Inside IES Research

April is National Bilingual/Multilingual Learner Advocacy Month! In this guest blog, Dr. Ryan Williams, principal researcher at the American Institutes for Research, describes his IES-funded project focused on identifying factors that help explain variation in the effects programs have on English learner student outcomes using a broad systematic review and meta-analysis.  

Over the past two decades, empirical research on programs that support English language and multilingual learners has surged. Many of the programs that researchers have studied are designed to support English literacy development and are tailored to the unique needs of English learners. Other programs are more general, but researchers often study program impacts on English learners in addition to impacts on a broader population of students. Relatively few attempts have been made to identify common findings across this literature. Even fewer attempts have been made to identify meaningful sources of variation that drive program impacts for English learner students—that is, understanding what works, for whom, and under what conditions. To help provide educators and policymakers answers to those important questions, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of the effectiveness of programs and strategies that may support English language learner students.

Our Systematic Review Process

We conducted a broad search that combed through electronic databases, unpublished ‘grey’ literature (for example, working papers, conference presentations, or research briefs), and sources that required hand-searching such as organizational websites. After documenting our primary decision-making factors within a review protocol, we applied a set of rigorous criteria to select studies for inclusion in the meta-analysis. We ultimately identified 83 studies that met our inclusion criteria. Each of these were randomized field studies that included English learner students in grades PK-12 and student academic learning outcomes such as English literacy, mathematics, science, and social studies. Each of the included studies was systematically coded to capture characteristics about the research methods, students and schools, settings, programs, outcome measures, and importantly, the program impacts that the studies reported. We then conducted a meta-analysis to understand the relationships between the characteristics we coded and the program impacts.

Preliminary Findings

We are still working on finalizing our analyses; however, our initial analyses revealed several interesting findings.

• Programs that included support for students to develop their first language skills tended to have larger improvements in student learning. This is consistent with prior research that suggests that supporting first language development can lead to improved learning in core content areas. However, the initial findings from this meta-analysis build on the prior research by providing empirical evidence across a large number of rigorous studies.
• There are some particularly promising practices for educators serving English learner students. These promising practices include the use of content differentiation, the use of translation in a student’s first language, and a focus on writing. Content differentiation aligns with best practices for teaching English learners, which emphasize the importance of providing instruction that is tailored to language proficiency levels and academic needs. The use of first language translation can be helpful for English learner students, as it can support their ability to access and comprehend academic content while they are still building their English proficiency. Focusing on writing can also be particularly important for English learners, as writing is often the last domain of language proficiency for students to develop. Our preliminary findings that English learner writing skills are responsive when targeted by instructional programs may hold implications for how to focus support for students who are nearing but not yet reaching English proficiency.
• The type of test used to measure program impact was related to the size of the program impact on student learning that studies found. Specifically, we found that it is reasonable to expect smaller program impacts when examining state standardized tests and larger impacts for other types of tests. This is consistent with findings from prior meta-analyses based on more general student populations, and it demonstrates the same applies when studying program impacts for English learner students. Statewide standardized tests are typically designed to cover a broad range of state content standards and thus may not reflect improvements in more specific areas of student learning targeted by a given program. On the other hand, researcher-developed tests may align too closely with a program and may not reflect broader, policy-relevant, changes in learning. Our initial evidence suggests that to understand program impacts for English learner students—or any group of students—we may want to use established, validated assessments but not only consider statewide standardized tests.

Next Steps

In terms of next steps, we will complete the meta-analysis work this summer and focus on disseminating the findings through multiple avenues, including a journal publication, review summaries on the AIR website, and future conference proceedings. In addition, we are working to deepen our understanding of the relationships identified in this study and explore promising avenues for practice and future research.

If you’d like to continue learning and see the results of this study, please continue to check back at AIR’s Methods of Synthesis and Integration Center project page, located here.

This blog was produced by Helyn Kim (Helyn.Kim@ed.gov), program officer for the English Learners portfolio, NCER.

Young women and men with disabilities face unique barriers in the transition from school to adulthood. In recognition of the IES 20^th anniversary, we are spotlighting Paths 2 the Future, a career development intervention for students with disabilities with gender-specific versions for boys and girls. For this blog post, virtual intern Audrey Im checks in with IES grantees Dr. Lauren Lindstrom (University of California, Davis) and Dr. John Lind (University of Oregon) about their experiences iteratively developing Paths 2 the Future. What started as an intervention to provide career guidance to high school girls with disabilities has now expanded to a package of interventions that also address the needs of high school-aged men with disabilities and underserved students of all genders.

