This paper presents the results of a systematic literature review on how the state has been explicitly and implicitly conceived in research on K–12 education policy in Latin America. Based on a review of 177 studies in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, seven general theoretical approaches are identified in research on Latin America that focuses on K–12 education policy and employs the language of “the state.” These approaches are labeled political economy, policy process, governance, institutionalism, poststructuralism, post-/decoloniality, and historical accounts. In addition to delineating the characteristics of these seven general approaches, this paper also identifies how each approach conceptualizes the state, or does not, as well as the implications of these approaches for how “the state” and other actors can purposefully act to guide education systems toward particular ends. The discussion section considers the consequences of the fact that the studies in the sample vary not only in terms of the explicitness of their theoretical approach, but also in terms of clarity around the nature of the state. The concluding section comments on the value of combining various theoretical perspectives for understanding the relationship between states and K–12 education policy in Latin America.
Although community colleges comprise about one-third of all higher education institutions and more than 50% of all public postsecondary education institutions—and serve important functions in the US higher education system—they are often regarded as marginal. This is an argument scholars have also made in relation to the prevalence of community college–focused scholarship, including in top-tier journals. The purpose of this systematic scoping review is to examine the prevalence of community college–related articles published between 2000 and 2019 across top-tier multidisciplinary education and higher education journals, as well as community college journals. We also identify topical themes (content areas) and subthemes (focal content areas) and methodological approaches used by scholars in that literature. Further, we analyze the citation prevalence of community college scholarship and the composition of community college scholars on journal editorial boards. We end with a discussion of the implications of policy, research, and practice of our investigation on the community college literature.
Education policy research aimed at eliminating racism necessitates methodological innovation that fosters both racial equity–centered approaches and robust empirical analysis of the systemic and structural nature of racism. Most quantitative research in educational psychology does not account for racism in its modeling, thereby obscuring the racialized environments in which students learn (DeCuir-Gunby & Schutz, 2014; Strunk & Andrzejewski, 2023). Drawing from Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory and the ethos of QuantCrit, this study evaluates various scales to highlight gaps and challenges in measuring racism within school settings. This review aims to uplift measures for researchers to use in their work and advocate for more targeted resources and reparations. Reviewing 66 studies and 50 unique scales, key findings include the overreliance on scales designed to measure racial discrimination at the intrapersonal level, while systemic and structural factors are often overlooked. Most measures were self-report surveys for older students developed more than 15 years ago. The results demonstrate the need to move beyond measures of intrapersonal racism to more up-to-date, multidimensional tools. The study’s findings also underscore the necessity of constant reevaluation of the tools so they keep pace with the shifting cultural realities of how racism operates, and the specific ways it impacts racially minoritized communities. As racism continues to evolve, so too must the methods by which it is measured.
Contract grading and labor-based grading contracts have emerged as a prominent antiracist and equitable alternative to normative writing assessment, purportedly mitigating linguistic discrimination and anxiety for multilingual writers. This systematic review synthesizes 42 publications to critically evaluate this promise, examining contract grading’s theoretical foundations, empirical efficacy, and specific implications for multilingual writing pedagogy. The findings confirm that contract grading significantly reduces student anxiety and enhances perceptions of fairness by decoupling grades from subjective quality judgments. However, the review uncovers a critical equity paradox: While designed to combat racial and linguistic bias, rigid labor-based models can inadvertently create new inequities for disabled, neurodivergent, and time-poor students. Furthermore, empirical evidence on writing quality remains limited and mixed, and significant implementation challenges, including immense instructor workload and student resistance, threaten its scalability. The analysis identifies a predominantly U.S.-centric, theoretically fragmented research landscape with limited methodologic rigor in multilingual writing contexts. We conclude by proposing a future research agenda that prioritizes intersectional frameworks, robust comparative studies in global settings, and critical adaptations addressing the emerging challenges of generative artificial intelligence, urging the field to refine labor-based grading contracts into a more nuanced and inclusively effective practice for diverse multilingual writers.
