Mary Kay Dugan is a managing technical assistant consultant at AIR. She is passionate about identifying evidence-based promising practices and translating them into policies and effective programs focused on underserved populations including disadvantaged youth and young adults. Dugan has over 30 years of experience helping federal, state, and local governments ...
Massachusetts has long received newcomers from many countries. Thousands of newcomers enter kindergarten through 12th grade in Massachusetts each year, and roughly 2 percent of those students arrive after having experienced a gap in their education. These students are recognized by Massachusetts as needing additional instructional and social-emotional support and ...
Besides the direct impact of COVID-19 on daily life, the pandemic has affected how individuals approach their personal health and well-being, including if and how they seek health care services.
Senior Researcher Manolya Tanyu and her colleague Anna Barry support youth both in their careers at AIR and also as volunteer mentors to youth. In this Q&A, they discuss what they’ve learned and gained from youth-adult mentoring, how their hands-on experience affects their work, and why anyone considering becoming a ...
Although English language learners (ELLs) have an increasing presence in postsecondary education, their unique needs are often unmet by institutions of higher education. Technology-mediated English language instruction may be a solution to the pressing challenges that postsecondary institutions face in providing personalized instruction to ELLs, because it allows instruction to ...
In this personal essay, AIR Principal Researcher Patricia Garcia-Arena shares her memories of being an English learner in preschool and elementary school—and how early literacy experiences can be better for ELs today, thanks to evidence-based instructional practices.
California’s supply of teachers is at a 12-year low. The trend continues as enrollment in educator preparation programs has dropped by more than 70 percent in the last decade. At a recent gathering in Sacramento, leading researchers, policy experts, and local practitioners looked at the problem in detail and offered ...
Caitlin Dawkins, a principal technical assistance consultant at AIR, helped to develop the concept of Second Chance Month, with colleagues at Prison Fellowship. In this Q&A, Dawkins explains why successful reentry is hard to measure and dispels some misconceptions around reentry.
This series of monographs addresses the issues of youth with cognitive or behavioral disabilities and their experiences in the juvenile justice system. Staff in the system can better serve these children by receiving support in understanding these issues.
AIR developed a systematic, transparent, evidence-based protocol to review and translate the extant research about juvenile drug courts and related interventions into comprehensive, reasonable, actionable, understandable, and measurable guidelines.