In 2007, Lauren Lindstrom (then a senior research associate at the University of Oregon) received a grant from the National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER) to develop PATHS, a curriculum to improve education and career outcomes of high school girls with learning disabilities, ADD/ADHD, and emotional or behavioral disabilities. Lindstrom and her team created a curriculum advancing gender equity, disability awareness, and career readiness, which was then implemented in six high schools as an 18-week program.

According to Dr. Lindstrom, her team created PATHS just for girls after examining the disparate post-school outcomes for high school girls with disabilities enrolled in existing transition programs. “I consistently noticed that the girls were less likely to go to work, and if they went to work, they were working in really low-wage jobs,” she said. “And this was with the benefit of an intervention, right? Same kind of disabilities, same schools, but very different outcomes. So that really sparked my interest.”

In 2015, Dr. Lindstrom received a second grant to conduct a randomized controlled trial to test whether the intervention, now called Paths 2 the Future (P2F), improved career knowledge and skills among participants.

“We realized that this was probably one of the very first randomized controlled trials of a gender-specific career intervention,” Lindstrom said.

Lindstrom and her team sampled 366 girls with high-incidence disabilities in 26 Oregon high schools. The girls randomly assigned to the P2F intervention received the curriculum’s four core modules on self-awareness, disability knowledge, gender identity, and career and college readiness. They also received extensive information on career-related activities. The girls in the control group received the existing transition services of their respective schools. This study period lasted one 18-week semester and included a 6-month follow up with the students.

The P2F study found that the girls in the treatment group not only had more awareness of their identity and career possibilities after completing the curriculum, but they also had more confidence to talk about those topics. “The nature of being in a girl-only class really mattered,” Lindstrom said. “The students told us they felt safe there. They said things like ‘I’m a different person now. I feel empowered to talk, to think differently about my future.’” Lindstrom’s study also found that students in the treatment group were more likely to seek and have work experience in high school, an important observation as early work experience has proven to be a predictor for their future employment.

Lindstrom’s co-PI and research collaborator, Dr. John Lind, wondered if the P2F model would also work for boys. Lind, a research associate at the University of Oregon, received a 2019 IES grant Paths to the Future for Young Men (P2F-Young Men) to modify the P2F curriculum to take into account the specific needs of high school boys with high-incidence disabilities. These needs included (but were not limited to) building healthy relationships, breaking down gender stereotypes, and managing anger and stress.

“I think these needs are applicable to a range of genders but doing it in a classroom with just young men opens up the opportunity for potentially deeper discussions,” Lind said. “And that’s feedback that we’ve gotten anecdotally from the teachers we work with.”

After fully developing the P2F-Young Men curriculum, the researchers are currently conducting a small randomized controlled trial with eight teachers and their students at Oregon high schools. Although they are still in the process of collecting data for this study, Lind noted that teachers report that having a gender-specific curriculum helped the boys feel more comfortable in having discussions. “This is anecdotal at this point,” Lind acknowledged, “but if that stands true by the end of our study, I think that’s a really important finding.”

To Lindstrom and Lind, having separate curriculum interventions for different genders was necessary to address gender-specific issues and foster a safe learning environment. At the same time, they felt that it was important for all students across the gender spectrum to have access to these curricula to promote social-emotional development and build knowledge of career pathways.

“Teachers and schools have come to us and said, well is it just for cisgender students or people who are born as a certain gender? And our answer to that is no,” Lind affirmed. “What we’ve done with P2F-Young Men is create a transition curriculum for people who identify as young men. We start early in the curriculum of getting to know yourself, exploring yourself, your strength.”

In 2017, through funding from the National Center for Education Research (NCER), Lindstrom and Lind also developed a non-gender-specific version of the curriculum called P2F for All. This curriculum was targeted to underserved youth who face barriers to educational attainment and, due to a variety of reasons, may not be receiving transition services or college and career readiness support. Their study developed and tested the new P2F for All curriculum and found that it increased participating students’ career readiness, emotional coping skills, and interpersonal skills.

P2F for All aimed to take the findings from their gender-specific studies focused on the needs of students with disabilities and create a new, comprehensive career readiness curriculum—one that succeeded at addressing the needs of underserved students, not just those identified for special education services, regardless of gender. “What we strive to do in special education is provide services that are individualized and meet the needs of the person,” Lind said. “I think we’ve got a range of lessons to address that, and, ultimately, I think that lessons could be pulled out of a menu to meet specific needs for all students.”

