Readers of this blog are familiar with the evidence demonstrating that City Connects helps students to put forward better effort in the classroom, have better attendance, and attain better grades and test scores. Researchers at the Boston College Mary E. Walsh Center for Thriving Children, along with scholars from other institutions, have also pursued questions that allow for a more nuanced understanding of questions like: how does City Connects impact teachers and schools? And how big are “opportunity gaps” and how are children affected by them?
The briefs and papers below summarize the results of numerous peer-reviewed studies that help us to better understand the impacts of access to opportunity, and the role of interventions like the City Connects model of integrated student support.
New Study Provides Strongest Evidence Yet On Impacts of Integrated Student Support
In the most rigorous study of integrated student support to date, researchers confirm the positive impacts of City Connects on student achievement. The study, Estimating the Impact of Integrated Student Support on Elementary School Achievement: A Natural Experiment, finds that students who are randomly assigned to City Connects schools score higher on state standardized tests in both Math and English Language Arts than their peers in other schools.
City Connects—which aims to combat the impacts of poverty and other out-of-school factors by linking students with holistic support and enrichment—is a model of integrated student support that serves around 200 schools across five states and two countries. Over the past two decades, researchers have linked the program to a multitude of positive student outcomes, including higher standardized test scores, lower rates of chronic absenteeism and grade retention, higher academic performance and engagement, and increased high school and post-secondary graduation rates. While these previous studies have provided empirical evidence to show the impact of City Connects, this latest study is the first to utilize randomization—a powerful research method—across elementary schools in looking at the impact of this intervention.
“The large positive achievement gains we saw in this study matched previous findings from multiple other studies investigating the same thing. So there is a consistency to the story. And that story is that integrated student support seems to work. Children seem to do better when both their academic and non academic challenges are tended to,” said Jordan Lawson, Research Associate at Boston College’s Mary E. Walsh Center for Thriving Children and lead author of the paper. “This latest evidence not only matches the previous findings, but it’s the strongest evidence we have regarding the efficacy of integrated student support thus far.”
Read more here.
New research on the opportunity gap and how children thrive
The number of educational opportunities that children accrue at home, in early education and care, at school, in afterschool programs, and in their communities as they grow up is strongly linked to their educational attainment and earnings in early adulthood, according to new research published recently by AERA’s Educational Researcher.
The results indicate that the opportunity gaps between low- and high-income households from birth through the end of high school largely explain differences in educational and income achievement between students from different backgrounds.
These findings come from a 26-year longitudinal study led by Center for Thriving Children Executive Director Eric Dearing (Boston College). His co-authors were Andres S. Bustamante (University of California–Irvine), Henrik D. Zachrisson (University of Oslo), and Deborah Lowe Vandell (University of California–Irvine).
Their study is the first to directly document opportunities and opportunity gaps as they accrue across early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence in multiple key areas of child development.
Read more here.
“The Impact of City Connects on Teachers and Schools”
Principals say that City Connects helps to improve school climate, and “[m]ore than 94% of teachers reported that they were more patient with their students because they better understood the non-academic issues that contributed to their students’ struggles in the classroom, and thought about the factors influencing student behavior before reacting to the behavior.” This brief summarizes the impacts of City Connects on teachers and schools, including:
• an expanded understanding of students
• a greater feeling of support in their jobs
• stronger relationships with students and families
• successful modifications to classroom approaches
“The Impact of City Connects on Select Student Sub-Groups”
Every student is unique, and some students are at greater risk of struggling in school than others. Various studies have looked at some of the impacts of City Connects on sub-groups of students, including:
• first-generation immigrant and English language learners
• Black and Latino boys
• students who were on track to receive special education services
For example, Black and Latino boys who received comprehensive support via City Connects were half as likely to drop out of school than their peers who didn’t receive such support. Learn more here.
