Math anxiety represents a substantial barrier to many students' math learning. In this paper, we apply interdisciplinary perspectives to data on over 13,200 ninth graders and their math teachers from the High School Longitudinal Study. Results suggest that being perceived as dis/abled relates to heightened math anxiety regardless of adolescents' gender, or race and ethnicity. Our intersectional approach reveals that adolescents' expressions of math anxiety do not always correspond with gender, racial, and ethnic stereotypes, with Black girls, Black boys, and Latine boys expressing relatively low levels of math anxiety. Finally, consistent with the principles of inclusion and universal design, placing students into groups of mixed ability is the only teacher approach to grouping that does not relate to high levels of math anxiety for any subgroup of students. With intersectionality and interdisciplinariness the pillars of Disability Studies in Education, this study contributes to critical research approaches and policy considerations.

Inequalities by disability status in college outcomes contribute to inequalities throughout adulthood in multiple domains. As the share of students with learning disabilities and/or ADHD increases on college campuses, research is needed on how best to support these undergraduates, both through formal and informal means. We integrate the social and medical models of disability with data on nearly 17,000 young adults in the US, who typically finished high school in 2013, and find that formal-disability-programming relates negatively to college enrollment but has no apparent bearing on college persistence. Among youth with similar sociodemographic backgrounds and comparable end of high school achievement levels, youth with a learning disability or ADHD who participate in special education during high school are less likely to enroll in college than youth with a learning disability or ADHD who do not. Multiple informal-disability-supports retain a significant relationship with college enrollment and persistence, even after accounting for important potential confounders. These supports may improve college outcomes because they demonstrate the relevance of education for careers (e.g., internships), build dominant social and cultural capital (e.g., high school counselors, career services), build human capital (e.g., college exam prep, academic support for college courses), and increase accessibility (e.g., online programs).

Completing advanced high school math coursework relates to better adulthood outcomes. Our understanding of why youth with learning disabilities (LDs) and/or ADHD have less access to high math course attainment is limited. Using data on around 20,000 adolescents from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, results indicate that, regardless of disability status, structural inequities in family social position are more salient for youth's math course attainment than formal disability programming, universal supports, or structural inequities in how students are sorted across schools. Among youth with the same disability status, youth from higher SES families, or whose parents have a STEM degree, have heightened access to high math course attainment even after accounting for prior achievement. Disparities in access to high math course attainment that persist net of controls for both youth with an LD and youth with ADHD present the possibility of disability-related stratification and stigma during high school.

Organizations that create opportunities for youth (14–21 years old) to be near-peer educators empower youth leadership through relational and community-oriented commitments. In this study, we describe how youth, employed to teach others STEM subjects, understand leadership, including what good leadership looks like and how the organizations they work for support their development as leaders. We include in-depth interviews with six youth community STEM educators. Participants in our study characterized youth leadership in side-by-side or dialogic leadership styles which catalyzed a sense of responsibility and a focus on giving back to their self-identified communities. Leadership in youth near-peer teaching settings is not individual, rather participants see themselves as part of a leadership team. Organizations supported leadership by creating family like structures and distributing opportunities for leadership to everyone. To disrupt educational inequities, young people need, and can excel in, authentic opportunities to lead.

Identifying the best model using fit indices is a crucial step in cognitive diagnosis (CD) data analysis. Previous research has examined the performance of popular relative and absolute model fit indices in the context of cognitive diagnosis models (CDMs). However, the effectiveness of these indices under uncommon conditions, such as small sample sizes, remains unclear. Therefore, the primary goal of this study is to investigate the impact of sample size on commonly used model fit indices in CD. Four relative model fit indices, including AIC, BIC, CAIC, and SABIC, and three absolute model fit indices, SRMSR, RMSEA 2, and M 2, were considered. The study also investigates the performance of two general approaches in CD, the generalized DINA (G-DINA) model and the general nonparametric classification (GNPC) method, in contrast to the studied model fit indices. The goal of this part of the study is to explore whether these two general approaches can serve as effective alternatives when the model fit indices do not perform well. Practical guidelines that would be useful for researchers and practitioners were provided based on the simulation results under various conditions. Additionally, a real data analysis was conducted to demonstrate the practical utility of the study.

