EDUCATION

Only a quarter of federally funded education innovations benefited students, report says

Some innovations did work well. Building Assets, Reducing Risks (BARR) is the poster child for what this grant program had hoped to produce. The idea was an early warning system that detects when children are starting to stumble at school. Teachers, administrators or counselors intervene in this early stage and build relationships with students to get them back on track. It received a seed grant to develop the idea and implement it in schools. The results were good enough for BARR to receive a bigger federal grant from this R&D program three years later. Again it worked with different types of students in different parts of the country, and BARR received a third grant to scale it up across the nation in 2017. Now BARR is in more than 300 schools, and Maine is adopting it statewide.

Some ideas that were proven to work in the short term didn’t yield long-term benefits or backfired completely. One example is Reading Recovery, a tutoring program for struggling readers in first grade that costs $10,000 per student and was a recipient of one of these grants. A randomized control trial that began in 2011 produced a giant boost in reading achievement for first graders. However, three years later, Reading Recovery students subsequently fell behind and by fourth grade were far worse readers than similar students who hadn’t had the tutoring, according to a follow-up study. The tutoring seemed to harm them.

It can be hard to understand these contradictions. Henry May, an associate professor at the University of Delaware who conducted both the short-term and long-term Reading Recovery studies, explained that the assessment used in the first grade study was full of simple one-syllable words. The tutoring sessions likely exposed children to these words so many times that the students memorized them. But Reading Recovery hadn’t taught the phonics necessary to read more complex words in later grades, May said. Reading Recovery disputes the long-term study results, pointing out that three-fourths of the study participants had departed so data was collected for only 25% of them. A spokesperson for the nonprofit organization also says it does teach phonics in its tutoring program.

I asked Abt’s Goodson to summarize the lessons learned from the federal program:

  • More students. It might seem like common sense to try a new idea on only a small group of students at first, but the Department of Education learned over time that it needed to increase the number of students in order to produce statistically significant results. There are two reasons that a study can end with a null result. One is because the intervention didn’t work, but it can also be a methodological quirk. When the achievement benefits are small, you need a large number of students to be sure that the result wasn’t a fluke. There were too many fluke signals in these evaluation studies. Over the years, sample sizes were increased even for ideas that were in the early development stage.
  • Implementation. Goodson still believes in the importance of randomized control trials to create credible evidence for what works, but she says one of the big lessons is that these trials alone are not enough. Documenting and studying the implementation are just as important as evaluating the results, she said. Understanding the barriers in the classroom can help developers tweak programs and make them more effective. They might be too expensive or require too many weeks of teacher training. The disappointing results of the i3 program have helped spawn a new “science of implementation” to learn more about these obstacles.
  • National scale up. Too much money was spent on expanding new ideas to more students across the nation, and some of these ideas ended up not panning out in research evaluations. In the successor program to i3, the scale up grants are much smaller. Instead of using the money to directly implement the intervention nationwide, the funds help innovators make practical adjustments so that it can be replicated. For example, instead of using expensive outside coaches, a program might experiment with training existing teachers at a school to run it.

Though the original i3 program no longer exists, its successor program, Education Innovation and Research (EIR), continues with the same mission of developing and evaluating new ideas. Currently, it is ramping up funding to deal with the post-pandemic crises of learning loss, mental health and teacher attrition.

Education Innovation and Research (EIR) grants 2017-2023

It’s easy to feel discouraged that the federal government has invested around $3 billion in the last dozen years on educational innovation with so little to show for it. But we are slowly building a good evidence database of some things that do work – ideas that are not just based on gut instincts and whim, but are scientifically proven with a relatively small investment compared to what the government spends on research in other areas. By contrast, defense research gets over $90 billion a year. Health research receives nearly $50 billion. I wonder how much further we might be in helping students become proficient in reading and math if we invested even a little bit more.




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