High school students become most engaged with their classes when teachers show how subject matter relates to students’ lives and encourage them to share opinions and ideas, new research shows.

The gap in language skills between children from low-income families and those from affluent homes becomes evident when children are as young as 18 months old, new research shows.

For years, researchers and educators have been debating the pros and cons of grade retention policies with respect to how holding back a student affects that student’s learning, behavior and motivation. New research in the American Journal of Education examines these policies from a new perspective: how holding back a student affects the student’s classmates. New research finds that having students in a class who have repeated a grade can lower the standardized test scores of the rest of the students.

Mentoring programs aim to provide children with a relationship with a caring adult beyond family, teachers or other adults outside of school. When mentoring programs are based in schools, they often seek to improve students’ academic performance, usually with mentors providing tutoring or homework help. New research finds that the academic help has less effect on a child’s school performance than the quality of the relationship between the mentor and student.