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 ...
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.
Deeper learning combines a deeper understanding of core academic content, the ability to apply that understanding to new situations, and a range of competencies related to human interaction and self-management. A recent study by AIR found that students in high schools that were part of networks associated with the William ...
This research brief, the second from the Back on Track study, describes the role of in-class mentors in the online classrooms and examines whether students benefited from additional instructional support from their in-class mentors.
Patricia Campie is a criminologist with more than 20 years of experience leading community-based research, evaluation, and implementation science initiatives. She is the principal investigator for the Research on Lowering Violence in Schools and Communities (ReSOLV) project, a five-year longitudinal study of the root causes of school violence and community, ...
U.S. businesses are facing challenges filling so-called “middle-skills” jobs in trades, telecommunications, health care, IT, and similar professions. Career and Technical Education (CTE) is an existing and promising pathway that can address this gap.
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 ...
New research indicates it is an effective way to gather informed public views on complex health policy and to help guide policy decisions. This fact sheet provides an overview of public deliberation—convening a diverse group of citizens to consider an ethical or values-based dilemma and weigh alternative views—and what evidence ...
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."