Dr. David Sweet
(202) 219-1748
David.Sweet@ed.gov

The purpose of the Institute's education research program on Middle and High School Reform (Middle/High School) is to support research on approaches, programs, and practices that enhance the potential of at-risk students to complete high school with the skills necessary for success in the workplace or in postsecondary education. The Middle/High School research program complements the Institute's existing research programs on teacher quality, reading and writing, interventions for struggling adolescent and adult readers, mathematics and science education, education leadership, and policy and systems, each of which includes middle and high school education. Although these research programs include research on interventions appropriate for middle and high schools, the Middle/High School education research program is different from these research programs in three ways. First, it focuses exclusively on improving educational outcomes in middle schools and high schools. Second, it focuses on a particular population—students who are at-risk of dropping out of high school or who finish high school without the skills necessary to be ready for the demands of the workplace or college. Third, it focuses on approaches, strategies, and interventions that are intended to supplement, complement, intensify, or in some sense, act as a catalyst to increase the benefit at-risk students would otherwise derive from their academic coursework. In other words, for the Middle/High School research program, the Institute is interested in approaches that can augment the effects of better instruction and higher quality teachers in the core academic subjects (e.g., double-blocking, structural reforms) and thereby, better serve the needs of students who are poorly prepared academically and motivationally for the demands of high school.

The Middle/High School research program addresses five goals: (1) exploring malleable factors¹ (e.g., interventions, systemic programs) that are associated with better student outcomes, as well as mediators and moderators of the relations between these factors and student outcomes, for the purpose of identifying potential targets of intervention; (2) developing innovative middle or high school reform interventions that are intended to increase the likelihood that at-risk students will complete high school with the skills necessary for success in the workplace or in postsecondary education; (3) evaluating the efficacy of fully developed middle or high school reform interventions with small efficacy or replication trials; (4) evaluating the impact of middle or high school reform interventions that are implemented at scale; and (5) developing and/or validating assessments of students' non-academic behaviors (e.g., timeliness, responsibility, persistence, discipline, initiative, social competence) that could be used by teachers to evaluate students on skills that are potentially important for future education or employment.

The long-term goal of the Middle/High School research program is to provide an array of effective middle and high school reform practices that have been shown to be effective for improving student outcomes. This research program is designed to support crosscutting reform efforts.