Schools' overt or explicit practices are a dominant lens through which education researchers and policymakers attempt to understand how schools are racially inequitable. Yet, Lewis and Diamond argue that contemporary racial inequalities are largely sustained through implicit factors, like institutional practices and structural inequalities. Ray's framework on racialized organizations similarly outlines how our racialized sociopolitical structure becomes embedded in organizations, legitimating and perpetuating the racialized hierarchy. We apply illustrative cluster analysis techniques to rich data on schools, teachers, and students from the nationally representative High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 to find that structural inequities (e.g., student body, sector, average achievement) appear to be most salient in delineating the racialization of US high schools, whereas the characteristics of schools and teachers that are typically emphasized for closing racial inequities in educational outcomes (e.g., teacher qualifications, courses offered, stratification practices) are not salient differentiators across schools.

The literature linking adulthood criminality to cumulative disadvantage and early school misbehavior demonstrates that understanding the mechanisms underlying student behavior and the responses of teachers and administrators is crucial in comprehending racial/ethnic disparities in actual or perceived school misbehavior. We use data on 19,160 ninth graders from the nationally representative High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 to show that boys' and girls' negative achievement and negative experiences with teachers relate more closely to school misbehavior than the contextual measures (e.g., negative peer climate, proportion Black) that have often been emphasized as most salient for misbehavior. Differences in negative achievement and experiences completely explain Black boys', Latinx boys', and Black girls' heightened levels of school misbehavior relative to White youth, and Asian boys' and girls' lower levels of school misbehavior. In contrast, differences in negative achievement and experiences only partially explain Latinx girls' higher levels of school misbehavior relative to White girls.

This study contributes to research exploring social factors shaping gender identification. Informed by structural symbolic interactionism, social identity theory, and Levitt's psychosocial theory of gender, we explore how a key aspect of external social structure-adolescent family socioeconomic status-is associated with gender identification in emerging adulthood. We examine whether correlates of family socioeconomic status, including adolescent family and educational experiences and friend and high school characteristics, are associated with a cisgender, binary transgender, nonbinary, or gender unsure identification. Using data from High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09), we find a positive association between adolescent family socioeconomic status and a nonbinary gender identification. Analyses indicate that educational and family experiences account for the largest percentage of the association between adolescent family socioeconomic status and nonbinary gender identification, potentially representing higher SES youths' heightened access to middle- and upper-class cultural schemas and resources.

Amid the proliferation of state-level bans on race-based affirmative action in higher education, the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on June 29, 2023, dismantled race-conscious college admission policies, intensifying concerns about the persistence and potential increase of racial inequality in higher education. The authors analyze four restricted-use national survey datasets to investigate racial disparities in college attendance outcomes from the 1980s through the 2010s. Although college entrance rates increased for all racial groups, Black and Hispanic youth became increasingly less likely than their White peers to attend four-year selective colleges. In the 2010s cohort, Black and Hispanic youth were 8 and 7 percentage points, respectively, less likely than their White counterparts to secure admission to four-year selective colleges, even after controlling for parents' income, education, and other family background variables. The findings underscore the urgent need for proactive policy interventions to address the widening racial inequality in attending selective postsecondary institutions.

Using data on ninth graders, math teachers, and schools from the nationally representative High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, we investigate the following questions: (1) How do ninth graders’ perceptions of their math teachers as equitable relate to their math identity at the intersection of adolescents’ race and gender? and (2) Do differences in the percentage of students at the school who share the adolescent’s race moderate (i.e., differentiate) the salience of perceptions of math teachers for adolescents’ math identities? Our results suggest that adolescents who perceive their math teachers as equitable typically have higher levels of math identity regardless of their race or gender. Adolescents’ perceptions of their math teachers as equitable are most salient for adolescents’ math identity in racially diverse schools, where racial differences and stereotypes may be more visible. Findings also indicate the seeming resistance of Black youth to racist stereotypes, whose math identity remains high regardless of their perceptions of their teachers.