November 2012

The November issue of Educational Researcher includes, in addition to the 2012 AERA Presidential Address, three articles of research significance that have important policy implications for student achievement, bullying in schools, and methods for quantifying student retention rates.

In “Curricular Coherence and the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics,” William H. Schmidt and Richard T. Houang examine the relationship of the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics (CCSSM) to student achievement to reveal that states with standards more like the CCSSM, on average, had higher NAEP scores.

Joseph P. Robinson and Dorothy L. Espelage, as a follow-up to their earlier work in Educational Researcher, examine the consistent pattern of findings that students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) experience higher rates of victimization by bullying. In “Bullying Explains Only Part of LGBTQ–Heterosexual Risk Disparities: Implications for Policy and Practice,” Robinson and Espelage investigated the extent to which such victimization could explain their greater rates of suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts, and unexcused absences from school.  The authors found that LGBTQ-identified students were 3.3 times as likely to think about suicide, 3 times as likely to attempt suicide, and 1.4 times as likely to skip school as were heterosexual students within the same school who reported equivalent levels of peer victimization.

John Robert Warren and jim saliba look at the imperfect system of quantifying student retention rates and offer a new way to estimate annual, grade-specific rates in “First- Through Eighth-Grade Retention Rates for All 50 States.” The authors use routinely collected and publicly available data to report retention rates for Grades 1–8 for academic years 2002–2003 through 2008–2009. Their comparisons with states’ reported rates of retention suggest that the new method produces results that are valid.