Lauren Lindstrom is a professor and dean of the School of Education at the University of California, Davis. Prior to UC-Davis, Dr. Lindstrom served more than 25 years as an academic and administrator at the University of Oregon’s College of Education. Dean Lindstrom is an active researcher whose areas of interest include inclusive education, gender equity, career and college readiness and transition services for youth with disabilities. 

John Lind is a research associate at the University of Oregon’s College of Education. As a former special education teacher, Dr. Lind has extensive experience developing and implementing strength-based interventions for youth with disabilities, including adolescents with emotional and behavior disabilities. He has also worked as an educational consultant, providing training and technical assistance to international, national, and state departments of education on issues related to IDEA, effective classroom management, multi-tiered levels of support, and inclusion. Currently, he is the director of the SIGnetwork, a clearinghouse of resources for the OSEP-funded State Personnel Development Grantees.

This blog was written by Virtual Student Federal Service Intern Audrey Im and produced by Katina Stapleton (Katina.Stapleton@ed.gov). Akilah Nelson (Akilah.Nelson@ed.gov) is the program officer for the IES Transition to Postsecondary Education, Career, and/or Independent Living portfolio. The blog is part of a larger series on DEIA in Education Research.

International and national assessment data show that many U.S. students struggle with mathematics, and there continues to be a gap between students with and without disabilities. The recent 2022 NAEP mathematics results continue to showcase these disparities, which have been further exacerbated as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly for lower-performing students and students of color.

In honor of Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month, we want to highlight the research IES is supporting to improve mathematics achievement and access to educational opportunities for all learners, especially learners who have been historically underserved and underrepresented in STEM education.

IES is supporting research through its discretionary grant competitions to measure, explore, develop, and evaluate effective mathematics programs, practices, and policies for all students, including those with or at risk for disabilities. Here are a few highlights of some new research supported by IES:

• Interleaved Mathematics Practice – Bryan Matlen (WestEd) and colleagues are conducting a systematic replication of a highly promising mathematics learning intervention, interleaved practice, in 7th grade classrooms. With the interleaved practice intervention, some of the assigned math practice problems are rearranged so that problems of different kinds are mixed together, which improves learning, and problems of the same kind are distributed across multiple assignments, which improves retention. Numerous studies in the laboratory and classroom have demonstrated that merely rearranging practice problems so that the students receive a higher dose of interleaved practice can dramatically boost scores on measures of learning. This replication study will determine whether this promising intervention can improve math learning and achievement and whether the intervention can scale to a widely-used online intervention that currently reaches tens of thousands of students in diverse settings.
• Educational Technology Approaches to K-12 Mathematics – Jennifer Morrison (Johns Hopkins University) and colleagues are conducting a meta-analysis of rigorous evaluations of approaches that use technology to improve student mathematics achievement in grades K to 12. Using meta-analytic techniques, the team will be identifying conditions under which various types of technology applications are most effective in teaching mathematics. The results will provide researchers and education leaders with up-to-date information on effective uses of technology, including computer assisted instruction, cooperative learning, intelligent tutoring systems, games, simulations, virtual reality, inquiry/discovery, project-based learning, and media-infused instruction.
• Specialized Intervention to Reach All Learners - Sarah Powell (University of Texas at Austin) and colleagues are conducting an initial efficacy evaluation of Math SPIRAL, an educator-provided mathematics intervention for students identified as needing intervention services through state achievement testing in grades four and five. Educators are provided with an evidence-based word problem intervention (Pirate Math Equation Quest), associated professional development, and coaching to support implementation and address the needs of their learners who are struggling in math. The research team will evaluate the impact of Math SPIRAL on mathematics outcomes for upper elementary students identified as being with or at risk for a disability. The results will provide information on the efficacy of Math SPIRAL as a tool to accelerate the learning of students in need of math intervention.
• Math and Reading Acquisition Co-Adaptive System – Jess Gropen (Center for Applied Special Technology), Steve Ritter (Carnegie Learning), and their research team are iteratively developing and studying a set of individualized reading supports for students embedded within an adaptive mathematics learning system (MATHia) and an associated teacher application (LiveLab). Heuristics will determine when reading supports or scaffolds should be provided or recommended to students. In addition, adaptive supports for teachers will alert them when students are likely exhibiting reading challenges and provide recommendations for intervention. The findings will determine whether these reading supports that can be embedded into a variety of digital and/or adaptive math tools to decrease reading challenges and increase students' ability to engage effectively with math. The findings and generated technical resources (such as design assets and heuristics) will be Creative Commons licensed and made available through GitHub for use by other developers.

