Jeffrey Grigg

School Enrollment Changes and Student Achievement Growth A Case Study in Educational Disruption and Continuity

Students in the United States change schools often, and frequent changes are associated with poor outcomes along numerous dimensions. These moves occur for many reasons, including both promotional transitions between educational levels and nonpromotional moves. Promotional student mobility is less likely than nonpromotional mobility to suffer from confounding due to unobserved factors. Using panel data from students enrolled in grades 3 to 8 in the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools during the implementation of a major change in school attendance policies, this article investigates the potential influence of four types of school changes—including promotional student mobility—on test score growth in reading and mathematics. All types of changes are associated with lower achievement growth during the year the enrollment change occurred, representing approximately 6 percent of expected annual growth, or 10 days of instruction. This incremental deficit is particularly concerning for disadvantaged students since they change schools more frequently. The results suggest that being new to a school does influence student achievement net of other factors; they also imply that important social ties are ruptured when students change schools.

Effects of Two Scientific Inquiry Professional Development Interventions on Teaching Practice

In this article, we examine classroom observations from a 3-year large-scale randomized trial in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to investigate the extent to which a professional development initiative in inquiry science influenced teaching practices in in 4th and 5th grade classrooms in 73 schools. During the course of the study, LAUSD introduced an additional districtwide scientific inquiry professional development initiative, which complicates the experimental analysis but allows us to conduct a quasiexperimental analysis of the second Multilevel models predicting the presence of science inquiry in observed classroom lessons show that both interventions increased the incidence of inquiry-based science teaching, but the impact was limited to selected features of the inquiry process. We also found that the experimental impacts on teaching practice correspond with the features of scientific inquiry to which the teachers were most frequently exposed during the professional development.

An Effort to Close Achievement Gaps at Scale Through Self-Affirmation:

In this districtwide scale-up, we randomly assigned seventh-grade students within 11 schools to receive a series of writing exercises designed to promote values affirmation. Impacts on cumulative seventh-grade grade point average (GPA) for the district’s racial/ethnic minority students who may be subject to stereotype threat are consistent with but smaller than those from prior smaller scale studies. Also, we find some evidence of impact on minority students’ standardized mathematics test scores. These effects address a substantial portion of the achievement gap unexplained by demographics and prior achievement—the portion of the gap potentially attributable to stereotype threat. Our results suggest that persistent achievement gaps, which may be explained by subtle social and psychological phenomena, can be mitigated by brief, yet theoretically precise, social-psychological interventions.

New evidence on self-affirmation effects and theorized sources of heterogeneity from large-scale replications

Brief, targeted self-affirmation writing exercises have recently been offered as a way to reduce racial achievement gaps, but evidence about their effects in educational settings is mixed, leaving ambiguity about the likely benefits of these strategies if implemented broadly. A key limitation in interpreting these mixed results is that they come from studies conducted by different research teams with different procedures in different settings; it is therefore impossible to isolate whether different effects are the result of theorized heterogeneity, unidentified moderators, or idiosyncratic features of the different studies. We addressed this limitation by conducting a well-powered replication of self-affirmation in a setting where a previous large-scale field experiment demonstrated significant positive impacts, using the same procedures. We found no evidence of effects in this replication study and estimates were precise enough to reject benefits larger than an effect size of 0.10. These null effects were significantly different from persistent benefits in the prior study in the same setting, and extensive testing revealed that currently theorized moderators of self-affirmation effects could not explain the difference. These results highlight the potential fragility of self-affirmation in educational settings when implemented widely and the need for new theory, measures, and evidence about the necessary conditions for self-affirmation success.

Randomised trial comparing the recording ability of a novel, electronic emergency documentation system with the AHA paper cardiac arrest record.

Objective To evaluate the ability of an electronic system created at the University of Washington to accurately document prerecorded VF and pulseless electrical activity (PEA) cardiac arrest scenarios compared with the American Heart Association paper cardiac arrest record. Methods 16 anaesthesiology residents were randomly assigned to view one of two prerecorded, simulated VF and PEA scenarios and asked to document the event with either the paper or electronic system. Each subject then repeated the process with the other video and documentation method. Five types of documentation errors were defined: (1) omission, (2) specification, (3) timing, (4) commission and (5) noise. The mean difference in errors between the paper and electronic methods was analysed using a single factor repeated measures ANOVA model. Results Compared with paper records, the electronic system omitted 6.3 fewer events (95% CI −10.1 to −2.5, p=0.003), which represents a 28% reduction in omission errors. Users recorded 2.9 fewer noise items (95% CI −5.3 to −0.6, p=0.003) when compared with paper, representing a 36% decrease in redundant or irrelevant information. The rate of timing (Δ=−3.2, 95% CI −9.3 to 3.0, p=0.286) and commission (Δ=−4.4, 95% CI −9.4 to 0.5, p=0.075) errors were similar between the electronic system and paper, while the rate of specification errors were about a third lower for the electronic system when compared with the paper record (Δ=−3.2, 95% CI −6.3 to −0.2, p=0.037). Conclusions Compared with paper documentation, documentation with the electronic system captured 24% more critical information during a simulated medical emergency without loss in data quality.

The Consequences of Principal and Teacher Turnover for School Social Resources

Abstract Staff turnover may have important consequences for the development of collective social resources based on trust, shared norms, and support among school professionals. We outline the theoretical role-specific consequences of principal and teacher turnover for features of principal leadership and teacher community, and we test these ideas in repeated teacher survey data from a sample of 73 Los Angeles elementary schools. We find evidence that principal turnover fundamentally disrupts but does not systematically decrease relational qualities of principal leadership; negative changes for initially high social resource schools offset positive changes for initially low social resource schools, suggesting that relational instability “resets” the resources that develop in the relationships between leadership and teachers. Greater consistency in measures of teacher community in the face of teacher turnover implies that the social resources inhering in the relationships among teachers are more robust to instability.

Impacts and Alternatives: Evidence From an Elementary Charter School Evaluation

Despite the prevalence of charter schools in the United States, few experimental studies evaluate the impact of charter school attendance on students in the early elementary grades. Using data from a randomized lottery in which kindergarten students and their parents applied to two oversubscribed and well-established charter schools in Denver, Colorado, we estimate the effect of admission to and attendance at these schools on third grade reading and mathematics test scores. We find no evidence of admission or attendance having an impact on third grade achievement but find suggestive evidence of differential effects favoring non-White students. These findings speak to the substantial variation of charter school impacts and raise questions about what families may want from schools aside from or in addition to achievement test impacts.

Self-Affirmation Effects Are Produced by School Context, Student Engagement With the Intervention, and Time: Lessons From a District-Wide Implementation:

Self-affirmation shows promise for reducing racial academic-achievement gaps; recently, however, mixed results have raised questions about the circumstances under which the self-affirmation intervention produces lasting benefits at scale. In this follow-up to the first district-wide scale-up of a self-affirmation intervention, we examined whether initial academic benefits in middle school carried over into high school, we tested for differential impacts moderated by school context, and we assessed the causal effects of student engagement with the self-affirming writing prompted by the intervention. Longitudinal results indicate that self-affirmation reduces the growth of the racial achievement gap by 50% across the high school transition (N = 920). Additionally, impacts are greatest within school contexts that cued stronger identity threats for racial minority students, and student engagement is causally associated with benefits. Our results imply the potential for powerful, lasting academic impacts from self-affirmation interventions if implemented broadly; however, these effects will depend on both contextual and individual factors.