Category: Educational Administration and Leadership

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Educational Administration and Leadership K-12 Education

Preliminary results from the Personalized Learning Initiative

Despite substantial federal investment through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund, the education sector still grapples with challenges related to pandemic-induced learning loss. High dosage tutoring has been a leading strategy in accelerating academic catch-up efforts. The Personalized Learning Initiative (PLI) led by the University of Chicago Education Lab, in collaboration with MDRC and researchers from the University of Toronto and Stanford University, focuses on whether and how high dosage tutoring can be scaled to benefit more students. Their preliminary report finds that incorporating tutoring during the school day is more effective than after-school or virtual tutoring and underscores the importance of structured, consistent approaches.

The initiative worked with Chicago Public Schools (CPS), Illinois; Fulton County Schools, Georgia; the New Mexico Public Education Department; and a mid-sized urban school district in California. The New Mexico and California partners focused on out-of-school tutoring, virtual tutoring at home and after-school respectively, and both struggled with low student participation that precluded rigorous evaluations. In contrast, CPS and Fulton County Schools, who used their ESSER funding to incorporate tutoring during the school day, had more robust participation and were able to participate in randomized controlled trials during the 2022-2023 school year.

Across sites, over 2,000 K-11 students were randomized into high dosage tutoring in math or reading or to business-as-usual control groups. In Fulton County, most of the schools began tutoring in January and 82% of students in the high dosage tutoring group participated in at least one session. Also notable was that 35% of those assigned to the business-as-usual group also received at least one tutoring session. The mean dosage for all assigned students was 9.0 sessions in the treatment group compared to 3.48 sessions in the control group. In Chicago, the mean dosage for the treatment group was 18.40 sessions for all assigned students, with 67% of them attending at least one session. The control group had a crossover rate of 18%, with a mean dosage of 4.61 sessions. Across both subjects and sites, the intent-to-treat impact was +0.04 and the treatment-on-the-treated effect size was +0.14. Despite challenges in maintaining data quality and delivery consistency, the combined outcomes from Fulton County and Chicago indicate a generally positive impact, particularly in math, where the treatment-on-the-treated (TOT) effect was 0.27 SD.

The broader lesson learned from the first year of the Personalized Learning Initiative is that high dosage tutoring can generate meaningful learning gains, provided it is structured and well-supported. The strategy that appears to work best involves a combination of smaller student-tutor ratios, structured curricula, and the use of trained tutors during the school day.

 

Source (Open Access): Personalized Learning Initiative Research Team. (2024). Realizing the Promise of High Dosage Tutoring at Scale: Preliminary Evidence for the Field. University of Chicago Education Lab. https://educationlab.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2024/03/UChicago-Education-Lab-PLI-Technical-Report-03.2024.pdf… Read the rest

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Educational Administration and Leadership Kindergarten Primary School Education

Long-term effects of pre-K for low-income students

A study by Johnson and colleagues has been the first to examine if, among students from low SES backgrounds, benefits to public or Head Start preschool attendance the year prior to kindergarten were still evident in third grade.

The study involved 689 students from low-SES backgrounds in the Tulsa, Oklahoma public school district who were third graders in 2021. Researchers used propensity score weighting to balance the baseline characteristics of the children, enabling a comparison of third grade achievement data of students who attended public pre-K, Head Start pre-K, or no pre-K the year before kindergarten (2017-18). Results, using literacy and math subtests from the Woodcock-Johnson, showed that academic performance favored pre-K attenders, with the most pronounced differences observed in kindergarten. However, these advantages diminished by third grade, excepting numerical fluency among Head Start pre-K attenders, whose outcomes in numerical fluency had further increased by third grade. In conclusion, both public school and Head Start pre-K programs benefitted students from low-income backgrounds into third grade, despite that the extent of the benefits as compared to pre-K non-attenders decreased over time for most areas.

 

Source (Open Access): Johnson, A. D., Partika, A., Martin, A., Lyons, I., Castle, S., & Phillips, D. A. (2024). Public preschool predicts stronger third-grade academic skills. AERA Open, 10, 23328584231223477. https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584231223477… Read the rest

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Educational Administration and Leadership Primary School Education Social and Motivational Outcomes

Student Success Skills’ effects on Hispanic students

Student Success Skills (SSS) is a program designed to help students reflect and develop purposeful academic, social, and self-management skills that ultimately lead to improved performance in school. A guidance counselor delivers weekly classroom lessons in academic goal-setting and in non-academic areas such as tracking health, wellness, and anxiety, which when addressed, have been shown in research to positively affect academic achievement.

Because the Hispanic student population is the fastest-growing of all student subsets, to ensure adequate cultural responsiveness, researchers examined the impact of SSS on attendance, self-regulation, and test anxiety on the subset of 681 Hispanic fifth grade students within a 2019 randomized controlled trial of SSS (383E, 298 C) from 30 schools in a single district. Following a one-day training, school counselors in the experimental group were randomly assigned to deliver SSS weekly for 45 minutes over five weeks, with a monthly booster session January-March. Control counselors continued with regular counseling practices. All students were tested two weeks before the experimental group began receiving treatment, two weeks after the fifth lesson and thirty weeks after the fifth lesson. Students were evaluated using three years’ attendance data and two student surveys: the Student Engagement in School Success Skills (SESSS) Self-Regulation of Arousal subscale and the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) test anxiety subscale.

Results showed that at 30 weeks post intervention, students who had been in the SSS group had better attendance and less test anxiety than controls. These improvements were not evident in at the first post-test, but were evident at the second, implying that time is needed both for students to create better habits and for schools to nurture the environments needed to encourage attendance and promote a safe environment. These findings mirror the findings of the overall RCT from which this data was drawn. Self-regulation showed no statistically significant difference between the two groups at either pre- or post-test—while experimental students’ self-regulation scores were indeed higher than controls’, the difference was not statistically significant.

