IES Blog

Dual enrollment improves student college going and postsecondary success, but practitioners need help in understanding the impact of dual enrollment and in learning strategies associated with effective and equitable implementation. Under the auspices of the IES-funded Evaluation of Career and College Promise (CCP) project, the North Carolina Community College System suggested hosting a conference to build knowledge and capacity in the field about dual enrollment. The Evaluation of CCP is a partnership with the SERVE Center at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, the North Carolina Community College System, and the RAND Corporation. In addition to the research goals—which involve looking at the implementation, impact, and cost of North Carolina’s dual enrollment program—the project also has a goal of capacity development for the agencies and for practitioners. As part of meeting this last goal, the project recently hosted a conference on Dual Enrollment: Accelerating Educational Attainment (DE21) with over 1,000 registrants from North Carolina and around the country.      

Julie Edmunds, the project’s principal investigator, discusses the DE21 conference.

Why host a conference on dual enrollment?

This was the brainchild of our partners at the North Carolina Community College System. They wanted to create an opportunity where researchers and practitioners could gather and share lessons learned from their respective work. The NC Community College System expected that we would be learning a lot from our project that we would want to share; they also knew that the people in the trenches had many valuable insights to help bridge the gap between research and practice. Because existing research shows that not all groups of students have the same access to dual enrollment, the project team decided collectively that the conference should have a strong focus on equity and to use the conference as a way to communicate and discuss strategies to support equity.

What happened at the conference?

We had a total of 40 sessions across two full days. There were dynamic keynote speakers, including Karen Stout from Achieving the Dream, and panels that discussed dual enrollment from the policy, research, student and parent perspectives. Although there was a strong North Carolina focus, there were sessions from other states such as Massachusetts, Texas, Indiana, and Ohio.

Conference presentations were organized into five themes: expanding access and equity, fostering college attainment, ensuring a successful transition to college and careers, preparing students for dual enrollment, and supporting success in dual enrollment courses.

The CCP study team presented findings from our evaluation of North Carolina’s dual enrollment pathways. We looked at individual and school-level factors associated with dual enrollment participation, such as student demographics, school size, locale, percentage of students from underrepresented minority groups, academic achievement, and workforce-orientation of students. Student socioeconomic level did not affect participation in dual enrollment. We also presented preliminary impacts of North Carolina’s three different dual enrollment pathways (college transfer, Career and Technical Education, and Cooperative Innovative High Schools or early colleges). Results from these three pathways showed that CCP participants had better high school outcomes such as higher school graduation rates and were more likely to enroll in postsecondary education. In addition, there were multiple sessions sharing research results from other states.

There were many presentations from practitioners that focused on topics like rigorous instruction, advising, participation of students with disabilities, creating strong secondary-postsecondary partnerships, using high school teachers as college instructors, among others. I need to give a huge shoutout to Katie Bao from the NC Community College System, who shepherded us all through the conference planning and implementation process.

What was the impact of the pandemic?

When we originally planned for the conference, we thought it would be in person. After the pandemic hit, we decided (as many other organizations did) to host it virtually. This made the conference much more accessible to a national audience, and we had participants and presenters from around the country.

What if someone missed the conference?

Another benefit of a virtual conference is that we are able to share all the sessions from the meeting. Please visit our site on YouTube to listen to the conference. 

What comes next?

Our study work continues, and we will share the results in a variety of ways, including through briefs and journal articles. We are also planning to host a second conference in 2023 and expect that it will have a virtual component so that it can continue to be available to a national audience.

Dr. Julie Edmunds is a Program Director at the SERVE Center at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In addition to being the PI on the Evaluation of Career and College Promise, she is one of the leading researchers on early college, a model that combines high school and college.

Improving the social and emotional climate of schools has become a growing priority for educators and policymakers in the past decade. The prevailing strategies for improving school climate include social and emotional learning, positive behavioral supports, and trauma-informed approaches. Many of these strategies foreground the importance of students having a voice in intervention, as students are special experts in their own social and emotional milieus.

Parallel to this trend has been a push toward student-centered pedagogical approaches in high schools that are responsive to cultural backgrounds and that promote skills aligned with the demands of the modern workplace, like critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration. Culturally responsive and restorative teaching and problem- and project-based learning are prominent movements. In this guest blog, Dr. Adam Voight at Cleveland State University discusses an ongoing IES-funded Development and Innovation project taking place in Cleveland, Ohio that aims to develop and document the feasibility of a school-based youth participatory action research intervention.

