View clinical trials related to Educational Achievement.
Filter by:The inability to consistently deliver at large scale promising education interventions is an important contributing cause to inequality in the U.S. The research team applies insights from price theory and field-based randomized controlled trials to examine the effect of implementing a promising academic skills development program at large scale before implementing at scale. The project is designed to provide evidence of direct scientific and policy value for attempts to scale up a specific intervention, but also stimulate a much more thorough investigation of social policy scale-up challenges by refining these methods and demonstrating their feasibility and value. The research team examines the challenge of program scale up for a promising intervention studied in Chicago at medium scale in the past - SAGA tutoring. Past work has demonstrated that SAGA's intensive, individualized, during-the-school-day math tutoring can generate very large gains in academic outcomes in a short period, even among students who are many years behind grade level. This study will explicitly explore the extent to which there is a trade-off between effectiveness and scale for this intervention. By taking advantage of the power of random sampling, this study will also allow for observation of the program's effectiveness as if it were running at three-and-a-half times the proposed scale in a subset of the study population.
This research aims to continue to study the effectiveness of a promising academic intervention (implemented by SAGA Innovations) that has previously been shown to significantly improve academic outcomes for disadvantaged youth. In addition, this study will begin to investigate the effects of scaling up this promising strategy by exploring variation in tutor effectiveness and the optimal instructor-student and student-student pairings for improving academic outcomes.
The purpose of this study is to learn more about the most cost-effective way to improve the long-term life outcomes of disadvantaged youth, by comparing best practice academic supports to best-practice non-academic supports, and learning more about whether investing in both simultaneously has synergistic (more than additive) effects.