Inside IES Research

Recent studies of gifted and talented programs indicate that the extent and quality of services available to gifted students vary from state to state, district to district, and even from school to school within school districts. In a project titled “Are Gifted Programs Beneficial to Underserved Students?” (PI: William Darity, Duke University), IES-funded researchers are examining the variability of Black and Hispanic students’ access to gifted programs in North Carolina and the potential impact of participation in these gifted programs on Black and Hispanic student outcomes. In this interview blog, we asked co-PIs Malik Henfield and Kristen Stephens to discuss the motivation for their study and preliminary findings.

What motivated your team to study the outcomes of Black and Hispanic students in gifted programs?

The disproportionality between the representation of white students and students of color in gifted education programs is both persistent and pervasive. For decades, we’ve both been working with teachers and school counselors seeking to increase the number of students of color in gifted education programs, but what happens once these students are placed in these programs? We know very little about the educational, social, and emotional impact that participation (or non-participation) has on students. Gifted education programs are widely believed to provide the best educational opportunity for students, but given the impacts race and socioeconomic status have on student success factors, this may not be a sound assumption. In fact, there is negligible (and often contradictory) published research that explores whether gifted programs contribute to beneficial academic and social-emotional outcomes for the underserved students who participate in them. Resolving this question will have tremendous implications for future gifted education policies.

Please tell us about your study. What have you learned so far?

With funding from IES, researchers from Duke University and Loyola University Chicago are collaborating to describe how gifted education policies in North Carolina are interpreted, implemented, and monitored at the state, district, and school levels. We are also estimating how these policies are related to Black, Hispanic, and economically disadvantaged students’ academic and social-emotional outcomes. We hope our examination of individual student characteristics, sociocultural contexts, and environmental factors will help improve the ways school systems identify and serve gifted students from traditionally underrepresented groups.

Although preliminary, there are several interesting findings from our study. Our analysis of district-level gifted education plans highlights promising equity practices (for example, using local norms to determine gifted program eligibility) as well as potential equity inhibitors (for example, relying predominantly on teacher referral). Our secondary data analysis reveals that the majority of school districts do not have equitable representation of Black and Hispanic students in gifted programs. Disproportionality was calculated using the Relative Difference in Composition Index (RDCI). The RDCI represents the difference between a group’s composition in gifted education programs and their composition across the school district expressed as a discrepancy percentage.

What’s Next?

In North Carolina, districts are allowed to interpret state policy and implement programs and support services in ways they deem appropriate. Our next step is to conduct an in-depth qualitative exploration of variations in policy within and across North Carolina school districts. In these forthcoming analyses, we will be looking only at youth identified as underserved along the racial/ethnic minority dimension. In each district, we plan to interview four distinct groups to better understand their greatest assets, needs, challenges, and resources they would find most valuable to facilitate successful academic and social-emotional outcomes: (1) high-achieving underserved students identified as gifted, (2) high-achieving underserved students not identified as gifted, (3) teachers, and (4) school counselors.

For example, we are interested in learning—

• How educators interpret identification processes from policies
• How educators perceive recruitment and retention processes and their role in them
• How ethnic minority students identified as gifted perceive recruitment and retention processes
• How ethnic minority students not selected for participation in gifted education programming perceive the recruitment process
• How both student groups make sense of their racial identity

We will then combine what we learned from studies 1-3 (using secondary data) with Study 4 (research in schools) and share the results with policymakers, educators, and the research community.

What advice would you like to share with other researchers who are studying access to gifted programs?

There are three recommendations we would like to share:

• Investigate instructional interventions that impact short- and long-term academic and social-emotional outcomes for gifted students. The field of gifted education has spent significant time and resources attempting to determine the best methods for identifying gifted students across all racial/ethnic groups. Nonetheless, disparities in representation still exist, and this hyper-focus on identification has come at the expense of increasing our understanding of what types of interventions work, for whom, and under what conditions.
• Conduct more localized research studies. Since gifted education programs are largely de-centralized, there is considerable variance in how policies are created and implemented across states, districts, and schools. For example, eligibility criteria for participation in gifted programs can differ significantly across school systems.  In NC, “cut score” percentages on achievement and aptitude tests can range from the 85th to the 99th percentile. This makes it difficult to generalize research findings across contexts when participant samples aren’t adequately comparable. 
• Extend beyond the identification question and consider both generalizability and transferability when designing the research methodology. For generalizability, this entails carefully selecting the sample population and the methods for developing causal models. For transferability, this means providing a detailed account of the ecosystem in which the research is taking place so that practitioners can see the utility of the findings and recommendations within their own contexts. Mixed methods studies would certainly help bridge the relationship between the two. 

