The Relationship Between Reciprocal School-to-School Collaboration and Student Academic Achievement

Despite the appeal of promoting and forming collaborative relationships between schools, empirical evidence for an association between school-to-school collaboration and school outcomes is still somewhat lacking. This study utilized data from 76 schools nested within 56 districts in the United States to examine the association between a school's reciprocal relationships and school outcomes by employing social network analysis and hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). After controlling for school and district demographic characteristics, we found the indices of reciprocal collaboration are associated with the school's 2018 student proficiency level in both math and reading and the growth in proficiency level between 2017 and 2018. The implications and limitations were discussed.

Engaging Parents in the Development and Testing of a Website to Support Social-Communication and Play Development for Preschoolers with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) present with social-communication and play challenges and would benefit from interventions targeting these skills. One way to ensure this is by engaging parents in technological supports to learn about an intervention and increase home-school collaboration. Thus, a website could potentially address both needs. This study describes the initial developmental processes of one such website. Specifically, we describe how engaging parents as stakeholders in the website development enhanced its future usability and feasibility. Data were collected through focus groups, interviews, and surveys to obtain parent feedback about website usability and applicability and about the intervention. Survey data were descriptively analyzed. Focus group and interview data were analyzed using systematic qualitative analysis. Parents perceived the website to be useful in helping them target social-communication and play with their preschoolers with ASD and highlighted specific aspects of the website and intervention they perceived as effective. Child outcomes and parent fidelity to the intervention supported these perceived developmental gains. Findings suggest that engaging parents in developmental processes may help ensure usability and applicability of resources and interventions. Furthermore, findings support the use of technology to help parents learn to use an intervention with their preschoolers with ASD. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Et kvantitativt blik på forældredeltagelse i skolesamarbejdet: Generelle tendenser i forhold til uddannelse, køn og klassetrin

This article examines parental involvement in school collaboration. The study was based on survey data from Program for Learning Management gathered between 2015 and 2019. An analysis was performed on parent responses (N = 38,378) to elucidate their personal experience of school collaboration in Danish primary and lower secondary public schools. The results indicate that highly educated parents more often participate equally in school collaboration. Mothers are still more involved in school collaboration than fathers and more often take on the main responsibility, especially at higher grade levels. In general, fathers could be involved more.

Understanding the role of local educational departments in school collaboration for improvement: Two districts in China

As improving low-performing schools has become a critical strategy to achieve educational equity in China, local educational departments have implemented various school collaboration programs. Drawing on international literature and empirical data from in-depth interviews and policy documents in two Chinese urban districts, this multiple-case qualitative study examines local educational departments’ roles in the school collaboration implementation. Our analysis shows that both local educational departments set clear district-wide expectations of school collaborations. While various strategies were implemented to improve low-performing schools, limited opportunities were provided for school-based educators to contribute to decision-making processes. Both districts relied more on structural changes to create conditions to improve teaching and learning, and lacked long-term investments in building professional capacity and fostering data-use cultures. Finally, local educational departments’ goals of equity and school improvement were sometimes overshadowed by other political and economic priorities. This study offers new evidence on the leadership roles that local educational departments play in Chinese school reform implementation, thus responding to a scarcity of district-level empirical research in Chinese literature. It also expands the existing international research base that is largely Western-focused and not necessarily applicable to all countries, especially developing countries where school improvement efforts are often situated in conflicting policy systems.