Inside IES Research

We hope you enjoyed yesterday’s NCSER grantee spotlight! Today, we present to you Dr. Beth Stormshak, Knight Chair and professor at the University of Oregon. Dr. Stormshak’s project is to conduct an efficacy trial of the Family Check-Up Online to address emotional and behavioral challenges among middle school students with or at risk for disability during their transition back to school after the pandemic-related school closures. 

*Responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.

NCSER: How would you describe your research project in a sentence?  

Dr. Beth Stormshak: This research examines the Family Check-Up Online in a hybrid efficacy-effectiveness trial that provides support for schools to implement the model under ideal conditions, and then tests the ability of schools to implement and sustain the intervention under real-world conditions, with the goal of reducing mental health and behavior problems in students who have been identified as “high needs.” 

NCSER: What was the need that inspired you to conduct this research? 

Dr. Beth Stormshak: The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the dire circumstances that most schools are facing as they tackle the mental health and behavioral concerns of students. Staffing shortages, escalating rates of mental health problems, and limited resources have led to a crisis that needs to be addressed nationwide. 

NCSER: What outcomes do you expect to change with this research? 

Dr. Beth Stormshak: With this research, we expect to impact student outcomes—including mental health, behavior, attendance, and achievement—which we refer to as the “ABCs” of student success (attendance, behavior, and classroom performance). We also expect to impact staffing outcomes, such as training in evidence-based approaches to intervention and willingness to engage with parents and caretakers to improve student success. 

NCSER: What inspired you to do research in special education?   

Dr. Beth Stormshak: I am interested in evidence-based interventions that support students who are struggling both academically and behaviorally. My work began over 30 years ago with a focus on improving student behavior problems in schools and has now expanded to include mental health and wellness, which impact most students and families receiving special education services. 

“The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the dire circumstances that most schools are facing as they tackle the mental health and behavioral concerns of students. Staffing shortages, escalating rates of mental health problems, and limited resources have led to a crisis that needs to be addressed nationwide.”

NCSER: Why is this particular research project important to you?  

Dr. Beth Stormshak: There is clear evidence that supporting parents in building positive relationships with their child improves child behavior, mental health, and academic outcomes. Yet schools have few resources to administer family-centered interventions. My research bridges the gap between schools and families by testing a new tool for supporting families at home, with clear implications for school behavior. The ultimate goal of this research is to support parent skills and relationship building, which in turn will lead to reductions in student problem behavior and mental health concerns. 

NCSER: How do you think this grant will impact special education?  

Dr. Beth Stormshak: Special educators are unique in that they often interface with families more than other school personnel. They also have training in behavioral supports for students, making them ideal candidates to learn this model and apply it to school settings. I hope that our work will provide a sustainable tool for educators that can be used to improve student outcomes. 

NCSER: How will this project address challenges related to the pandemic?  

Dr. Beth Stormshak: Parents are more frustrated than ever with services provided to support student mental health. Schools are overwhelmed with students who need support, and communities do not have any additional resources to support families and students. This online program provides a cost-effective approach to service distribution that will have greater reach and impact than most programs currently available in schools and communities. 

NCSER: What are some of the biggest challenges in special education research today? 

Dr. Beth Stormshak: There are many challenges to special education research, including sustaining partnerships with schools when there is high turnover in staffing and limited resources at the school level to engage with the research community. Due to the crisis levels of staffing in most schools, it is challenging for schools to add “one more thing” to their plate. It is also a challenge for schools to identify staff for training and support in new programs. 

NCSER: What’s one thing you wish more people knew about children and youth with or at risk for disabilities?  

Dr. Beth Stormshak: Disabilities come in a variety of forms, and may include behavioral concerns, mental health concerns, and academic concerns. All parents want the best for their children, and many families struggle with approaches to behavioral management that are effective and helpful to their child. Many parents also feel blamed by schools or communities for their child’s disabilities. The Family Check-Up is strength-based and supportive, focusing on what parents are doing well and supporting parents to engage positively with their child. Our research on this model over 25 years suggests that parents who engage in the program will experience improvements in child behavior, mental health, and self-regulation, as well as their own parenting skills, stress, and depression. All of these outcomes lead to improvements in student achievement. 