 

Source: Villares, E., Bowers, H., Brigman, G., & Bottini, C. (2024). The effects of Student Success Skills on attendance and emotion regulation. Journal of Counseling & Development, 102(2), 163–174. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcad.12503… Read the rest

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Educational Administration and Leadership K-12 Education Programme Evaluation

Utilizing an evidence-based improvement framework for choosing interventions to improve attendance

Chronic absence, defined as missing 10% or more of school days per year for any reason, poses serious risks of adverse effects on student achievement and graduation rates. A recent report advocated for the use of an evidence-based improvement framework to reduce chronic absence by offering an example of how to use this framework to choose an attendance intervention that meets local needs.

The framework was rooted in a five-step improvement process: inform, select, plan, implement, and analyze. It emphasized the continuous nature of the process and its alignment with state and local goals. It highlighted the importance of initially understanding local needs through a thorough analysis and then identifying and choosing appropriate interventions.

A detailed example showcased the framework in action, illustrating how a school team might identify a need, such as engaging families to encourage attendance schoolwide. Then educators may identify evidence-based attendance interventions by using credible repositories, such as Evidence for ESSA. The Evidence for ESSA website describes the interventions, their outcomes, and considerations, including staffing, technology, cost, etc. By examining potential evidence-based strategies from the interventions, educators select the intervention, plan for implementation, carry out implementation, and analyze the effectiveness of the intervention in their local context.

In conclusion, the report emphasized the necessity of applying an evidence-based improvement framework to tackle chronic absence. It encouraged educators to meticulously assess their unique challenges and select interventions that are not only grounded in solid evidence but are also feasible and appropriate for their specific environments.

 

Source (Open Access): REL West. (2024). Applying a cycle of evidence-based continuous improvement when selecting interventions and project components to improve attendance. https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/rel/regions/west/pdf/AttendanceIntervention_Infographic_508c.pdf.… Read the rest

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Educational Administration and Leadership K-12 Education

Can Early Warning Systems improve attendance for low-SES students?

During and following the COVID-19 pandemic, chronic absenteeism increased dramatically across the United States, with the largest increase by low-income students. One of the most common approaches schools implement to identify, monitor, and address student absenteeism is the Early Warning System (EWS), intended to provide schools with data about student attendance patterns in time to intervene and address absenteeism. Because existing research has been mixed on the impact of the low-cost program, Canbolat recently examined student attendance and demographic data from 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 to determine the impact of the program on student absenteeism, and if it varied by socio-economic status (SES), given the structural barriers low-SES students face to attend school.

The study focused on a single large urban southeast school district (n=80,000 students, 51% free- and reduced-lunch) where EWS was used for monitoring and intervention guidance as part of a district-wide multi-tiered system of support (MTSS). The study used a sharp regression discontinuity design (RD) with cutoffs based on EWS procedures. Students were identified as at-risk when they had more than a 4% absence rate, while students were identified as off-track when they reached 10% absence.

The author found no significant overall impact of EWS on student attendance for either at-risk or off-track students. However, the impact did differ by SES level for off-track students who were socioeconomically advantaged, reducing the absence rate by 1-2 percentage points (a meaningful difference). This discrepancy suggests that the EWS may not adequately address the structural barriers faced by socioeconomically disadvantaged students, such as the need for increased parental involvement and community support. Alternatively, it may indicate that the EWS is ineffective when dealing with a large number of moderately or chronically absent students.  The author suggests several policy and practical improvements to enhance the effectiveness of the EWS. These include forging partnerships with community organizations and implementing targeted communications to dispel common parental misconceptions about attendance.

 

Source: Canbolat, Y. (2024). Early warning for whom? Regression discontinuity evidence from the effect of early warning system on student absence. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 01623737231221503. https://doi.org/10.3102/01623737231221503… Read the rest

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Educational Administration and Leadership Language Development Primary School Education

Improving elementary reading fluency in Brazil

The expansion of educational opportunities in developing nations has resulted in increased years of schooling, evident from significant rises in secondary education enrollment rates over the past decades. While access to education is clearly important, it is also crucial to focus on the quality of education. Low literacy rates remain an issue in many parts of the world and identifying effective ways to teach all students to read is essential for both individuals and societies at large.

In Brazil, only 45% of third-grade students demonstrated adequate reading skills on the 2016 national literacy assessment. A recent study by Gomes and Hirata, published in Education Economics, evaluated a program aimed at improving reading fluency among primary school students in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Students in grades 3-5 from 11 public schools were randomly assigned to receive the experimental reading program (n= 220) or to continue with their business-as-usual reading curriculum (n = 244). The program, lasting three months with three sessions per week, focused on techniques like repeated reading, group sessions, and individualized attention. A key feature of the program involved reading aloud with emphasis on modulation. Instructors frequently highlighted their modeling of intonation and rhythm, drawing students’ attention to these aspects.

Results indicated positive impacts on reading speed (ES = +0.14) and accuracy (ES = +0.16), yet no significant improvement in prosody (ES = +0.12) or reading comprehension (ES = +0.03). While the study punctuates the importance of prioritizing reading fluency, particularly in regions like Brazil where literacy levels are low despite increased access to schooling, it also highlights the challenges in achieving comprehensive improvements.

 

Source: Gomes, M., & Hirata, G. (2024). Developing reading fluency in primary school: Evidence from an RCT. Education Economics, 0(0), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/09645292.2024.2322535… Read the rest