This study examined the links among students' effort, tracking, and students' achievement. It found that students in higher tracks exert substantially more effort than do students in lower tracks. These differences in effort are largely explained by differences in prior effort and achievement, as well as students' experiences in their classes. Students' effort is strongly related to students' learning, and track differences in students' effort account for a modest portion of track differences in students' learning. Finally, the effect of students' effort on students' learning is roughly the same, regardless of the track in which a student is placed.

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Does unequal access to high quality English instruction lead to unequal achievement outcomes for students? Four key aspects of high quality instruction—quantity of assignments, coherence of instruction, student voice in curricular and pedagogical issues, and the content of instruction—are examined to see whether each aspect affects growth in reading achievement from grades 8 to 12. Analyses indicate that some aspects of student voice enhance achievement growth, but quantity and coherence do not. Content has the most substantial impact on achievement growth: greater emphasis on analytical writing is associated with greater growth in reading scores. Overall, these measures of instructional practices partially explain why students’ track position and reading achievement are related.

Prior research has not examined how much of the socioeconomic status (SES) advantage on schooling outcomes is related to participation in extracurricular activities. The authors explore the SES advantage and extracurricular participation in elementary school-aged children, with a focus on noncognitive skills. The authors argue that noncognitive skills mediate the influence of SES and extracurricular activities on academic skills. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class of 1998-99, the authors find that extracurricular participation explains a modest portion of the SES advantage in noncognitive and cognitive skills. In addition, the influence of extracurricular participation on both noncognitive and cognitive skills varies by children's SES.Keywords extracurricular activities, noncognitive skills, achievement, SES advantage Socioeconomic status (SES) differences in educational achievement and attainment are large and pervasive in modern industrialized societies. Students from higher-SES backgrounds have higher levels of academic achievement and are more likely to go further in school than lower SES students. These SES inequalities in schooling outcomes are later translated into advantages in occupational attainment and income (Blau and Duncan 1967;Jencks 1972;Kerckhoff, Raudenbush, and Glennie 2001;Sewell and Hauser 1975). A growing body of evidence suggests that SES gaps in achievement are present before students enter formal schooling (Entwisle, Alexander, and Olson 1997;Farkas 2004;Hart and Risley 1995). These important findings suggest that inequalities in students' home environments are critical factors that drive much of the SES gap in achievement in school. Our study contributes to the SES gap literature by examining inequalities in an additional context: extracurricular activities (EAs).In this study, we focus on unequal access to learning opportunities that elementary school students receive outside both the conventional school curriculum and the immediate home environment. We examine whether EAs provide an additional source of advantage for high-SES students that helps them increase their chances of school success. In her recent ethnographic account of class differences in childhood experiences, Lareau (2003) focused on class differences in parenting styles that led some parents to provide enriched extracurricular experiences for their children. In our study, we examine SES differences in extracurricular participation in elementary school and consider their effect on students' noncognitive skills and achievement outcomes for students in the same age range as Lareau's study.We argue that EAs improve students' noncognitive skills: a broad set of skills that include (but