In August 2022, IES also launched the Learning Acceleration Challenge (LAC) Math Prize to identify and award school-based, digital interventions that significantly improve math outcomes for upper elementary school students with or at risk for a disability that affects math performance. Interventions for the Math Prize needed to specifically focus on fractions and could also include prerequisite skills such as whole numbers and operations. Two interventions are currently competing for the math prize and the winner will be announced Fall 2023.

In addition, IES has developed Practice Guides with evidence-based recommendations for educators to address challenges in their classrooms and schools. A list of the mathematics focused Practice Guides can be found here.

This blog was written by Christina Chhin (christina.chhin@ed.gov), NCER; Sarah Brasiel (sarah.brasiel@ed.gov), NCSER; and Britta Bresina (britta.bresina@ed.gov), NCSER.

When it comes to using research to inform practice, teachers tend to want succinct tips and strategies that can work in their own classrooms. Researchers can use social media channels to tailor their messages from their research findings and disseminate where teachers are already active. In this guest blog, Dr. Sam Van Horne, University of Delaware, describes the work that researchers conducted as part of the originally IES-funded Center for Research Use in Education. The goal of the center was to understand the gaps between researcher and practitioner perspectives on the usefulness of research in practice so that the center can address issues around how researcher communicate about their research, how practitioners can use research more effectively in their classrooms, and how to build stronger connections between the two communities.

Using a large cross-sectional survey of school-based practitioners, we found that practitioners report consuming research through multiple channels, and more than half of reported using social media in the last year with the goal of improving their practice. Social media channels, therefore, provide education researchers with an opportunity to connect with practitioners, but where are researchers likely to find teachers on social media? And how can researchers distill their findings for sharing in mediums that are vastly different than traditional academic forms? Here are some recommendations based on our research.

• Finding and Connecting with Educators on Social Media: One review of research about social media use among teachers found that Facebook and Twitter are some of the main sites that teachers use. But teachers also use Pinterest and Instagram as methods for learning from other teachers about teaching strategies. Posting in multiple channels may make it more likely that a message can reach educators. To find educators, researchers can search for public lists on education-focused topics or see who is using hashtags like #edtwitter, #TeachersofInstagram, or #EduTooters. By following lists, researchers can efficiently find educators to follow and tag (i.e., add the educator’s username to a social media message) with their messages about research-informed practice. This can aid with directly engaging practitioners and beginning conversations about applying research to practice.
• Using Hashtags or Tagging Specific People on Social Media: Social media networks like Twitter can overwhelm users with the volume of content being shared, so it’s critical to use tools like hashtags to find a practice-focused community who may be interested in applying research findings. Users search for content with hashtags that are discipline specific or likely to reach educators, such as #edutooters on Mastodon, #edutwitter on Twitter, or #teachersofinstagram or #teachersfollowteachers on Instagram. The key is identifying teachers or knowledge brokers (i.e., people or organizations who support practitioners in applying research evidence to teaching practice) that may be interested in the message and who may retweet or boost the message to their own followers.
• Tailoring Messages to Focus on What Practitioners Can Do: When the audience is identified, researchers can ask themselves, “What do I want this group to consider doing based on these research findings?” Then, social media messages can incorporate those ideas rather than just summarizing research findings. Social media messages describing how research can inform education practice should be economical and capture interest. Links to the original paper can be appended to a post for those who want to read more.
•  When possible, include links to publications or resources in publicly available repositories and not to versions in subscription-based journals. IES grantees can increase the visibility of their research by submitting their publications as grantee submissions in ERIC. This not only fulfills public-access requirements but also gives practitioners access to important information for improving teaching practice.  
• Incorporating Visual Elements to Attract Attention to Education Research Findings: Messages that incorporate visual elements or video are better suited for sharing on social media. The visual abstract is a succinct summary of research findings that is well-suited for sharing in social media platforms, and researchers have found that visual abstracts are more often shared on social media platforms than plain text about research. You can find guidance on creating visual abstracts here, though the authors suggest collaborating with a designer. These visual abstracts are suited for visual platforms like Pinterest or Instagram. Some journals make a regular practice of posting brief video messages from authors who explain their research study and the significance of the findings. Animations can also attract more attention to messages about research.

