce the working memory (WM) load that pressure and anxiety can impose on test-takers. The mechanisms of EW are far from clear, however, and social and developmental questions about its role in shaping children's engagement with academic contexts remain.…

Purpose: School principals' commitment and motivation have not been systematically investigated, but concerted research is needed as 25% of principals leave their jobs each year. This article investigates how new school principals make sense of their motivation to challenging work in a high pressure, high turnover field. Understanding principal…

Higher-order thinking is relational reasoning in which multiple representations are linked together, through inferences, comparisons, abstractions, and hierarchies. We examine the development of higher-order thinking in 64 preschool-aged children, observed from 14 to 58 months in naturalistic situations at home. We used children's spontaneous talk…

School health programs are united by their desire to promote health and health-related outcomes among youth. They are also united by the fact that their expected effects are contingent on successful program implementation, which is often impeded by a multitude of real-world barriers. Techniques used in management science may help optimize…

This study examined two widely available light-touch, writing-based mindset interventions: one that targeted students' purpose for learning and one that aimed to increase students' growth mindset. In order to examine the potential mechanisms underlying previously reported effects of mindset interventions, we analyzed these interventions' effects…

Positioning our analyses within two theoretical frameworks, system justification (SJ) theory and critical consciousness (CC), we examine relationships between social class and endorsement of SJ and CC beliefs and behaviors within a sample of low-income, Latinx and Black youth living in Chicago. We operationalize social class using five indicators:…

Critical consciousness (CC) has emerged as a framework for understanding how low-income and racial/ethnic minority youth recognize, interpret, and work to change the experiences and systems of oppression that they face in their daily lives. Despite this, relatively little is known about how youths' experiences with economic hardship and structural…

This study explores children's early academic and self-regulatory skills as potential pathways through which a preschool enrichment program -- the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP) -- may contribute to low-income children's long-term outcomes (N = 466; M age at baseline = 4.10 years). We find that CSRP's impact on high school grades may be…

The present study examines the extent to which participation in a 14-week professional development course designed to improve teacher-child interactions in the classroom moderated the relation between teacher-reported job stress and gains in observed teacher-child interaction quality from the beginning to the end of the intervention. Participants…

This paper reports findings from a researcher-practitioner partnership (2015-18) that examined how adult education providers in Chicago, Houston, and Miami are designing and implementing career pathways (CP) programming, particularly for immigrants and adults with limited education. This Institute of Education Sciences-funded study was the first…

Neighborhoods constitute a microsystem theorized to be of great importance for immigrant families, with the potential to support and facilitate families' transitions to life in the United States. Yet, few studies examine immigrants' perceptions of their neighborhoods and the extent to which different aspects of these neighborhoods, such as safety…

Recent research work in school leadership highlighting the importance of principals' organizational management skills has prompted scholars to consider their importance in relation to instructional leadership skills. However, there is limited empirical work that directly compares these leadership skills and their importance for school outcomes. In…

The purpose of this study was to examine how adult education providers in Chicago, Houston, and Miami are designing and implementing career pathways (CP) programming, especially for adults who are immigrants or have barriers to employment and education. The researcher-practitioner partnership included the Institute for the Study of Adult Literacy…

The main goal of the present research was to test whether the presence of analogies would affect the relative accuracy of metacognitive judgments about learning from expository science texts, and whether any effect would depend on the type of cues that readers used as the basis for their judgments of comprehension. In a series of experiments,…

Classroom activities aimed at changing students' identity-based motivation (IBM) improve student outcomes by helping students experience school as the path to their adult future identities and their difficulties along the way as signals of the importance of schoolwork. One way to scale these effects would be to have teachers deliver IBM…