José de Amesti & Susana Claro

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Apprenticeship increase employment opportunities, but what about academic outcomes?  

Apprenticeship-based high schools increase employment outcomes compared to school-based-only vocational education: countries that implement apprenticeship have eased the school-to-work transition and reduced youth unemployment. Despite these promising benefits of apprenticeship, there is almost no evidence of its impact on students’ educational outcomes. In fact, some worry that spending less time at school could motivate students to leave the academic path to join the workplace instead, causing apprentices to achieve lower educational attainment.

Summary by: Elizabeth Hentschel

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Background

Attending high-quality early childhood care and education (ECCE) programs can lead to positive child outcomes across multiple developmental domains including cognitive and social-emotional. Children from low-income families rarely have access to high-quality ECCE – less than one quarter attend center-based childcare rated as high-quality. The National Head Start (HS) Program is one affordable (free) option to low-income families, but data from 2006 find that only 40% of National Head Start Programs are considered high quality. This study seeks to understand if children who were randomly selected and offered an opportunity to participate in Head Start enroll in higher quality ECCE than they otherwise would have.

Summary by: Samantha Batel

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Increasing attendance in early childhood education is a national goal

Head Start is the nation’s largest federally funded early childhood education program for children from low-income families. This type of programming, which is a central policy lever for expanding opportunity, can only be effective if children attend regularly. However, there is no systematic evidence on whether or why strategies to improve attendance are effective. 

Summary by: Yining Hua

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What is QuickReads Technology? Is it effective?

QuickReads (QR) is a curriculum that uses science and social studies texts to build reading skills. It has both print-only and technology + print formats and utilizes 15-minute instructional sessions built on a model with wide and long-lasting support in comprehension instruction. This study finds that QR enhanced students’ reading skills in all evaluated areas: reading fluency, reading comprehension, and vocabulary. The figure shows the outcome of the reading comprehension assessment. The three bars within each grade group represent students who 1) did not use QR (control), 2) used QR print materials, and 3) used QR technology-based and printed materials, respectively (from left to right). Across all grades, QR effectively enhanced students reading fluency.

Mengli Song, Kristina L. Zeiser, Drew Atchison, and Iliana Brodziak de los Reyes

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What are Early College High Schools?

Early Colleges are small high schools designed to increase the opportunity for students–particularly students traditionally underrepresented in higher education­–to earn a postsecondary credential. To achieve this goal, they partner with colleges and universities to provide high school students with college experience with the expectation that all students will earn an associate’s degree or up to 2 years of college credits during high school at no or low-cost to their families. Early Colleges also provide a rigorous and supportive high school environment to help students navigate and succeed in college coursework.

Summary by: Muqi Guo

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ASSISTments is an online math homework intervention developed to target formative assessment. Teachers and students can assign, do, and review homework using the ASSISTments platform. While doing homework in ASSISTments students receive immediate feedback on their work, opportunities to improve their answers, and hints and tutorials for select problems. Teachers receive a report that identifies which assigned homework problems were difficult for students, along with common wrong answers.

What are the impacts of the ASSISTments intervention?

Nicolai Topstad Borgen, Oddbjørn Raaum, Lars Johannessen Kirkebøen, Mari-Anne Sørlie, Terje Ogden, Ivar Frønes

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Does School-Wide Positive Behavioral Support (SWPBS) affect academic failure and marginalization?

If at all, effects are likely small in Norway. Exposure to SWPBS in grades 1-7 does not seem to have a noticeable influence on students’ later academic achievements, school dropout, later school problem behavior, or criminal charges, neither in general nor for at-risk students.

Mengli Song, Andrew J. Wayne, Michael S. Garet, Seth Brown, and Jordan Rickles

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What is the intervention tested in this study?

The 2-year intervention consisted of three components that were designed to provide educators with performance feedback on classroom practice (four times per year), student growth (once per year), and principal leadership (twice per year), respectively. The intervention targeted principals and teachers of reading and mathematics in grades 4–8, whose participation in the intervention was voluntary with no consequences for tenure or employment.

Tricia A. Zucker, María S. Carlo, Susan H. Landry, Saba S. Masood, Jeffrey M. Williams, Vibhuti Bhavsar

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Can Developing Talkers improve academic vocabulary?