Dr. Malik S. Henfield is a full professor and founding dean of the Institute for Racial Justice at Loyola University Chicago. His scholarship situates Black students' lived experiences in a broader ecological milieu to critically explore how their personal, social, academic, and career success is impeded and enhanced by school, family, and community contexts. His work to date has focused heavily on the experiences of Black students formally identified as gifted/high achieving.

Dr. Kristen R. Stephens is an associate professor of the Practice in the Program in Education at Duke University. She studies legal and policy issues related to gifted education at the federal, state, and local levels--particularly around how such policies contribute to beneficial academic, social-emotional, and behavioral outcomes for traditionally underserved gifted students.

This interview blog is part of a larger IES blog series on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) in the education sciences. It was produced by Katina Stapleton (Katina.Stapleton@ed.gov), co-chair of the IES Diversity and Inclusion Council. For more information about the study, please contact the program officer, Corinne Alfeld (Corinne.Alfeld@ed.gov).

The prevalence of children identified as having autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has increased steadily in the last 20 years. Early identification and intervention is important, a point that is underscored by the CDC’s campaign Learn the Signs. Act Early. To recognize April’s Autism Awareness Month, NCSER is highlighting two projects supporting the capacity of parents and educators to intervene in children’s early development.

Assisting Early Interventionists in Facilitating Parent Mediation of Learning

Researchers Hannah Schertz (left, Indiana University) and Kathleen Baggett (right, Georgia State University) have developed a framework to improve the social communication skills of toddlers showing signs of ASD with a system that guides early interventionists (EIs) to support parents. The program, Supporting Early Interventionists of Toddlers with Autism to Build Family Capacity (SEITA), aims to help EIs to work with parents as they integrate interventions into natural interactions with their children. EIs learn to guide parents in understanding when their child is engaging in social communication and in implementing learning strategies to enhance these competencies during parent-child interactions. More specifically, EIs guide parents in applying four mediated strategies to promote engagement in learning: focusing, giving meaning, encouraging, and expanding. For example, one strategy they use is to facilitate guided reflection on a just-recorded video of parent-child interactions.

As the researchers test the promise of the intervention, they report that EIs have conducted the intervention with fidelity in both home-based and telehealth contexts. They have found that parents in the study demonstrated clear improvements in their use of at least two mediated learning strategies and have been able to implement intervention practices with fidelity when working with their children. The researchers also track the children’s progress on social reciprocity, joint attention, positive social behavior, and social play, and results will be analyzed when data collection is complete.

Investigating the Long-Term Benefits of an Elementary Intervention

The IAR team (from left to right): James P. Donnelly, Marcus L. Thomeer, Christopher Lopata, and Jonathan D. Rodgers

As children age into elementary grades, their primary site of intervention becomes the school. In 2008, NCSER funded the development of the comprehensive school-based intervention (CSBI) to support the social competencies of children with high functioning autism spectrum disorder (HFASD). This multi-prong approach includes interactive computer instruction to teach children to recognize emotions, social skills groups, therapeutic peer group activities to practice social skills, daily behavioral notes, and monthly parent training. A 2013 NCSER-funded randomized controlled trial of CSBI found that students with HFASD who participated in CSBI improved significantly in measures of social cognition, social-communication skills, and ASD symptoms compared to students with HFASD who received typical instruction.

To assess the intervention’s ability to impact long-term student development, Christopher Lopata and his colleagues James Donnelly, Marcus Thomeer, and Jonathan Rodgers (Canisius College) are following up on the initial efficacy trial to study the middle and high school students who participated in CSBI in elementary school. They are measuring student social cognition, social communication skills, ASD symptoms, and academic achievement at the beginning and end of two consecutive school years to examine lasting impacts of the CSBI program. Although data are still being analyzed from this project, it is notable that because data collection occurred as the COVID-19 pandemic caused school shutdowns, the PIs were able to examine the potential effects of stay-at-home restrictions on these students. There have been widespread concerns that disruptions to routines, curtailed social opportunities, and removal of support services associated with shutdowns could have deleterious effects on children with ASD. However, Lopata and colleagues found no significant differences between data collected before stay-at-home restrictions and data collected 4 months after the restrictions on ASD symptoms, adaptive behaviors, or social communication.