NCSER: What are some of the most exciting news/innovations/stories that give you hope for the future of special education research?  

Dr. Beth Stormshak: There are many ways to intervene and support students. The COVID-19 pandemic has helped us focus on the mental health needs of students, and ultimately may change the way we think about schools, their role, and their engagement with families. The pandemic has also normalized telehealth and online support for students and parents. This has enabled the development of evidence-based programs, such as the Family Check-Up, to online platforms, which can be delivered asynchronously and therefore can reach large numbers of students that were, before, inaccessible. Ultimately this will lead to reductions in health disparities for many populations who have had limited access to mental health services. 

NCSER: What are some of the future goals for you and your team? 

Dr. Beth Stormshak: Our goals are to test the Family Check-Up Online in real-world settings and to adapt the model to fit the needs of schools across the country. Our work is community-based and we have engaged school providers in the process of development, carefully testing the feasibility and acceptability of this approach with school collaborators. We hope that this research provides insights into the process for implementing the model in schools, which can be applied to other schools across the United States who are interested in learning this model and providing this resource to parents and students. 

Thank you for reading our conversation with Dr. Beth Stormshak! Come back tomorrow for our next grantee spotlight!  

Welcome to the first installment of the National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER) grantee spotlight series! For the next two weeks, we’ll publish exclusive conversations with NCSER’s Research to Accelerate Pandemic Recovery in Special Education program grantees. NCSER is pleased to highlight researchers who are addressing the urgent challenges schools face to support students with or at risk for disabilities, their teachers, and their families in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Today, we want to present to you Dr. Erica Lembke, professor of special education at the University of Missouri. Dr. Lembke’s project, STAIR: Supporting Teaching of Algebra with Individual Readiness, aims to evaluate different levels of intensity of a professional development and coaching model for middle school special education teachers to accelerate pandemic recovery in mathematics for their students with disabilities.  

*Responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.

NCSER: How would you describe your research project in a sentence?   

Dr. Erica Lembke: Supporting Teaching of Algebra with Individual Readiness 2.0 (STAIR) provides just-in-time pandemic recovery intervention in special education by supporting teachers to address the needs of students with math difficulties through professional development and coaching that focuses on teaching teachers how to use data to inform their instruction.   

Join us on January 19, 2023, from 3pm EST-4:30pm EST, as members of the IES-funded LEARN (Leveraging Evidence to Accelerate Recovery Nationwide) Network convene publicly for the first time to share their network's goals and vision. Learn more from the network teams during this virtual event

and hear from IES Director Mark Schneider about his hopes for the LEARN Network in the coming years as IES looks to the future with a focus on progress, purpose, and performance.

The LEARN Network was established to focus on adapting and preparing to scale existing, evidence-based products to address learning acceleration and recovery for students in K-12, particularly for students from underrepresented groups disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to generating solutions to the nation’s most pressing challenges to COVID-19 recovery within the education sector, IES expects that the combined efforts of this network will lead to the establishment of best practices for how to prepare to effectively scale evidence-based products.

The LEARN Network includes a scaling lead and four product teams. The scaling lead, led by a team at SRI International, is facilitating training, coaching, and collaboration activities with product teams; ensuring educator needs and perspectives are addressed; and providing a model for the field that ensures evidence-based products are developed with the potential to achieve impact at scale for students—particularly those in most need—from the start. Product teams are focused on preparing to scale literacy products for students in K-3 (Targeted Reading Instruction; Grantee: University of Florida), 4th-5th grade (Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies; Grantee: AIR), and middle school (Strategic Adolescent Reading Intervention; Grantee: SERP) as well as a math product for students in 5th grade (Classwide Fraction Intervention combined with Math Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies; Grantee: AIR).

Registration is now open, and we hope to see you there! For more information on the event and to register, visit https://learntoscale.org/. 

