Improving academic outcomes for economically disadvantaged students has proven challenging, particularly for children at older ages. We present two large-scale randomized controlled trials of a high-dosage tutoring program delivered to secondary school students in Chicago. One innovation is to use paraprofessional tutors to hold down cost, thereby increasing scalability. Participating in math tutoring increases math test scores by 0.18 to 0.40 standard deviations and increases math and non-math course grades. These effects persist into future years. The data are consistent with increased personalization of instruction as a mechanism. The benefit-cost ratio is comparable to many successful early-childhood programs.

Survey data are commonly cited as evidence of widespread misperceptions and misinformed beliefs. This paper shows that surveys generally fail to identify the firm, deep, steadfast, confidently held beliefs described in leading accounts. Instead, even those who report 100% certain belief in falsehoods about well-studied topics like climate change, vaccine side effects, and the COVID-19 death toll exhibit substantial response instability over time. Similar levels of response stability are observed among those who report 100% certain belief in benign, politically uncontested falsehoods—for example, that electrons are larger than atoms and that lasers work by focusing sound waves. As opposed to firmly held misperceptions, claims to be highly certain of incorrect answers are best interpreted as “miseducated” guesses based on mistaken inferential reasoning. Those reporting middling and low levels of certainty are best viewed as making close-to-blind guesses. These findings recast existing evidence as to the prevalence, predictors, correction, and consequences of misperceptions and misinformed beliefs.

Social provision in the United States is highly decentralized. Significant federal and state funding flows to local organizational actors, who are granted discretion over how to allocate resources to people in need. In welfare states where many programs are underfunded and decoupled from local need, how does decentralization shape who gets what? This article identifies forces that shape how local actors classify help-seekers when they ration scarce resources, focusing on the case of prioritization in the Housing Choice Voucher Program. We use network methods to represent and analyze 1,398 local prioritization policies. Our results reveal two patterns that challenge expectations from past literature. First, we observe classificatory restraint, or many organizations choosing not to draw fine distinctions between applicants to prioritize. Second, when organizations do institute priority categories, policies often advantage applicants who are formally institutionally connected to the local community. Interviews with officials, in turn, reveal how prioritization schemes reflect housing agencies’ position within a matrix of intra-organizational, inter-organizational, and vertical forces that structure the meaning and cost of classifying help-seekers. These findings illustrate how local organizations’ use of classification to solve on-the-ground organizational problems and manage scarce resources can generate additional forms of exclusion.

Over the last decade, large-scale replication projects across the biomedical and social sciences have reported relatively low replication rates. In these large-scale replication projects, replication has typically been evaluated based on a single replication study of some original study and dichotomously as successful or failed. However, evaluations of replicability that are based on a single study and are dichotomous are inadequate, and evaluations of replicability should instead be based on multiple studies, be continuous, and be multi-faceted. Further, such evaluations are in fact possible due to two characteristics shared by many large-scale replication projects. In this article, we provide such an evaluation for two prominent large-scale replication projects, one which replicated a phenomenon from cognitive psychology and another which replicated 13 phenomena from social psychology and behavioral economics. Our results indicate a very high degree of replicability in the former and a medium to low degree of replicability in the latter. They also suggest an unidentified covariate in each, namely ocular dominance in the former and political ideology in the latter, that is theoretically pertinent. We conclude by discussing evaluations of replicability at large, recommendations for future large-scale replication projects, and design-based model generalization. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

This article examines how the death of Li Wenliang, in February 2020, served as an affordance for Chinese netizens to engage with their intimate sense of themselves as political subjects through the interrogative process of scalar inquiry. Li, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital who was sanctioned by Chinese authorities in 2019 for warning friends about the virus, was also an eminently normative and successful Han Chinese citizen who many saw as a reflection of themselves. His persecution, public humiliation, and death thus indexed the vulnerability of even the most compliant subjects and triggered an unprecedented public response that included both grief and outrage. Although largely censored within hours, this response continued to emerge throughout the year in a public mega-thread on his Weibo “Wailing Wall.” This article draws on an alternative archive of censored messages on Li's Weibo page—usually described as an affective, apolitical space—to demonstrate how the Wailing Wall also becomes a unique sociomoral space in which people collaboratively reflect upon their sense of themselves as embodied subjects. Scalar inquiry, I suggest, thus emerges as a continual, collaborative, and simultaneously personal and political process of interrogating citizenship and nationhood vis-à-vis the remembered past, the experienced present, and the anticipated future.

In the summer of 1954, the Highlander Folk School, a racially integrated institution located in the hills of Tennessee, hosted a series of workshops on the United Nations. Highlander’s UN workshops cultivated a grassroots globalism that aimed to connect the UN to local action on behalf of racial integration. Yet while the workshops helped raise awareness about the work of the UN, they failed to directly link such global awareness to local action and instead revealed the danger that a certain kind of global optimism would lead to local apathy. By contrast, Highlander’s radical integrationism, by challenging the borders of race, opened a space for other kinds of border crossing, particularly in regard to nonviolent civil disobedience. Audio recordings of Highlander’s workshops provide a rare perspective on the geography of nonviolence. By revealing the geographic imagination of local activists, these tapes allow us to reconceive the transnational history of the American civil rights movement as a grassroots endeavor.

In racialized societies, race divides people, prioritizes some groups over others, and directly impacts opportunities and outcomes in life. These missed opportunities and altered outcomes can be rectified only through the deliberate dismantling of explicit, implicit, and systemic patterns of injustice. Racial problems cannot be corrected merely by the good wishes of individuals-purposeful actions and interventions are required. To create equitable systems, civil courage is vital. Civil courage differs from other forms of courage, as it is directed at social change. People who demonstrate civil courage are aware of the negative consequences and social costs but choose to persist based on a moral imperative. After defining allyship and providing contemporary and historical examples of civil courage, this paper explains the difficulties and impediments inherent in implementing racial justice. To enable growth and change, we introduce ten practical exercises based on cognitive-behavioral approaches to help individuals increase their awareness and ability to demonstrate racial justice allyship in alignment with valued behaviors. We explain how these exercises can be utilized to change thinking patterns, why the exercises can be difficult, and how psychologists and others might make use of them to expand the capacity for civil courage in the service of racial justice. Public Significance Statement Racial justice is an important goal for the well-being of racialized people globally. However, most Americans, psychologists included, find it difficult to align their values and intentions with actions. This paper offers a frank discussion of the issues of shame and discomfort that often surround issues of racial injustice and describes cognitive-behavioral approaches for cultivating civil courage.