NCSER will continue to share the final results of these studies, as well as additional research focused on supporting children with ASD, in the future.

Written by Julianne Kasper, Virtual Student Federal Service Intern at IES and graduate student in Education Policy & Leadership at American University, and by Emily Weaver (Emily.Weaver@ed.gov), NCSER program officer who oversees ASD grants.

The transition into high school is characterized by growing academic demands, more diverse and complex social interactions, and increasing pressure associated with the looming transition into adult life and responsibilities. As part of an IES-funded measurement project, Drs. Michael Furlong, Erin Dowdy, and Karen Nylund-Gibson refined and validated the Social Emotional Health Survey-Secondary (SEHS-S-2020). The SEHS-S-2020 assesses the social-emotional assets of high school students and fits within multi-tiered systems of support and response-to-intervention frameworks schools regularly employ for the identification and care of students with learning or social-emotional needs. We asked the research team that developed the SEHS-S-2020 to tell us more about the development of the measure and how it is being used in schools.

What inspired you to develop the Social Emotional Health Survey-Secondary?

We were motivated by two events between 2008 and 2013. First, while we were serving as local evaluators of two Safe Schools/Healthy Students (SSHS) projects in Santa Barbara County, our project school administrators and mental health professionals challenged us to consider alternative ways to assess social-emotional health and the impacts of these projects. Second, around the same time, Michael Furlong was editing the first edition of the Handbook of Positive Psychology in Schools. Examining various positive psychological mindsets for the SSHS projects, we recognized that many of these constructs—such as hope, self-efficacy, and grit—had overlapping content. Based on this, we wanted to see if we could develop an efficient measure of positive psychology mindsets in adolescents.

The traditional mental health disorder literature uses comorbidity to describe the poor psychosocial outcomes for individuals experiencing more than one psychological disorder. We wondered whether students who report multiple social and psychological assets have enhanced developmental outcomes. The term we use for this "whole is greater than the sum of its parts" construct is covitality. Building on this concept, a significant effort of our work at the University of California, Santa Barbara has been to develop measures for schools to monitor social-emotional wellness. We created measures for primary and secondary schools and higher education institutions because fostering social-emotional health is ongoing and responsive to emerging developmental tasks.

How does the Social Emotional Health Survey-Secondary measure covitality?

Through an IES Measurement grant, we refined and validated the SEHS-Secondary form, which measures psychosocial strengths derived from the social emotional learning (SEL) and positive youth development (PYD) literature. SEHS-S-2020 assesses four related general positive social and emotional health domains that contribute to covitality. 

• Belief in Self consists of three subscales grounded in constructs from self-determination theory literature: self-efficacy, self-awareness, and persistence. 
• Belief in Others comprises three subscales derived from constructs found in childhood resilience literature: school support, peer support, and family support. 
• Emotional Competence consists of three subscales: emotion regulation, empathy, and behavioral self-control. 
• Engaged Living comprises three subscales grounded in constructs derived from the positive youth psychology literature: gratitude, zest, and optimism.

What did you find during the validation study?

The validation project involved a cross-sectional sample of more than 100,000 California secondary school students in partnership with the California State Department of Education and WestEd. We also collected three years of longitudinal data with two collaborating school districts. Our goal was to develop a valid measure to support educator efforts to foster positive development. We wanted to document how the number of developmental assets was associated with mental well-being. This chart shows that students reporting many SEHS-S-2020 assets were substantially more likely to report flourishing well-being. Adolescents with more SEHS-S-2020 assets were less likely to report chronic sadness or past-year suicidal ideation (see the covitality advantage).

Did you have any unanticipated project outcomes?

Data collection immediately predated the COVID-19 pandemic. It provided a baseline to assess the effects of the pandemic and broader social divisiveness in the United States on student well-being. An important unanticipated outcome is that pre-pandemic social well-being declined substantially during and after remote learning.

Our project began collecting longitudinal data from middle and high school students in October 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic. One participating school district asked us to administer the survey in October 2020 during remote learning and in October 2021 after the students returned to school, in order to understand remote learning's impacts on students' well-being. They also provided support for specific students who were not coping well. Our preliminary findings (paper in progress) showed that the students reported some diminished emotional well-being and global life satisfaction, but their social well-being decreased substantially from 2019 to 2021, about one-half of a standard deviation. Two macro-social items in particular declined markedly. One asks the students to express how often (in the past month) "they felt that society was a good place or becoming a better place for all people." A second asks them, "if the way that society works makes sense." Students reporting the steepest social well-being declines also reported substantial increases in chronic sadness and diminished global life satisfaction. These declines suggest that the broader impacts of the pandemic took a toll on the students.

