Improving how schools engage families during the crucial 9th-grade year

Researchers Martha Abele Mac Iver, Joyce Epstein, and Steven Sheldon summarize the outcomes of their four-year partnership with an urban district aimed at improving the ways schools engage families during the critical transition to high school. They describe how schools put into practice the strategies learned in ongoing professional development, how family engagement practices changed, and what effects those changes had on students. Particular strategies include the use of an online parent portal and interactive homework assignments about the transition to high school.

Advancing the Agency of Adolescent Girls

More than 98 million adolescent girls are not in school. Can girls inuence their schooling without changes in their family's economic environment? In Rajasthan, India, we examine the impact of a school-based life skills program that seeks to address low aspirations, narrow societal roles for girls and women, restricted networks of social support, and limited decision-making power. We find the intervention causes a 25 percent decline in school dropout that persists from seventh grade through the transition to high school. Improvements in socioemotional support among girls exposed to the intervention seem especially important in their decision to stay in school.

Teacher collaboration and instructional program coherence across the transition to high school

This study explores to what extent principals perceive instructional program coherence (IPC) and vertical collaboration occur in high schools and their mid-level feeder schools. It also measures IPC and its five components' association with different measures of student achievement. The study took place in the state of Missouri, and 312 principals of high schools with separate feeder middle schools were invited to participate. Electronic and paper surveys as well as public data were collected and analyzed using descriptive statistics, bivariate correlations, and linear regression. The findings show that principals perceive their school's IPC to be fairly strong, but their vertical collaboration needs improvement. The findings also indicate that only particular IPC components such as curriculum, instruction positively influenced graduation rates, academic climate positively influenced the EOC Algebra 1 scores, and vertical collaboration positively associated with higher average freshman GPA's. A major limitation to this study was the low response rate.

Transição para o ensino médio: Gestão de política de correção de fluxo e trajetórias escolares

This study analyzes the possible relations between a student flow correction policy in a public education system and the transition to high school. The study of students' educational trajectories was the resource used to understand the results of the policy management and its possible effects on middle school transitions to high school. The analysis used data from the School Census, the education system's enrollment base, and available official documents on the policy and its management. Initially, the context of the policy design and management - structured within a public/private partnership - and the educational trajectories of the entire population of students enrolled in the system studied in the fifth grade in 2010 are presented. Subsequently, the trajectories of those who reached high school in 2014 are presented. The results suggest that, although the correction of student’s flow has favored entry into high school through projects of learning acceleration, the high repetition rate in the following year – the first year of the new stage of schooling - shows that access to high school may not correspond to a sustainable and well consolidated learning process, highlighting the limits of the controversial compensatory nature of the policy on screen.

High school entrance exam system evaluation from the perspective of mathematics teachers

The aim of this study was to examine the opinions of secondary school math teachers regarding the examination system for the transition to high school which was implemented for the first time in 2017-2018 academic year in Turkey. The research was conducted in the second semester of 2018-2019 academic year, a semi-structured interview form was used as data collection tool. In addition, the sample of the study consisted of 30 math branch teachers working in central secondary schools across a province in Eastern Anatolia. The interview form consisted of 6 open-ended questions prepared by the researchers after receiving expert opinions. Content analysis method was used in analyzing the data. As a result of findings, it was understood that while some of the teachers had positive opinions about this new exam, some others had negative thoughts.

On Track or Derailed? Race, Advanced Math, and the Transition to High School

Recent scholarship has examined how accelerated math trajectories leading to calculus take shape during middle school. The focus of this study is on advanced math course taking during the critical yet understudied period that follows: the transition to high school. Data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 are used to examine advanced math course taking in ninth grade, including both track persistence among students who took advanced math in middle school and upward mobility among students who took standard math in middle school. Results reveal sizable racial gaps in the likelihood of staying on (and getting on) the accelerated math track, neither of which are fully explained by prior academic performance factors. Interactions with parents and teachers positively predict advanced math course taking. In some cases, interactions with teachers may also reduce inequality in track persistence, whereas interactions with counselors increase such inequality. Implications for research and policy are discussed.