A Randomized Controlled Trial of Professional Development for Interdisciplinary Civic Education: Impacts on Humanities Teachers and Their Students

by Dennis J. Barr, Beth Boulay, Robert L. Selman, Rachel McCormick, Ethan Lowenstein, Beth Gamse, Melinda Fine & M. Brielle Leonard
This article reports on a randomized controlled experiment examining the impact of a professional development intervention that helps teachers foster students’ historical thinking skills, social and ethical reflection, and civic learning.
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Addition by Subtraction: The Relation Between Dropout Rates and School-Level Academic Achievement

by Elizabeth Glennie, Kara Bonneau, Michelle vanDellen & Kenneth A. Dodge
This article examines the relation between school-level academic performance and dropout rates under North Carolina’s accountability system. Using data on every public school student in the state over an 8-year period, we examine (1) the relation between changes in academic performance and the subsequent dropout rate, and (2) the relation between changes in the dropout rate and subsequent performance.
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The Era of Big Data: A Call for More Nuanced Datasets

by M. Felicity Rogers-Chapman
In this era of big data analysis, there is a push to understand education on a large-scale, yet existing datasets provide only a blurry picture of students and schools. This commentary argues that there is a need to develop twenty-first century tools that can fully capture the nuanced population that constitutes the educational landscape of the United States.