How are schools using the resources your project developed?

There is a greater emphasis on evaluating social and emotional health and well-being than before. The SEHS-S-2020 is now a core component of the California Healthy Kids Survey (CHKS), a biennial survey used by most California schools. It provides information about student wellness and risk-related behaviors. In addition, several California school districts have adopted the SEHS-S-2020 and other project-developed measures for their Tier 1 universal wellness screening, following up and providing counseling services and supports.

We are eager to see more schools using the resources from our project. For example, researchers in more than 20 countries have adapted the SEHS-S-2020 to explore cross-cultural aspects of well-being. An app to administer, score, report, and track  social and emotional wellness with the SEHS-S-2020 now supports Tier 1 wellness monitoring.

Michael Furlong, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of School Psychology and holds a 2021-2022 Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professorship at the University of California Santa Barbara.

Erin Dowdy, PhD., is a Professor in the Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology at the University of California Santa Barbara. She is a licensed psychologist and a nationally certified school psychologist.

Karen Nylund-Gibson, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Quantitative Methods in the Department of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

This blog was produced by NCER Program Officer, Corinne Alfeld. Please contact Corinne.Alfeld@ed.gov for more information.

Each generation faces its own societal challenges. Two prominent issues—the climate crisis and America’s political divide—are heavy burdens for today’s youth. Without explicit focus in schools, it is hard to imagine how children will learn to work across differences and collaborate with others to solve complex environmental problems. Youth are very capable people, and school comes alive when they feel agency and see how their efforts matter in the community. Service-learning can help teachers make instruction feel relevant and teach skills that lead to civic engagement as youth learn to design, implement, and evaluate solutions to problems that are important to them. In this interview blog, the Connect Science project team explains how they developed curriculum and professional development to support teachers to engage their students in service-learning experiences.

Can you tell us about Connect Science and what it looks like in action?

Fueled by an IES Development and Innovation grant, our team developed and evaluated a science-based service-learning approach for the upper-elementary school years. In doing so, we answered a need that teachers and schools face as they strive to create engaging experiences aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

Connect Science is a 12-week project-based learning unit for upper elementary students. Early on, teachers and students explore topics of energy and natural resources using lessons aligned with the NGSS. Teachers guide student learning on what it means to be an engaged citizen and on the social and collaborative skills needed to take action in the community. To prepare, teachers receive five days of professional development and follow-up coaching. Teachers also receive a Connect Science manual, related books, and science materials.

But what does Connect Science actually look like in action? Imagine fourth graders engaged in a science unit on renewable and non-renewable resources. The students learn about different energy sources and then discuss pros and cons of each source. They become aware that non-renewable energy resources are rapidly diminishing and would not always be available to generate electricity. The awareness of this problem energizes them to promote energy conservation. Toward that goal, the students decide to educate other students and families at their school about energy use. At the next open house night, they turn their cafeteria into an energy fair where they share important information. For example, one group of students teaches about what types of energy sources were used in their state to produce electricity and another group teaches ways that people can save energy in their home. Before and after the energy fair, the students administer a pre- and post-survey on energy facts to size up what their visitors learned.

How did the IES grant support the development and pilot testing of Connect Science?

In the first two years of this grant, we developed and tested materials with teachers. In the third year, we conducted a randomized controlled trial of Connect Science involving 41 classrooms with 20 in Connect Science and 21 in a waitlist comparison group, resulting in a student sample of 868 students (423 students participated in the intervention).

We found that Connect Science impacted teacher practices and student outcomes. Teachers in the Connect Science group were more effective at engaging in the two NGSS practices that we measured: eliciting and building on prior knowledge and creating opportunities for student critique, explanation, and argument. Further, we saw higher science achievement and energy attitudes and behaviors in the intervention than control condition. The social skill results hinged on the fidelity of implementation. When teachers used more Connect Science practices, students showed improved communication and social competence. As a result of these findings, Connect Science is designated as a Promising Program by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL).

What are the implications of your findings?

Too few projects integrate academic and social learning in schools. Often, high-quality NGSS materials are developed with little thought about the social skills students need to engage in that instruction. Likewise, social and emotional learning is often taught separately from academic content. Service-learning is a framework that bridges these two areas and allows students to engage in authentic, science-based work. Given our experiences, we have a few recommendations for educators eager to use service-learning.