Researchers must possess the ability to clearly communicate research findings to non-technical audiences, including decision makers who may have limited time and varying levels of tolerance for data-rich reports. We and our colleagues recently honed these skills while preparing research briefs for the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) as part of an IES-funded partnership project between VDOE and the University of Virginia exploring the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on students and teachers. These briefs are a key mechanism through which our project services the purpose of IES’s Using Longitudinal Data to Support State Education Policymaking Grantmaking Programs to generate useful findings to inform the decision making of policy makers and education leaders at the state, district, and school levels.

In their initial feedback, VDOE described the briefs as “too technical.” When we led with the numbers, our intended audience quickly became overwhelmed by the need to also interpret the findings on their own. Our conversations with VDOE provided helpful direction on how we could revise the briefs to better reach non-technical, decision-making audiences in Virginia and beyond. We share six strategies we have applied to all our research briefs.

• Yes, briefs need a summary too: The draft briefs were short (4-7 pages) inclusive of figures and endnotes, and they began with a list of key findings. Based on the feedback, we morphed this list into a proper summary of the brief. Many of the decision makers we want to reach only have time to read a page summary, and that summary needs to be self-contained. Without additional context, the initial list of key findings would have had minimal impact.
• Lead with the headline: Numbers are a powerful tool for storytelling; however, too many numbers can also be hard for many people—researchers and non-researchers alike—to consume. We therefore edited each paragraph to lead with a numbers-free sentence that provides the main take away from the analysis and followed that up with the supporting evidence (the numbers).
• Answer the question: Our initial groundwork to develop solid relationships with agency staff allowed us to identify priority questions on which to focus the briefs. While several tangential but interesting findings also resulted from our analysis, the briefs we developed only focused on answering the priority research questions. Tangential findings can be explored in more depth in future research projects.
• Accurate but not over-caveated: All research makes some assumptions and has some limitations. The average non-technical audience member is unlikely to want a thorough detailing of each of these; however, some are too important to exclude. We chose to include those that were most vital to helping the reader make the correct interpretation.
• A picture speaks a thousand words: This was something at which our initial drafts succeeded. Rather than providing tables of statistics, we included simple, well-labeled figures that clearly presented the key findings graphically to visually tell the story.
• Conclude by summarizing not extrapolating: The purpose of these briefs was to describe the changes that the pandemic wrought to Virginia’s public schools and convey that knowledge to decision makers charged with plotting a course forward. The briefs were not intended to provide explicit guidance or recommendations to those decision makers.

These strategies, of course, are also useful when writing for technical audiences. While their training and experiences may equip them to consume research that doesn’t exhibit these six strategies, using these strategies will enhance the impact of your research findings with even the most technical of audiences.

Luke C. Miller is a Research Associate Professor at the University of Virginia’s School of Education and Human Development. He is the lead researcher and co-Principal Investigator on the IES-funded project led by VDOE in partnership with UVA.

Jennifer Piver-Renna is the Director of the Office of Research in the Department of Data, Research and Technology at the Virginia Department of Education. She is the state education agency (SEA) co-Investigator on the IES-funded project.

This blog was produced by Allen Ruby (Allen.Ruby@ed.gov), Associate Commissioner for Policy and Systems Division, NCER.  

Since 2004, the Institute of Education Sciences has funded predoctoral training programs to increase the number of well-trained PhD students who are prepared to conduct rigorous and relevant education research. In addition to providing training to doctoral students, all IES-funded predoctoral programs are encouraged to help broaden participation in the education sciences as part of their leadership activities. In this guest blog post, the leadership team of the University of Virginia predoctoral training program discusses their continuing efforts to create diverse pathways for students interested in education research.

In 2008, the IES-funded Virginia Education Science Training (VEST) Program began the Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) with the goal of recruiting more students from traditionally marginalized groups into education science research. Each year, 8–10 students from around the United States traveled to receive faculty mentorship in independent research at the University of Virginia. In doing so, they experienced facilitated opportunities to develop new research skills and reflect about their own identities as scholars and students of color, first generation college students and/or students from families with low income. They became active members of research groups, visited IES program officers in Washington, DC, and presented their own research at the Leadership Alliance National Symposium.

