Measuring Students' Ability to Engage in Scientific Inquiry: A New Instrument to Assess Data Analysis, Explanation, and Argumentation.

We describe the conceptualization, design, development, validation, and testing of a summative instrument that measures high school students' ability to analyze and evaluate data, construct scientific explanations, and formulate scientific arguments in biology and chemistry disciplinary contexts. Data from 1,405 students were analyzed to evaluate the properties of the instrument. Student measurement separation reliability was 0.71 with items showing satisfactory fit to the Partial Credit Model. The use of the Evidence-Centered Design framework during the design and development process provided a strong foundation for the validity argument. Additional evidence for validation were also gathered. The strengths of the instrument lie in its relatively brief time for administration and a unique approach that integrates science practice and disciplinary knowledge, while simultaneously seeking to decouple their measurement. This research models how to design assessments that align to the National Research Council's framework and informs the design of Next Generation Science Standards-aligned assessments.

Life on the Frontier of AP Expansion: Can Schools in Less-Resourced Communities Successfully Implement Advanced Placement Science Courses?

The Advanced Placement (AP) program has undergone two major reforms in recent decades: the first aimed at increasing access and the second at increasing relevance. Both initiatives are partially designed to increase the number of high school students from low-income backgrounds who have access to college-level coursework. Yet critics argue that schools in less-resourced communities are unable to implement AP at the level expected by its founders. We offer the first model of the components inherent in a well-implemented AP science course and the first evaluation of AP implementation with a focus on public schools newly offering the inquiry-based version of AP Biology and Chemistry courses. We find that these frontier schools were able to implement most, but not all, of the key components of an AP science course.

Foreign-born Peers and Academic Performance.

The academic performance of foreign-born youth in the United States is well studied, yet little is known about whether and how foreign-born students influence their classmates. In this article, I develop a set of expectations regarding the potential consequences of immigrant integration across schools, with a distinction between the effects of sharing schools with immigrants who are designated as English language learners (ELL) and those who are not. I then use administrative data on multiple cohorts of Florida public high school students to estimate the effect of immigrant shares on immigrant and native-born students' academic performance. The identification strategy pays careful attention to the selection problem by estimating the effect of foreign-born peers from deviations in the share foreign-born across cohorts of students attending the same school in different years. The assumption underlying this approach is that students choose schools based on the composition of the entire school, not on the composition of each entering cohort. The results of the analysis, which hold under several robustness checks, indicate that foreign-born peers (both those who are ELL and those who are non-ELL) have no effect on their high school classmates' academic performance.

Testing, time limits, and English learners: does age of school entry affect how quickly students can learn English?

Using data on young English learners (EL) who enroll in the New York City public school system, I examine how long it takes students to become minimally proficient in English and how the time to proficiency differs for students by their age of school entry. Specifically, I follow four recent entry cohorts of ELs ages 5-10 and use discrete-time survival analysis to model the rate at which different age groups acquire proficiency. I find that approximately half of the students become proficient within three years after school entry and that younger students learn more quickly than older students. Age of entry differences are robust to controls for observed differences between age of entry groups in their economic and demographic characteristics, their disabilities, and the schools they attend. The results lend support to the theory that older students face developmental barriers to learning new languages quickly.

Bridging child welfare and juvenile justice: preventing unnecessary detention of foster children.

Gaps in service coordination between child welfare and other child-serving agencies are well documented. This article examines the gap between the child welfare and juvenile justice systems and discusses a program, Project Confirm, designed to reduce the problems associated with this gap. Project Confirm aims to improve cooperation between juvenile justice and child welfare agencies to prevent the unnecessary detention of arrested foster children in secure facilities. The program's design is outlined, and implementation statistics and government partner perceptions of the program in its first year of operations are provided. The article also identifies future challenges to implementation and discusses the broader implications of the program. In making this appeal for coordination and collaboration among public agencies, I'm not talking about pro forma integration efforts-I'm not talking about memoranda of understanding or top-level reorganizations that have autonomous agencies vaguely reporting to a single box labeled "human services." Rather, I'm talking about the much more challenging objective of achieving real working partnerships at the front line. (Nelson, 1998, p. 6)