Structural racism “refers to the totality of ways in which societies foster racial discrimination through mutually reinforcing systems”. By this definition, structural racism is deeply embedded in education policy and practice. However, within quantitative education research, explicit attention to how structural racism is conceptualized and measured remains limited. Guided by critical race theory and quantitative critical race theory (QuantCrit), this systematic literature review examines how structural racism has been named and operationalized in quantitative studies across disciplines in the United States. We analyze patterns in how researchers conceptualize, measure, and model structural racism, with particular attention to the methodological decisions that shape what becomes empirically visible. Notably, we find that while adjacent fields—such as public health and sociology—have developed explicit quantitative measures of structural racism, no quantitative education studies in our sample operationalized structural racism as a measurable construct. Drawing on approaches from these adjacent fields, we discuss conceptual and methodological implications for education research and outline pathways to advancing quantitative analyses that more directly examine how structural racism operates within educational systems.
Research has highlighted the role of Black principals in shaping school leadership and school communities. However, there remains a lack of a comprehensive review of Black principals’ matriculation through the principalship pipeline. The purpose of this review is to synthesize the literature on Black principals’ matriculation through the principalship pipeline, with attention to how race shapes documented experiences, opportunities, and constraints. Drawing on racialized organizational theory and intersectionality, this study synthesizes 40 studies published between 2001 and 2022. The analysis highlights how the literature characterizes Black principals’ leadership as an educational asset for students, teachers, and communities—evidenced through transformative leadership and resilience—and explains the barriers of racialized hiring, heightened scrutiny, and constrained advancement that they encounter along the way. Collectively, the literature suggests that race functions as an institutional filter shaping Black principals’ opportunities, constraints, and leadership trajectories. The review concludes with implications for research, policy, and practice, underscoring the need to (a) broaden conceptual frameworks that account for racialized organizational dynamics, (b) advance policies that diversify leadership pipelines, and (c) support district and state practices that affirm the value of Black leadership in schools.
This systematic review examined the effects of physical activity (PA) at different intensities (light, moderate, and vigorous) on learning variables in students aged 6 to 16 years, considering practice modality (individual or group) and timing (before, during, or after school). Based on 42 intervention studies (2014–2024), PA positively influences emotional, socio-behavioral, and cognitive learning dimensions. Emotionally, PA reduces stress, enhances emotional regulation, and boosts intrinsic motivation. Socio-behaviorally, it strengthens skills like cooperation and teamwork, with group interventions being most effective. Cognitively, light-to-moderate PA improves attention and memory, while moderate-to-vigorous intensities benefit inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility, though fatigue may limit high-intensity benefits. Importantly, the context of implementation (regular classroom, physical education class, extracurricular programs, or whole-school approaches) shaped the type and magnitude of benefits observed, highlighting the need to align interventions with pedagogical goals and school conditions. PA during school hours is most effective when integrated with academics, while extracurricular interventions excel when they emphasize voluntary participation and enjoyment. A proposed model positions PA as a critical tool for enhancing learning and overcoming educational barriers, offering guidelines to optimize its impact through intensity, modality, and timing. This review also aims to generate evidence-based recommendations that are adaptable to diverse school contexts worldwide and accessible to educators and families, ensuring that guidance is both practical and inclusive.
Reading comprehension is a complex cognitive process that entails the ongoing integration of textual units, guided by syntactic structures, to construct a coherent representation of a text. Understanding complex sentence structures and applying syntactic knowledge to construct meaning are crucial for comprehending challenging texts. Although previous research has highlighted the significant relationship between syntactic awareness and text comprehension, the effects of syntactic skill interventions have received limited attention. This meta-analysis examined 40 empirical studies from 33 articles investigating the impact of syntactic skill interventions on students in grades pre-K–12. A total of 174 effect sizes, involving 15,784 students, were analyzed. Overall, the interventions were effective, with effect sizes of g = 0.17 for passage-level comprehension, g = 0.15 for sentence-level comprehension, and g = 0.47 for syntactic knowledge. Effect sizes varied based on factors such as intervention characteristics (e.g., group format and syntactic diversity) and the participants’ grade levels and reading ability. Future research should explore more detailed interventions and participant characteristics to further clarify these effects.
Young carers under the age of 18 years provide informal care for family members with a disability, physical or mental illness, or substance misuse issue in addition to a managing their schoolwork and other responsibilities. Caring responsibilities may negatively impact their wellbeing and educational and social opportunities. Although schools are essential in shaping the educational experiences of young carers, there is a lack of awareness about them and their needs as a distinct group, along with insufficient support from teachers and school staff. The overall aim of this qualitative systematic review was to explore the experiences of young carers in school settings from the perspective of the young carer and the views of their parents and school staff. Following a systematic search process, 17 peer-reviewed, qualitative studies met the inclusion criteria. Findings highlight the dual nature of schools in young carers’ lives, offering support and stability while also posing challenges involving stigma, bullying, and inconsistent and reactive school support. Fear of judgement often prevented young carers from disclosing their caring role to others. Schools should implement proactive policies, including staff training, peer support, and flexible learning, and balance high expectations with empathy to ensure that young carers are recognized and supported.