• Teach social, emotional, and collaborative skills with intention before launching into group work. In the elementary schools, children thrive from being in supportive caring classrooms and they respond well to lessons on active listening, respectful communication, and understanding people with multiple perspectives.
• Leverage the existing curriculum and build in service-learning experiences. Rather than adding one more new topic, look at existing curricular topics and use service-learning to facilitate deep learning on content areas that already part of the curriculum.
• Amplify youth voice. Teachers need to work with students to identify a relevant community problem and generate solutions to that problem. We carefully developed the Connect Science materials to be more teacher-directed toward the beginning of the unit and more student-directed toward the end. This approach was based both on theoretical and empirical work supporting the importance of student autonomy.

Sara Rimm-Kaufman is the Commonwealth Professor of Education at the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development. Her recent book for teachers, SEL from the Start, is based on the Connect Science work.

Eileen Merritt is a Research Scientist in the College of Natural Resources and the Environment at Virginia Tech. Her research and teaching focus on environmental and sustainability education.

Tracy Harkins is the owner of Harkins Consulting, LLC in Maine. Her focus is providing professional development and resources to engage and motivate student learners through service-learning. She will be offering an upcoming Connect Science Institute in Summer 2022.

For questions about this project, please contact Corinne.Alfeld@ed.gov, NCER program officer.

On January 25-27, 2022, NCER and NCSER hosted  our first Principal Investigators (PI) Meeting since the COVID-19 pandemic changed the world as we know it. Even though we were hopeful and eager to connect with our grantees in person, given the continuing uncertainties due to COVID-19, we opted for our very first fully virtual PI meeting, and we are pleased to say it was a success on many fronts!

Our co-chairs, Brian Boyd (University of Kansas), and Doré LaForett (Child Trends and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) were instrumental in the success of this meeting. They helped identify the meeting theme: Advancing Equity & Inclusion in the Education Sciences, suggested sessions (including the plenaries) that addressed the theme,  recommended strategies to encourage networking and engagement, and participated in two great sessions focused on Engaging in Anti-racist, Culturally Responsive Research Practices and the Importance of Identifying English Learners in Education Research Studies.

Here are a few highlights:

The meeting kicked off with a welcome from the Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, followed by IES Director Mark Schneider’s opening remarks. Secretary Cardona reaffirmed the importance and need for high-quality education research to identify, measure, and address disparities in education opportunities and outcomes. Director Schneider spoke about improving the infrastructure of the education sciences and ways that IES will continue to encourage investigators to incorporate the SEER principles going forward. He also revealed a ninth SEER principle focused on equity, calling on researchers to “address inequities in societal resources and outcomes.” See a recap of his talk here.

This year’s theme was threaded throughout the meeting, emphasizing the importance and complexity of advancing equity and inclusion in the education sciences. The opening plenary speakers began the meeting with advice on how to center equity and inclusion in education research; the Commissioners provided updates on how NCER and NCSER are working to address diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility; sessions focused on challenges and potential solutions for doing research with an equity lens; and the closing plenary discussed how to plan for diversity in education research.   

Deep conversations occurred around meaningful and relevant topic areas. Over three days, we had nearly 900 attendees going in and out of virtual rooms (with very few technology glitches—no small feat!) participating in discussions around four main topic areas:

• Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA)—Sessions included discussions of centering equity in education research
• COVID-19 Pandemic—Sessions included lessons learned from COVID-19 research pivots and considerations for research during COVID-19 and recovery
• Methods & Measurement—Sessions included information on innovations in statistical methods, data collection tools, and scaling evidence-based practices
• Results from IES Research—Sessions included highlights of findings from several IES-funded grants and Research and Development centers

See the agenda for a complete list of this year’s sessions.

Finally, although we weren’t able to be in the same physical room, one of the real benefits of this virtual meeting was the ability to record the sessions. IES continues to encourage the dissemination of IES-supported research to a wider audience, and we want to do our part by making the recordings from the sessions publicly available. We hope you enjoy watching the incredibly valuable and thought-provoking presentations and discussions and share widely with your networks.

Thanks to our attendees for their participation. Your engagement made this year’s meeting a true success. We are already looking forward to next year’s meeting!

If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for how to continue the conversation around DEIA, please do not hesitate to contact NCER Commissioner Liz Albro (Elizabeth.Albro@ed.gov) or NCSER Commissioner Joan McLaughlin (Joan.McLauglin@ed.gov). We look forward to hearing from you.