SRI Authors: Lauren J. Cassidy, Ela Joshi, Julia Yankelowitz, Kaily Yee, Kyra N. Caspary Abstract The Barr Foundation launched the Engage New England Initiative in 2017 to support the development of innovative schools to serve students who are off track to graduate from high school. A key system of these schools is a primary person […]
Kyra N. Caspary
SRI Author
Los Angeles City College’s STEM Pathways Program: Participation and Impact
Los Angeles City College launched the STEM Pathways program in 2016 to improve students’ STEM degree completion and transfer to 4-year colleges, particularly for low-income and Latinx students. With funding from the U.S. Department of Education, the program offered a variety of supports including Supplemental Instruction (SI), peer tutoring in STEM, a book and technology loan program, specialized counseling, a math boot camp, and an undergraduate research experience. This report presents findings from three quasi-experimental studies estimating the impact of program participation overall, as well as STEM Learning Center participation and SI participation, specifically on STEM course success and continuation in STEM. SRI found positive and statistically significant results for continuation in STEM and STEM course success.
Evaluation of Los Angeles City College’s STEM Pathways Program: Impacts of STEM Pathways Program Participation on Student Outcomes
Los Angeles City College launched the STEM Pathways program in 2016 with funding from the U.S. Department of Education. The intent of the STEM Pathways program was to improve STEM degree completion and transfer to 4-year colleges, particularly for low-income and Latinx students. The program offered a variety of supports including Supplemental Instruction (SI), peer tutoring in STEM, a book and technology loan program, specialized counseling, a math boot camp, and an undergraduate research experience. This report presents findings from a quasi-experimental study estimating the impact of STEM Pathways program participation on STEM course success and continuation in STEM, as well as degree attainment. SRI found positive and statistically significant results for continuation in STEM and STEM credits earned.
Evaluation of Los Angeles City College’s STEM Pathways Program: Impacts of the Supplemental Instruction Program on Student Outcomes
Los Angeles City College launched the STEM Pathways program in 2016 with funding from the U.S. Department of Education. The intent of the STEM Pathways program was to improve students’ STEM degree completion and transfer to 4-year colleges, particularly for low-income and Latinx students. The program provided a variety of supports including Supplemental Instruction (SI) for key STEM courses. This report presents findings from a quasi-experimental study estimating the impact of SI participation on STEM course success and continuation in STEM. SRI found positive and statistically significant results for focal course passing, focal course grade, and continuation in STEM.
Evaluation of Los Angeles City College’s STEM Pathways Program: Impacts of the STEM Learning Center on Student Outcomes
Los Angeles City College launched the STEM Pathways program in 2016 with funding from the U.S. Department of Education. The intent of the STEM Pathways program was to improve students’ STEM degree completion and transfer to 4-year colleges, particularly for low-income and Latinx students, through a variety of supports. The STEM Learning Center, a drop-in peer tutoring program offering students assistance in STEM courses, was one of the grant’s most-used supports. This report presents findings from a quasi-experimental study to estimate the impact of the STEM Learning Center on STEM course success and continuation in STEM. SRI found positive effects of STEM Learning Center participation on students’ STEM outcomes, in terms of increased STEM credits and STEM continuation.
Designing Schools with and for Students: Lessons Learned from the Engage New England Initiative
This research brief identifies promising strategies for embracing student voice in school design based on the experience of Engage New England (ENE) grantees. Successfully engaging students in decision-making and school design is not as simple as inviting them to attend staff meetings. As ENE grantees learned, meaningfully engaging students requires planning, scaffolding, and sustained attention to both representation and accessibility for the most historically underserved youth. The lessons ENE grantees learned from engaging in a structured, student-centered design process can help other schools to include student voice in school design and they may also be applied more broadly to ongoing continuous efforts. The lessons also may be useful for supporting the engagement of all participants in school design work, adults, and students alike. These lessons learned are presented and described in greater depth throughout the brief.
Designing Schools with and for Students: Lessons Learned from the Engage New England Initiative is the first of a series of research briefs resulting from SRI Education’s evaluation of the Engage New England Initiative. Subsequent releases will address the implementation of core components of the initiative, the student experience in ENE schools, planning year supports, and student outcomes such as high school graduation and successful transition to postsecondary education or training.
Study of the Engage New England Initiative Cross-Site Learning Brief 3: Improving Instructional Systems
This brief examines the efforts of schools participating in the Barr Foundation’s Engage New England Initiative to improve the instructional systems for students who are off track to graduate high school.
Postsecondary Outcomes of IB Diploma Programme Graduates in the U.S.
The International Baccalaureate’s (IB’s) 2-year Diploma Programme (DP) includes courses in six subject groups that emphasize interdisciplinary understanding and critical thinking skills. IB commissioned SRI Education to draw on multiple extant data sets to examine and summarize postsecondary outcomes of IB DP graduates in the United States.
Community College On-Track Indicators for Linked Learning Students
The rapidly expanding Linked Learning approach blends career technical and college preparatory course sequence in a single high school pathway, representing the convergence of two strands of high school reform from the past thirty years. Using data from nine California districts, we examine the effect of high school Linked Learning participation on students’ early community college outcomes. This research brief uses administrative data from key California community college districts to build on previous analysis of end-of-high-school and early postsecondary enrollment outcomes for Linked Learning students which found that Linked Learning students who started high school with low levels of academic achievement were more likely than their similar peers to enroll in college. We find that Linked Learning students perform similarly to their peers during the first two years of college.