This systematic review explores the intersection of youth participatory action research (YPAR) and trauma-informed practices (TIP) in U.S. schools. Drawing on 19 empirical studies, we analyze how YPAR has been leveraged to support the healing of trauma-exposed youth, particularly youth of color. Using a race-conscious, trauma-informed framework—CARS (critical, agentic, relational, and strengths-based)—we synthesize findings and demonstrate that YPAR fosters individual and collective healing by promoting agency, building community, and addressing systemic injustices. Our review reveals that YPAR participants develop critical awareness of their trauma and engage in transformative action to challenge and disrupt harmful structures. This study contributes to the growing literature advocating for youth-centered, justice-oriented approaches to trauma in educational contexts, accentuating the importance of integrating YPAR into trauma-informed practice for holistic, sustained healing.
The field of education has renewed its focus on whiteness and white supremacy as constitutive forces in local educational politics. Using integrative literature review methods, this article examines what scholarship on local educational politics reveals about how whiteness operates in specific contexts and how the field theorizes whiteness. Five themes emerged: the mechanisms of whiteness, the power and disempowerment of parents and communities, segregation and isolation, the hegemonic power of non-racism, and the reconstruction of white racial identity. Findings reveal that whiteness is actively maintained through subtle and overt policies, practices, and governance systems that uphold racial hierarchies, yet this scholarship often highlights individual actors over structural, historical, and class-based forces. Using local educational contexts as sites for transformative, liberatory inquiry, future research should center anti-Blackness; situate whiteness within broader political, economic, and spatial systems; and prioritize dismantling rather than merely documenting racial domination.
Family–teacher collaboration plays a critical role in PK–12 schools for multilingual students and students with disabilities. Teacher preparation programs prepare future teachers to collaborate with families before they enter the classrooms, yet little is known regarding the extent to which programs prepare teacher candidates to collaborate with these specific family populations. In this systematic review, the authors synthesize 27 studies conducted in teacher preparation programs that train teachers to collaborate with (a) families of students with disabilities, (b) multilingual families, or (c) multilingual families of students with disabilities. Most studies investigated the collaboration with families of students with disabilities (n = 21), while some investigated multilingual families (n = 8), and very few examined collaborations with families of students who are dually identified, multilingual students with disabilities (n = 2). In a thematic analysis, we identified two family–teacher collaboration program models and several class activities across four types of teacher preparation program models. Our critique identifies methodological strengths and weaknesses of the literature, practice and policy implications, and a call for future research to equitably center family voice in family–teacher investigations.
This scoping review documents the content and outcomes of parental engagement components within school-based social-emotional learning (SEL) programs for pre-K through 12th grade. Of 83 programs reviewed, 45 included parental engagement components and were analyzed for format, rationale, and evidence. Findings showed that although the need for parental engagement is widely recognized, implementation and effectiveness data remain limited. Common formats included standalone written materials, such as pamphlets and letters sent home (80.0%), and parent groups or workshops (62.2%). Rationales for parent engagement predominantly focused on empowering parents and increasing the generalization of children’s SEL knowledge outside of school settings. A significant gap was identified in the evidence base: only a minority of programs documented the effectiveness, acceptability, or feasibility of their parent components. To advance the field, future research should employ methodologically rigorous evaluation designs to assess the impact of parental engagement components within school-based SEL programs.
This systematic review sheds light on the scientific landscape of critical thinking (CT) in teacher education (TED) by synthesizing how CT in TED has been investigated in terms of selected features of international scholarship on the topic and how CT has been conceptualized in this scholarship. Based on 208 included studies, our results show heterogeneity in targeted educational levels, school subjects, geography and adopted methodologies. A sharp increase in publication rates is also documented. We show further that conceptualizations nested in argumentation theory predominate. Often, scholars offer implicit definitions and use varied, related terminology, blurring CT as a concept. Lastly, explicit clarifications on the role of disciplinary knowledge in CT are often absent. We argue for an emphasis on conceptual clarity in future scholarship on CT in TED, consider the implications of our findings and offer actionable proposals for theory and practice.