Yes, according to a rigorous study conducted in Texas with young students who were mostly English learners (ELs, 63%). Students who participated in a 26-week shared reading program, which taught academic vocabulary and asked inferential comprehension questions, learned more sophisticated words compared with students who did not (see bar chart below). This study shows that an intervention can cause children as young as pre-kindergarten (pre-k) and kindergarten to learn more academic words. This extends past research on direct instruction to academic level words. Developing academic level language in the earliest grades aligns with modern learning guidelines that view rigorous classroom discourse as foundational to college and career readiness.

Julie Edmunds, Fatih Unlu, Elizabeth Glennie, Lawrence Bernstein, Lily Fesler, Jane Furey, & Nina Arshavsky

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Are early college high schools effective?

Yes, they are, according to a rigorous study conducted in North Carolina. Students who attended Early College High Schools enrolled in and completed college more than comparable students who did not (see bar chart below). The increase in degree completion is one of the largest ever observed in a randomized trial! Early college students also earned 8 times as many college credits in high school as their peers in the control group.

Ben Clarke, Christian Doabler, Keith Smolkowski, Evangeline Kurtz Nelson, Hank Fien, Scott K. Baker, Derek Kosty

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Early intervention can reduce the achievement gap in mathematics

More than half of elementary school students in the United States score below proficient in mathematics in fourth grade. To address this problem, educators can provide early intervention on whole number skills (e.g., counting by ones; adding two numbers to make 10; decomposing numbers). Early intervention may be integral to children’s long-term success with mathematical thinking because difficulty at school entry typically persists into later elementary grades. Persistent frustration and hardship in learning mathematics are associated with a mathematics learning disability (MLD). Students with MLD are most vulnerable to lifelong difficulty managing daily tasks that involve numbers (e.g., money management). Students with or at risk for MLD will likely benefit from intervention as early as possible to reduce adverse long-term impacts.

Cory Koedel, Jiaxi Li, Matthew G. Springer, & Li Tan

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Do Rating Differences in Reformed Teacher Evaluation Systems Cause Teachers to Alter Their Professional Improvement Behaviors?

According to our analysis of Tennessee’s reformed teacher evaluation model, the answer is no.

Dan Goldhaber, John Krieg, & Roddy Theobald

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Every year there are more than 125,000 student teachers who complete apprenticeships in K-12 public schools. These apprenticeships occur in the classrooms of inservice teachers, known as mentor or cooperating teachers. Does hosting teacher candidates affect student test performance, either during the apprenticeship or in the classrooms of mentor teachers after they host a student teacher?  There is a good deal of speculation about this, but no published quantitative exploration of the impacts on students in the classrooms where student teaching has taken place.

Kristin Rogde, Monica Melby-Lervåg, & Arne Lervåg

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There are increasing numbers of children whose first language differs from the predominant language of instruction in their school. Entering school where the language of instruction is a student’s second language is associated with undesirable social, educational, and economic outcomes. This study investigates the efficacy of an intervention aimed at improving second-language skills of kindergarteners.

How did we test the intervention?

Chris van Klaveren, Karen Kooiman, Ilja Cornelisz & Martijn Meeter

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Secondary school students tend to be overly optimistic about how well they will perform in college. This overconfidence leads to suboptimal decision making. But what if secondary school students were told their likelihood of succeeding in the college program they applied to prior to their decision to enroll?  Would this influence their decision to enroll?

This study presents the results of a field experiment in which a random half of 313 secondary-school students applying to higher education received personalized predictions on study success (the other half did not receive such predictions). A comparison of the enrolment rates of the two groups of students helps us understand the effect of receiving these personalized predictions. We find that:

Sharon Wolf, J. Lawrence Aber, Jere Behrman & Edward Tsinigo

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Preschool teacher training program improves classroom quality and child outcomes in Ghana

Children around the world are attending preschool more than ever before. But many preschools are poor quality and children are not learning. Ghana, a lower-middle income country in West Africa, has been at the forefront of expanding access to preschool and adopting a progressive- child-centered curriculum.

Yet, preschool quality remains poor and most teachers have not been trained in the national curriculum.