The study examines summer Algebra 1 readiness camps in five Rhode Island districts, launched to help prepare rising 9th graders for the state’s new high school math requirements. Funded by the Rhode Island Department of Education, these programs showed promising results:

• Algebra 1 camp attendance was strong, with more than half of participants attending over 81-100% of program days, with an average attendance of 75%.
• Students in the program had fall math test scores that were 4.5 percentile points higher than similar students who did not participate, and students who were struggling the most with math appeared to benefit the most from the programs.
• Student confidence and engagement increased for participants, with teachers attributing these outcomes to the project-based learning model.

These findings provide one of the first detailed looks at how Rhode Island districts are implementing strategies to meet the state’s updated graduation requirements.

This report, produced in partnership with the Rhode Island School Superintendents Association (RISSA) and the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE), examines the current state of teacher professional learning (PL) in Rhode Island. It identifies challenges districts face and provides guidance for district and state leaders to strengthen PL.

Over the past decade, districts have increased spending on PL, but gaps remain as federal COVID relief funding has ended. The report outlines practical steps to improve PL, including stabilizing investments, establishing a coaching model, and aligning PL time with district priorities.

The findings suggest that sustaining and expanding these efforts through a purposeful PL strategy can support student learning by turning investments into improvements in classroom instruction.

In the 2024-2025 school year, Annenberg launched the Professional Learning (PL) Network in RI, a community of practice with six Rhode Island school districts focused on curriculum-based professional learning (CBPL). Districts in the PL Network developed professional learning initiatives to improve instruction, drawing on insights from the Research Partnership for Professional Learning (RPPL). 

In this brief, we highlight three primary implementation challenges that network districts faced and the promising practices that emerged to address them. 

Peers affect individual's productivity in the workforce, in education, and in other team-based tasks. Using large-scale language data from an online college course, we measure the impacts of peer interactions on student learning outcomes and persistence. In our setting, students are quasi-randomly assigned to peers, and as such, we are able to overcome selection biases stemming from endogenous peer grouping. We also mitigate reflection bias by utilizing rich student interaction data. We find that females and older students are more likely to engage in student interactions. Students are also more likely to interact with peers of the same gender and with peers from roughly the same geographic region. For students who are relatively less likely to be engaged in online discussion, exposure to more interactive peers increases their probabilities of passing the course, improves their grade in the course, and increases their likelihood of enrolling in the following academic term. This study demonstrates how the use of large-scale, text-based data can provide insights into students' learning processes.

This study leverages nationally representative data (N ≈ 6,000) to examine the magnitude of quality differences between (a) formal and informal early childhood education and care providers; (b) Head Start, prekindergarten, and other center-based care; and (c) programs serving toddlers and those serving preschoolers. It then documents differences in children's reading and math skills at age 5 between those who had enrolled in formal and informal settings. Cross-sector differences are substantially reduced when accounting for a set of quality measures, though these measures do less to explain more modest differences in outcomes within the formal sector. Results inform current efforts aimed at improving the quality of early childhood settings by highlighting the large quality differences across sectors and their relationship with child development.

Students' experiences and the opportunities they have to learn rest on the quality of education decisions made in each class room, in each school, in each district, and in each state, federal legislature, and department of education. Who can run schools? Who can teach? What content is covered? How is it taught? Which students are in each class? When is recess? How much money is spent, on what and on whom? These are just some of the decisions that must be made and whose answers affect students. The role of research and scholarship more broadly in education finance and policy is to inform these decisions for the benefit of students. In practice, however, the influence of research is often opaque. The lack of transparency comes not only from poor decision making but also from good decision makers weighing incomplete information about the likely effects of their options with a logic about how the world works. Useful education research builds these logics and provides information about the effects of specific choices. It also identifies individuals with the greatest potential to make good decisions given this incomplete information and the need to use judgment in decision making.

Politics of education researchers have long recognized the role of micropolitics in school decision-making processes. We argue that investigating micropolitical dynamics is key to an important set of school decisions that are fundamental to inequities in access to high-quality teachers: assignments of teachers and students to classrooms. Focusing on the intraorganizational political power of experienced teachers, our analysis of survey and administrative data from a large urban district suggests that more experienced teachers have more influence over which students are assigned to their classrooms. By a variety of measures, we also find that more experienced teachers are assigned fewer disadvantaged students, on average, a pattern inconsistent with goals of ameliorating educational inequality by matching more qualified teachers with the students who need them most.

Kindergarten is the age at which children's future time perspective emerges. This capacity enables them to form goals based on past and ongoing experiences and project themselves in the future. This development may play an important role in guiding children in self-regulated learning. When faced with the conflict between their need to learn and their desire to play (CLP), children make choices based on their perceptions of CLP. However, their CLP-related perceptions and responses are also influenced by the values their culture upholds. Research shows that Western learning emphasizes more mental activities and positive affect, whereas East Asian learning stresses more social/moral self-perfection. Children's CLP-related perceptions and responses are likely shaped by their respective cultures' values.

Maternal warmth, the quality of the affectional bond between mothers and their children, has been found to be consistently associated with children’s positive developmental outcomes in Western cultures. However, researchers debate the potential differences in the cultural meanings of maternal warmth, particularly between Chinese and European American families. To address the lack of empirical research on this issue, the present study examined culturally derived perceptions and practices of maternal warmth through open-ended interviews with 70 Chinese immigrant and 70 European American mothers of preschoolers. Specifically, we compared mothers’ perceived importance and degree of expression of warmth toward their children, and why and how they express warmth toward their children in the 2 cultural groups. Results showed that, although mothers perceived expressing warmth to be similarly important, European American mothers perceived expressing more warmth toward their children. Moreover, both cultural similarities and differences were found in why these 2 groups of mothers believed it was important to express warmth and the specific practices they used. Chinese immigrant mothers’ responses were interpreted as reflecting a cultural emphasis on nurturance and instrumental support, whereas European American mothers’ responses reflected the Western cultural focus on more direct and outward demonstrations of warmth.

Relatively little research has examined the ways in which immigrant Latino parents can effectively support their adolescent children's schooling. To address this gap, we conducted in-depth interviews with 32 Mexican-heritage 9th graders. Students identified parents' advice giving as the most salient form of involvement. Parental advice emphasized the importance of persisting in school, avoiding hardship as experienced by parents, and exhibiting social competence in relationships with peers and teachers. Parental advice giving was transmitted most effectively in the context of parent--child closeness. The findings form a basis for fostering effective and sustainable parent--school partnerships.