Quite fortuitously, at an IES principal investigator meeting, we connected with the leadership of the IES-funded Research Institute for Scholars of Equity (RISE) program taking place at North Carolina Central University (NCCU). As a result, for four years, we collaborated with RISE leadership to host two-day RISE fellow visits to UVA. During these visits RISE fellows shared their projects and ideas with VEST fellows and faculty. The RISE and SURP fellows also mingled and attended workshops on graduate school admissions.

We had three goals for these efforts:

• Provide IES pre-doctoral fellows with the opportunity to apply leadership skills to working with undergraduates
• Increase the diversity of education scientists
• Increase the diversity of our IES-sponsored PhD program

Enter COVID. In 2020, bringing students to UVA for the summer wasn’t feasible or wise. Instead, we reflected on our past successful experiences with NCCU and realized we could improve the quality of student experiences if we also worked closely with faculty at other universities. To start, we engaged with Virginia State University (VSU) and Norfolk State University (NSU), two Virginia HBCUs, to create the Open Doors Program.

Initially, eight faculty and administrators from NSU and VSU met with the UVA team, which included a post-doctoral fellow and a PhD student who coordinated discussions, helped design the curriculum, and built an Open Doors handbook. The design team built a program in which 12 rising juniors at NSU and VSU would:

• Engage in the research and writing process that will lead to a research product and presentation that reflects their strengths, interests, and goals
• Gain a deeper understanding of the opportunities available to them in graduate school
• Have the opportunity to examine the complexities and multiple layers of their intersectional identities, identify assets and cultural wealth, and identify academic strengths and areas of growth
• Build relationships with faculty and graduate student mentors

Due to the pandemic, the program was offered virtually over four weeks with a combination of seminars and mentoring sessions. The program exceeded our expectations. The students all indicated that Open Doors was a useful learning experience for them and provided them with a better understanding of the opportunities available in graduate school. The faculty valued the opportunity to work with each other. We will be offering Open Doors 2.0 next June with another cohort of 12 students from NSU and VSU. We learned a lot from our first year and have planned several modifications to the program. For example, this year, we anticipate that students and some NSU and VSU faculty will be on campus at UVA for two of the four weeks; the other two weeks will be virtual.

These efforts have been true learning experiences for UVA faculty and VEST fellows. We have several recommendations for other programs eager to create pathways programs.

• Clarify your goals and organize the program around the key outcomes that you are trying to achieve. For SURP and Open Doors, we focused in on four outcomes: preparation to conduct education research, preparation for graduate school, expansion of networks, and providing access to new mentoring relationships.
• Teach skills as well as knowledge. Our evaluation of SURP points to the importance of teaching skills so students can formulate research questions, recognize research designs, analyze and interpret data, and write about research. Students reported gaining skills in these areas which are critical to success in graduate school in education research.
• Identify ways to enhance cultural capital. Students benefit from knowledge, familiarity, and comfort with university life. In Open Doors, we wanted to build an authentic collaboration that allowed faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students at the HBCUs and UVA to learn from each other, extending the cultural capital of all participants.

Our efforts have been exciting yet humbling. Above all, we enjoy listening to and learning from the SURP and Open Doors students. In Open Doors, we also enjoyed building relationships with faculty at other institutions. We have increasingly become aware of the challenges we face in efforts to increase the diversity of our programs. Recruitment is just a first step. Creating graduate school experiences that are conducive to learning and engagement for students from diverse group is an important second step. And a third critical step is to transform life at our universities so that students (and faculty) from traditionally marginalized groups can thrive and flourish. In doing so, we expect that universities will be better able to meet a full range of new challenges that lie ahead in education science.

Sara Rimm-Kaufman is the Commonwealth Professor of Education in the Educational Psychology-Applied Developmental Science program at the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development.

Jim Wyckoff is the Memorial Professor of Education and Public Policy in the Education Policy program and directs the Center on Education Policy and Workforce Competitiveness at the University of Virginia.

Jamie Inlow is the Coordinator for the VEST Predoctoral Training Program in the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development.

This blog post is part of an ongoing series featuring IES training programs as well as our blog series on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) within IES grant programs.

Produced by Katina Stapleton (Katina.Stapleton@ed.gov), co-Chair of the IES Diversity and Inclusion Council and predoctoral training program officer.