Daphna Oyserman

The purpose of this study is to test the efficacy of a teacher-training and implementation model for the Pathways to Success program that was developed through a previous IES grant. Pathways is a 12-session social psychological intervention administered at the start of eighth grade to help students change key elements of their identity based motivation - their possible selves (who students expect to become in the near and distant future), their strategies to work on these possible selves, and...

This development study addressed two challenges: high school failure and the need to transform theory- and evidence-based dropout prevention programs into usable, feasible, scalable school-based programs to reduce risk of school failure. School-to-Jobs (STJ) is an intervention rooted in identity-based motivation theory, which predicts that to do well in school, children need to experience the present as psychologically connected to their future self, and interpret difficulties in school as s...