Remediating Academic Skill Deficits Among Disadvantaged Youth

Educational Achievement Clinical Trial

Clinical Trial Details — Status: Active, not recruiting

Administrative data

• NCT number: NCT02673645
• Other study ID #: SBS IRB15-0711
• Status: Active, not recruiting
• Phase: N/A
• First received: January 28, 2016
• Last updated: July 7, 2017
• Start date: August 2015
• Est. completion date: June 2019

Study information

• Verified date: July 2017
• Source: University of Chicago
• Contact: n/a
• Is FDA regulated: No
• Study type: Interventional

Clinical Trial Summary

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.

Description:

The University of Chicago Education Lab research team is carrying out a randomized controlled trial of a promising academic intervention during the 2015-16 academic year in partnership with the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and SAGA Innovations. Male and female CPS students in grades 9 and 10 will be randomly assigned either to receive what investigators believe to be a best-practice intensive academic support, or to a control group receiving status quo CPS and community services, for one academic year (AY2015-16). The intervention is high-dosage math tutoring provided by SAGA Innovations (previously Match Education of Boston). A previous randomized controlled trial conducted by the University of Chicago research team found that one year of this intervention, delivered in AY2013-14, generated between one and two extra years of academic growth in math, over and above what the normal U.S. high school student learns in one year. The estimated effects for math achievement are on the order of 0.19 to 0.30 SD, depending on the exact test and norming used. The intervention also improved student grades in math, by 0.58 points on a 1-4 grade scale, compared to a control mean of 1.77. These gains are particularly important because math success versus failure is a strong predictor of high school graduation.

This current study aims to replicate the investigators' previous findings, and to that end the research team will again look at the academic, behavioral, and long-term effects of this high-dosage math tutoring program on youth. This study is also designed to explore issues that will be central to efforts to scale-up this promising strategy, including variation in tutor quality and whether there are optimal tutor-student and student-student pairings in terms of gender and race.

The SAGA Innovations program expands on the nationally recognized innovation of high-dosage, in-school-day tutoring developed in Match Education's charter school in Boston. The tutoring program meets as a scheduled course, Math Lab, once a day during the normal school day, and is provided in addition to a student's regular math class. Students taking the course receive an elective credit upon completion. Every student works with the same full-time, professional tutor for the entirety of the school year. The content of the tutoring sessions is aligned with what students are learning in their regular math courses, but is also targeted to address individual gaps in math knowledge. Also following the original model developed by Match Education, SAGA tutors use frequent internal formative assessments of student progress to individualize instruction.

In addition to replicating previous studies that suggest the promise of this high-dosage tutoring model for improving the academic outcomes of at-risk youth, this study also aims to provide insight into the ability of this program to serve youth at a much larger scale. Despite the great need for programs that can affect the national dropout crisis and improve youth outcomes, little is known about how to take promising education interventions to scale. This study will begin to explore whether there is a trade-off between effectiveness and scale by randomly assigning students to pairings and randomly assigning pairings to tutors. Tutors will be separately ranked from highest to lowest quality by SAGA leadership, and by randomly assigning tutors to students, the investigators will be able to explore what effect, if any, tutor quality has on student outcomes. In addition, this study will look at whether gender and race composition of student-tutor pairings and student-student pairings has an effect on outcomes. This work will enable the investigators to begin to learn about variation in tutor effectiveness and the optimal way to match kids to tutors. The research team hopes this work will have important implications for how to scale this promising strategy both within Chicago and beyond.

Recruitment information / eligibility

• Status: Active, not recruiting
• Enrollment: 1848
• Est. completion date: June 2019
• Est. primary completion date: June 2018
• Accepts healthy volunteers: No
• Gender: All
• Age group: N/A and older

Eligibility

Inclusion Criteria:

• Low-performing Chicago Public School high schools, chosen in collaboration with the Chicago Public Schools based on criteria such as dropout rate, test scores, scores on academic rating scale, etc.

• School administrators are enthusiastic about the program and agree to terms and conditions of the experimental design

• Male and female youth within these schools who are rising 9th and 10th graders in academic year (AY) 2015-16

Exclusion Criteria:

• Youth who have missed >60% of days during AY2014-15 (through March), and so would not be expected to show up in school enough during intervention year (AY2015-16) to benefit from school-based programming

• Youth who have failed >75% of classes during AY2014-15 (through March)

• Youth who have Individualized Education Program (IEP) designations for autism, "educable mentally handicapped," and/or traumatic brain injury

Related Conditions & MeSH terms

• Educational Achievement

Intervention

Other:
• SAGA Innovations
An intensive math tutoring program.

Locations

Country	Name	City	State
n/a

Sponsors (8)

Lead Sponsor	Collaborator
University of Chicago	Chicago Public Schools, Crown Family, Lloyd A. Fry Foundation, Northwestern University, Paul M. Angell Family Foundation, Polk Bros. Foundation, SAGA Innovations

References & Publications (3)

Cook P, Dodge K, Farkas G, Fryer RG, Guryan J, Ludwig J, Mayer S, Pollack H, Steinberg L. Not Too Late: Improving Academic Outcomes for Disadvantaged Youth. Northwestern Institute for Policy Research Working Paper, February 2015.

Cook P, Dodge K, Farkas G, Fryer RG, Guryan J, Ludwig J, Mayer S, Pollack H, Steinberg L. The (Surprising) Efficacy of Academic and Behavioral Intervention with Disadvantaged Youth: Results from a Randomized Experiment in Chicago. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 19862, 2014.

Fryer RG. Injecting Charter School Best Practices into Traditional Public Schools: Evidence from Field Experiments. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 129(3): 1355-1407, 2014.

Outcome

Type	Measure	Description	Time frame	Safety issue
Primary	Math achievement	Performance on math standardized achievement test scores	1-year
Primary	Absentee rate	Number of school absences, obtained from Chicago Public Schools (CPS) administrative database	1-year
Primary	Student misconduct	Number of school misconduct infractions, obtained from Chicago Public Schools administrative database	1-year
Primary	Total courses failed	Number of total school courses failed, obtained from Chicago Public Schools administrative database	1-year
Primary	Math courses failed	Number of math courses failed, obtained from Chicago Public Schools administrative database	1-year
Primary	Non-math courses failed	Number of non-math courses failed, obtained from Chicago Public Schools administrative database	1-year
Primary	Math course grades	Math course grades, obtained from Chicago Public Schools administrative database	1-year
Primary	School persistence	Measure from CPS student records of school persistence (enrollment or graduation status by end of academic year)	1-year
Secondary	Violent crime arrests	Number of violent crime arrests, obtained from Chicago Police Department and Illinois State Police administrative databases	1-year
Secondary	Other arrests (property, drug, and other crimes)	Number of non-violent crime arrests, including property crimes, drug crimes, and other crimes, obtained from Chicago Police Department and Illinois State Police administrative databases	1-year
Secondary	Quarterly earnings data	Quarterly earnings collected by the Illinois Department of Employment Security, maintained for the state unemployment insurance system	1-year