Our project is exploring how youth participatory action research (YPAR) may help to realize two objectives—school climate improvement and culturally-restorative, engaged learning. YPAR involves young people leading a cycle of problem identification, data collection and analysis, and evidence-informed action. It has long been used in out-of-school and extracurricular spaces to promote youth development and effect social change. We are field testing its potential to fit within more formal school spaces.

Project HighKEY

The engine for our project, which we call Project HighKEY (High-school Knowledge and Education through YPAR), is a design team composed of high school teachers and students, district officials, and university researchers. It is built from the Cleveland Alliance for Education Research, a research-practice partnership between the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, Cleveland State University, and the American Institutes for Research. The design team meets monthly to discuss YPAR theory and fit with high school curriculum and standards and make plans for YPAR field tests in schools. We have created a crosswalk of the documented competencies that students derive from YPAR and high school standards in English language arts (ELA), mathematics, science, and social studies in Ohio. For example, one state ELA standard is “Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence,” and through YPAR students collect and analyze survey and interview data and use their findings to advocate for change related to their chosen topic. A state math standard is “Interpret the slope and the intercept of a linear model in the context of data,” and this process may be applied to survey data students collect through YPAR, making an otherwise abstract activity more meaningful to students.  

Assessing the Effectiveness of YPAR

Remaining open-minded about the various ways in which YPAR may or may not fit in different high school courses, we are currently testing its implementation in a pre-calculus course, a government course, an English course, and a life-skills course. For example, a math teacher on our design team has built her statistics unit around YPAR. Students in three separate sections of the course have worked in groups of two or three to identify an issue and create a survey that is being administered to the broader student body. These issues include the lack of extracurricular activities, poor school culture, and unhealthy breakfast and lunch options. Their survey data will be used as the basis for learning about representing data with plots, distributions, measures of center, frequencies, and correlation after the winter holiday. Our theory is that students will be more engaged when using their own data on topics of their choosing and toward the goal of making real change. Across all of our project schools, we are monitoring administrative data, student and teacher survey data, and interview data to assess the feasibility, usability, and student and school outcomes of YPAR.

Impact of COVID-19 and How We Adapted

We received notification of our grant award in March 2020, the same week that COVID-19 shut down K-12 schools across the nation. When our project formally began in July 2020, our partner schools were planning for a wholly remote school year, and we pivoted to hold design team meetings virtually and loosen expectations for teacher implementation. Despite these challenges, several successful YPAR projects during that first year—all of which were conducted entirely remotely—taught all of us much about how YPAR can happen in online spaces. This school year, students and staff are back to in-person learning, but, in addition to the ongoing pandemic, the crushing teacher shortage has forced us to continue to adapt. Whereas we once planned our design team meeting during the school day, we now meet after school due to a lack of substitute teachers, and we use creative technology to allow for mixed virtual and in-person attendance. Our leadership team is also spending a great deal of time in classrooms with teachers to assist those implementing for the first time. Our goal is to create a resource that teachers anywhere can use to incorporate YPAR into their courses. The product will be strengthened by the lessons we have learned from doing this work during these extraordinary times and the resulting considerations for how to deal with obstacles to implementation.

Adam Voight is the Director of the Center for Urban Education at Cleveland State University.

For questions about this grant, please contact Corinne Alfeld, NCER Program Officer, at Corinne.Alfeld@ed.gov.

IES is proud to introduce the 2021-2022 cohort of interns. These interns come to us through the U.S. State Department’s Virtual Student Federal Service and the U.S. Department of Education’s Student Volunteer Trainee Program. Two students are data science interns and one is an open science intern. All three interns are helping the National Center for Education Research and the National Center for Special Education Research communicate what we fund and the results of our funded research.

We asked this year’s interns to tell us about themselves, why they are interested in an internship, and a “fun fact” to share. Here’s what they said.

Joleen Chiu is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and economics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

I am interested in applying data science to researching income inequality and expanding opportunities for low-income families. Prior to this internship, I conducted an independent research project on assisting low-income students with applying for financial aid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits using return-free filing. I have also taken courses on coding in R and Python. I want to stay involved in economic policy research that supports low-income and underrepresented communities and potentially pursue graduate studies.

I hope that my internship experience with IES will strengthen my data analysis skills, allow me to contribute to projects that will improve the education experiences of students around the country, and provide me with a better understanding of graduate programs and research in the federal government.