Numerous systematic reviews and studies have focused on the influence principals have on school improvement, but most of these studies have ignored the inclusion of students with special education needs. Building on the international attention to inclusion sparked by the 1994 Salamanca Statement, we have conducted a comprehensive review of empirical studies on principal leadership for inclusive schools published between 1995 and January 2024. Our search has yielded 38 studies across 13 countries. We have identified three areas of practice: (a) creating and sustaining a shared commitment to inclusion; (b) establishing and improving inclusive organizational conditions; and (c) building instructional and leadership capacity for inclusion. We have also identified 15 targeted practices. While most studies were focused within the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, common practices and challenges are apparent in all parts of the world. We conclude with recommendations for future research, policy, and practice.
Critical qualitative research has evolved over time and is an invaluable tool in advancing education research and practice. Researchers who have conducted critical literature reviews—through either a systematic/scientific or a synthesis approach—have enriched the breadth and depth of our understanding of said population or topic. More important, their/our work strives to raise critical consciousness, pushes for social transformation, and disrupts structural oppressions. The purpose of our collective work is to name, offer examples, and discuss how researchers have taken up critical qualitative inquiry to contribute to and expand knowledge through a literature synthesis approach. We share our positionalities, discuss the usage of critical theory, identify literature review examples, and offer considerations for conducting syntheses.
U.S. public schools engaged in an unprecedented effort to expand tutoring in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Broad-based support for scaling tutoring emerged, in part, because of the large effects on student achievement found in prior meta-analyses. We conduct an expanded meta-analysis of 263 randomized controlled trials and explore how estimates change when we better align our sample with a policy-relevant target of inference: large-scale tutoring programs aiming to improve performance on independent, standardized tests. Pooled effect sizes from studies with stronger target-equivalence are .16 to .22 standard deviations, relative to .40 standard deviations in our full sample. This result is driven by stark declines in pooled effect sizes as program scale increases. We explore four hypotheses for this pattern and document how a bundled package of recommended design features serves to partially inoculate programs from this attenuation at scale.
In light of recent technological, scientific, and medical innovations our societies have seen as an outcome of interdisciplinary teamwork, the study of reasoning within these teams has received heightened attention in the literature. Prior syntheses have been published on interdisciplinary teamwork. However, no reviews have systematically investigated reasoning and thinking as they occur in disciplinarily diverse teams. Thus, this systematic review was conducted to examine the literature addressing reasoning and thinking processes within these teams and how thinking and reasoning processes interact with problem characteristics. Forty documents were identified and synthesized, involving over 1,400 individuals engaged in interdisciplinary teamwork. The findings indicate that task characteristics, domain expertise, and the reasoning and thinking that underlie decision-making may shape how interdisciplinary teams approach and resolve problems. These insights highlight the cognitive complexity of interdisciplinary collaboration and suggest directions for future research on how reasoning processes support effective teamwork.
Teacher burnout is assumed to impair the cognitive, motivational, and social functioning of teachers, thereby hindering their professional behavior. Although this is a rapidly growing field of research, a systematic research synthesis is still lacking. Therefore, we meta-analytically summarized primary studies on the work-related correlates of teacher burnout symptoms in terms of absenteeism, the quality of teacher-student interactions (i.e., emotional support, classroom management, and instructional support), and student motivation and achievement. Meta-analyses of 86 studies demonstrated negative associations between teacher burnout symptoms and teacher-student interactions, and student motivation and achievement, whereas absenteeism was positively related to burnout. Meta-regressions showed that the negative associations between teacher burnout, teacher-student interactions, and student motivation varied significantly depending on the rater perspective (i.e., teacher self-report vs external reports). Building on the meta-analytic findings, we propose directions for future research and highlight practical implications for intervention programs.
First-generation college students (FGCS) represent 54% of the undergraduate population in the United States, yet they make up only one-fourth of college graduates. FGCS, particularly those from racially minoritized populations, encounter distinct challenges that can adversely affect their college experiences, sense of belonging, and successful outcomes. To close the gap between enrollment and completion for these students, faculty, staff, and administrators must understand how to create environments that actively support their success. This scoping review synthesizes the research conducted since 2000 on undergraduate FGCS of Color at four-year predominantly White institutions (PWIs), identifying effective practices that foster belonging, the guiding frameworks used in these studies, common barriers students face, and the assets they leverage to persist and succeed. The findings offer a foundation for relevant implications for practitioners and highlight critical gaps that future research must address to better support this growing student population.
