States and schools are shifting their focus to ensure college and career readiness is a realistic and attainable goal for all students. This brief provides an overview of competency-based education, one model to support college and career readiness for all.
Competency-based education is an educational approach that focuses on mastery of an expanded set of competencies—rather than seat time—as a measure of student learning. This brief explores how states and districts can define learner competencies that reflect the full range of knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary for students to achieve ...
Medicare reform is a center-stage issue in the presidential campaign. In this video interview, Marilyn Moon, an Institute Fellow at AIR, explains why the issue matters and which features of the federal health insurance program for Americans ages 65 and older and the disabled most need to be addressed. ...
This guide provides a review of research on higher education persistence indicators that can be used to predict whether a student will remain enrolled in college and complete a two- or four-year degree.
What makes a school a place where Alaskan students want to be and want to do well? Why do students stay in school or drop out? And what do Alaskan students believe that schools can do to help them succeed? Researchers at AIR present the answers, provided directly by students, to these questions.
A recent special issue in the Journal of Drug and Alcohol Dependence highlights findings from three decades of research on the Good Behavior Game and its impact on a variety of long term behavioral and mental health outcomes.
About 1.7 million youth in the U.S. have at least one parent in prison. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the number of parents held in prisons has risen 79 percent from 1991-2007. Youth with incarcerated parents fare worse than other youth on a range of educational and physical ...
Competency-based education makes student mastery of learning goals—rather than seat time—the metric to determine student credit and progression. Take a closer look at how schools implement competency-based education, and how it is related to what students need to learn effectively.
In a longitudinal, quasi-experimental study that spanned more than a decade, AIR found that attending a high school with an explicit focus on deeper learning resulted in positive short-term outcomes, but few longer-term outcomes. In this Q&A, AIR Principal Researcher Kristina Zeiser and Senior Researcher Catherine Bitter share insights about ...
Parents, teachers, schools, districts, states, and especially students all want schools that prepare graduates to thrive in the 21st century. In this blog post, Anne Mishkind asks what it means to be "college and career ready."