One fun fact about me is that I like to collect pressed penny souvenirs! I currently have 23 in my collection, including one from Taiwan and many from amusement parks throughout California.

Hain Minn is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in information science at the University of Maryland, College Park

I’m an undergraduate student pursuing a data science specialization within information science. Previously, I took coursework on data science techniques and concepts such as machine learning that allowed me to better analyze and perform modeling of various datasets. I have experience with Python (including packages like pandas), MySQL, RStudio, and Excel, as well as past coursework in object-oriented programming (Java).

My goals for the future are to further develop my skills in data analysis and data science and to one day be able to work with data that can help better our world. Working with the IES is a valuable opportunity to see real-world applications of data. As a teacher and mentor to younger students, I know I would enjoy seeing my own work have a positive impact on the field. I hope that this experience teaches me practical skills in not only data science but also real workplace teamwork that I wouldn’t learn from just a classroom.

One fun fact about me is that I enjoy reading. I have acquired and am currently reading a full annotated collection of HP Lovecraft’s works, starting with Call of Cthulhu.

Julianne Kasper is pursuing a master’s degree in education policy and leadership at American University in Washington, D.C.

Before starting my master’s program, I was a high school educator for 6 years in Houston, Texas. I am most interested in bridging the gaps between practitioners, researchers, and policymakers in education. My expertise is in instruction and leadership. While teaching, I was exposed to the complex issues that affect teachers, students, and families as they pursue educational equity. Through my master’s program, I became interested in how educators with practical school experience could help solve those problems in the broader realm of education, particularly in research and policymaking. I’m currently assisting with research on teacher collaboration as a mechanism for increasing inclusivity in the school workplace. In addition to pursuing my studies, I support local teachers through my work for the nonprofit Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship in Philadelphia.

As an IES intern, I am writing blog pieces featuring impactful IES-funded research and helping to create a compendium of IES-funded STEM research. My internship experience gives me the opportunity to interact with a federal agency virtually from outside of D.C., exposes me to a wealth of current educational research projects, and strengthens my ability to write to specific audiences, including policymakers.

One fun fact about me is that I am a voracious reader of many genres, and I love to talk about books! This year some favorites have been Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, Madeline Miller’s Circe, and Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law.

Over the last few months, staff from the National Center for Education Research, the National Center for Special Education Research, and the Standards and Review Office have partnered to increase our awareness of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility issues (DEIA) in the IES-grant making process. The goal is to broaden participation of institutions and researchers who apply for and receive IES grants, increase the diversity of IES panel reviewers, and encourage culturally responsive research across our grant competitions.

Based on feedback from our December 2020 technical working group Increasing Diversity and Representation of IES-funded Education Researchers, we are hosting a series of Listening and Learning sessions with researchers and other stakeholder groups. The first session, How Can the Institute of Education Sciences Support HBCU Applicants, was held during HBCU Week in partnership with the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity through Historically Black Colleges and Universities. We discussed lessons learned in our DEIA blog update and used this feedback to develop an HBCU-specific presentation of IES funding opportunities for HBCU Research and Innovation Week.

Over the next few months, IES will hold additional virtual Listening and Learning sessions, including Leveraging the Voices of Persons with Disabilities in Education Research. Unless specified, these sessions will be open to the public and will require registration. More information about the sessions and registration links will be available on the IES website. If you have questions about the events or would like to schedule one specific to your community, please contact IESVirtualTA@ed.gov.

Listening and Learning Sessions:​

• Leveraging Hispanic Voices in Education Research – December 6, 2021 at 1 pm ET. Hosted jointly with the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence and Economic Opportunity for Hispanics.
• Leveraging Black Voices in Education Research – December 9, 2021 at 2 pm ET. Hosted jointly with the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Black Americans.
• Leveraging Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Voices in Education Research – January 18, 2022 at 2:30pm ET. Hosted jointly with the White House Initiative on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders.
• Leveraging Native American and Alaska Native Voices in Education Research – Date to be determined. Hosted jointly with the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Native Americans and Strengthening Tribal Colleges and Universities.
• Leveraging the Voices of Persons with Disabilities in Education Research – Date to be determined.

The Department of Education’s Small Business Innovation Research Program (SBIR), administered by IES, provides awards for the research and development of new, commercially viable education technology products. Known as ED/IES SBIR, the program’s goal is to grow a portfolio of scalable, research-based products that address pressing needs across topic areas in education and special education.

