Research, The GRAD Partnership

A 20-year campaign to address America’s high school dropout crisis produced unprecedented gains in graduation rates nationwide. Can lessons from this campaign help the nation cross this elusive threshold and inspire action on other social issues?

Connectedness Research

Strengthening School Connectedness to Increase Student Success

May 2024 EdResearch for Action brief exploring evidence on strategies to build a sense of school connectedness and engagement among all students.

Attendance Research

Meeting the Chronic Absenteeism Challenge – What Do We Know?

What does a doubling of the number of students who are missing a month or more of schooling in the school year mean? What do the numbers tell us about the challenges our schools and communities face, and what does the evidence base say about the types of solutions and responses that are needed to meet them?

Attendance Course Performance Research

Off to a Strong Start: The GRAD Partnership Year 1 Results

Year one of the GRAD Partnership’s implementation of student success systems, the next generation of early warning/on-track systems, occurred in the year following what many teachers and school leaders called the most challenging year of their career. Data from the first cohort of the GRAD Partnership schools indicates that student success systems were up to the challenge: Schools working with the GRAD Partnership to implement student success systems saw fewer course failures and reductions in chronic absenteeism. Read the research brief to learn more about the real, tangible, and meaningful ways student success system implementation benefitted students across the…

Connectedness Research

Why is School Connectedness So Important?

This short post from 2018 summarizes what the authors found in their systematic research review on school connectedness, which aimed to define school connectedness and identify the relationship of four factors (attending, belonging, engaging, and flow) to connectedness. The blog post clearly lays out what looks connectedness looks like, and offers guidance for schools to encourage it, and the literature review takes a deeper, more theoretical approach towards the development of a model of school connectedness.

Belonging Relationships Research

Structures for Belonging: A Synthesis of Research on Belonging-Supportive Learning Environments (SERN)

Student Experience Research Network reviews research on structural factors related to belonging in access to learning environments; relationships with educators, peers, and families; instructional resources and pedagogy; and system-level policies and practices.

Research

Research Brief: Student Success Systems Show Positive Results

January, 2024 Recent randomized controlled trials— the gold standard for determining the causal impact of educational interventions— have shown that student success systems generate positive results for students, schools, districts, and communities. Read our new brief to learn more about the benefits of high-quality student success systems.

Research

A Pathway to Change: Building Student Success Systems to Support Students with Disabilities

September 21, 2023 Students with disabilities graduate at lower rates than their nondisabled peers. Of the 49.4 million public-school students in the U.S., 13% receive services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA; U.S. Department of Education, 2022), a law that provides a free and appropriate public education to children with disabilities ages 3–21. There are many reasons students drop out of high school, and it is often a combination of factors. One of the most common reasons is a need for more engagement or interest in school.

Connectedness Research

Centering School Connectedness

As featured in NASBE's The State Education Standard - Fostering school connectedness is an effective, universal prevention measure that affects many important student outcomes. Students who are connected to school get better grades, attend more often, have fewer behavioral challenges, graduate from high school, and go to college at higher rates than their disconnected peers.

Research

Building a Grad Nation: Progress and Challenge in Raising High School Graduation Rates

The final (June 2023) report to the nation on a 20-year effort to boost high school graduation rates shows graduation rates rising from 71 percent in 2001 to 86.5 percent by the Class of 2020, translating into 5 million more students graduating, rather than dropping out, during that period. Despite the great progress made over the course of the 20-year effort culminating in the GradNation Campaign, equity gaps persist, and the COVID-19 pandemic had significant impacts on student learning and health. The report calls for, among other policy recommendations, expanding the use of Student Success Systems. Read more on…