From an education technology perspective, 2021 will surely be remembered as the “year after” the onset of the global pandemic—where demand for effective education tools and platforms skyrocketed and developers pivoted to meet the needs of the return to in-person and hybrid learning environments. Dozens of ED/IES SBIR-developers contributed to these efforts, with millions of students and educators using their products to support remote and in-person learning in 2021. This blog shares some highlights from the ED/IES SBIR program in 2021 and provides a preview of its recently released 2022 solicitations.

The ED Games Expo

IES hosted the 8^th annual ED Games Expo virtually in June 2021 to provide resources to the public in response to pandemic-related challenges. As part of the virtual Expo, 170 IES- and government-supported education technology products were available at no cost to educators and students around the country. The Expo also presented 35 virtual events for the public that have been viewed more than 10,000 times on YouTube, highlighted by a Kick Off Show introduced by Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona and including master classes for educators and behind-the-sciences “how to” events for students. Dates for the next ED Games Expo will be announced soon.

New ED/IES SBIR Awards

ED/IES SBIR announced 29 new 2021 awards, including 18 for prototype development and 11 for full-scale education technology product development. The awards continue trends from recent years.

One exciting trend is the employment of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, or algorithms to personalize student learning. Examples include projects by Myriad Sensors (Pocket Lab) to develop an AI engine to assess and provide feedback to students while doing physical science experiments, Analytic Measures Inc. (AMI) to create an natural language processing engine to recommend personalized practice activities based on a student’s level of oral reading fluency, and by KooApps and Kings Peak Technology to use machine learning to provide immediate vocabulary support to English learners.

Another trend in 2021 is the development of new products to scale existing IES-funded research. Projects that build on prior IES research include: Nimble Hiring to develop a platform to improve school district hiring and educator retention, xSEL Labs to create a platform for social and behavioral learning innovations, and Emberex to create a user interface with reporting and recommendation features to meet modern standards for a reading assessment.

ED/IES SBIR also continues to support projects in new areas. For example, three new projects are developing music-based technologies to support learning (Muzology, Edify, and Lyrics to Learn).

Highlights From Individual Projects in the Portfolio

Many ED/IES SBIR-supported companies enjoyed newsworthy successes in 2021.

• Through its ED/IES SBIR-developed platform, Future Engineers administered the TechRise Student Challenge and Lunabotics Junior Challenge for NASA, and an AEOP We Heart Veterans Pin Design Challenge for the Army through which more than 15,000 students participated around the country. 
• Myriad Sensors (PocketLab) hosted a series of “Science is Cool Unconferences” in 2020 and 2021 to present innovative approaches for sciences educators which were attended by more than 65,000 science educators.
• Codespark was acquired by BEGIN to support wide-scale distribution of its coding apps, including ED/IES SBIR-developed Story Mode.
• Cognitive Toybox and research partners received an award from the Gates Foundation to continue development of their early childhood assessment; they also received an investment from Morgan Stanley to grow their business.
• Muzology was recognized as a Top 10 Finisher in the 2021 Elite 200 by GSU-ASV as a top pre-seed start-up in the field of education technology.
• The Education Development Center received an IES research grant to evaluate the efficacy of Electric Funstuff’s Mission US Games, which were developed in part through ED/IES SBIR.
• ECO by Strange Loop Games reached more than 500,000 units sold in 2021.
• Inq-ITS reached the one million mark for its completed virtual labs.

ED/IES SBIR Releases Two 2022 Program Solicitations

On December 1, 2021, ED/IES SBIR released two new solicitations. Phase I solicitation #91990022R0001 is a request for proposals for $250,000 awards for 8 months for the research, development, and evaluation of new prototypes of education and special education technology products. Direct to Phase II solicitation #91990022R0002 is a request for proposals for $1,000,000 for 2 years for R&D and evaluation to develop new technology to prepare existing researcher-developed evidence-based innovations (products, interventions, practices) for use at scale, and to plan for commercialization. The goal is to support the successful transfer of research to practice at scale in education and special education. Proposals for both solicitations are due February 1, 2022.

Stay tuned for updates in 2022 on Twitter and Facebook as IES continues to support innovative forms of technology.

Edward Metz is a research scientist and the program manager for the Small Business Innovation Research Program at the US Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. Please contact Edward.Metz@ed.gov with questions or for more information.