Disseminating education research on social media is not a “one-and-done” practice but should be part of a professional social media presence. Many guides exist for developing a professional social media presence, such as these for Twitter and LinkedIn. In addition to posting about research and its implications for practice, researchers can post about research or general issues in the field. This helps with building a following that will be more likely to see posts about research. There are other benefits to disseminating research on social media channels, including providing researchers with metrics about how many times their messages are shared or retweeted (or boosted, on Mastodon), as well as enabling research about optimal ways to share research to reach the broadest audience. In fact, Dr. Farley-Ripple, a leader of CRUE, and colleagues have received funding from the National Science Foundation for a research study to investigate the effectiveness of different dissemination strategies on social media, including the effectiveness of the translational visual abstract.

Connecting with educators on social media is a process. Researchers can begin by creating a presence on social media networks where educators are found and then post often about education and use hashtags to help make messages visible to educators. Messages can be succinct posts that include recommendations or strategies that are feasible for educators to adopt or include multimedia messages like the translational visual abstract to attract attention in a medium that is suited to visuals. Over time, it’s possible to learn what works and what doesn’t and adapt strategies for reaching educators, while keeping in mind that the tools and networks available now will undoubtedly adapt and change themselves.

Sam Van Horne is a Data Scientist at the Center for Research Use in Education and the Center for Research in Education and Social Policy at the University of Delaware.

This blog was produced by Corinne Alfeld (Corinne.Alfeld@ed.gov), program officer, NCER.

In celebration of IES’s 20^th anniversary, we are highlighting NCER’s investments in field-initiated research on equity in education. In this guest blog interview, researchers Amy Ellen Schwartz and Sarah Cordes share the equity-related implications of their IES-funded research on school busing. The research team conducted four related studies as part of their IES grant. First, researchers examined the individual and school factors that may explain why some students ride the bus and others do not. Next, they explored the relationship between bus use and school choice, examining whether students who use the bus to attend a choice school attend a higher quality school than their zoned school. The final two studies explored the link between taking the bus and academic outcomes.

What motivated your research on school busing?

Both of us are very interested in how factors outside the classroom matter for students. The school bus is a critical school service; however, at the start of our research, we knew very little about ridership, commutes, or the relationships between school bus ridership and student outcomes. Given what we know about inequities in other school services and the geography of schooling, it seemed natural for us to explore whether sociodemographic disparities exist in access to and provision of school bus service. Although NYC, like many other urban districts, also provides passes for use on public transit, we chose to focus specifically on the school bus because districts have significantly more discretion to set policies around the school bus.

What were your findings about the relationship(s) between school busing and student outcomes?

Despite the popular images of the iconic yellow school bus as a fundamental part of American public education, there is wide variation in the availability and cost of school bus service across schools, districts, and states. As part of our IES-funded research, we examined the relationship between bus access/characteristics of the bus ride in New York City (NYC) and various outcomes including the likelihood that students attend a choice school, the quality of school attended, attendance, and test scores. Our research revealed four key findings:

1. Among NYC students who attend choice schools, those who use transportation, especially the school bus, are more likely to attend a school that is significantly better than their zoned school.
2. Transportation plays a particularly important role for Black and Hispanic students in NYC. Black and Hispanic students who use the bus to attend a choice school are 30-40 percentage points more likely to attend a significantly better school than Black or Hispanic students who attend a choice school but do not use transportation.
3. Access to the school bus in NYC is associated with higher attendance—bus riders are absent approximately one day less than non-riders and are about four percentage points less likely to be chronically absent. However, most of this gap is explained by differences in the schools that bus riders attend, as within-school disparities in attendance are small.
4. Although long bus rides (over 45 minutes) are relatively uncommon in NYC, students with long bus rides are disproportionately Black and more likely to attend charter or district choice schools. Further, long bus rides have negative effects on attendance and chronic absenteeism of district choice students and may have small negative effects on test scores among charter school students.

What does equity (or lack thereof) look like in the NYC school bus system?

This is a complicated question that is largely context specific. For example, equity in school bus systems in a choice-rich district like NYC looks different than equity in a district where most students attend their zoned schools. In NYC, the main determinant of school bus eligibility is how far a student lives from school based on their grade level. For example, students in K-2 are eligible for free transportation (MetroCard or school bus) if they attend a school that is more than half a mile from home. That said, “eligibility” for school bus transportation does not mean that students will be assigned to a school bus. This creates the potential for inequities.

Among students who attend the same school, we find no strong evidence of racial/ethnic disparities in bus access. This is not the case when we compare students who attend different schools. We found that while Black students are significantly more likely than any other racial/ethnic group to be eligible for the bus, eligible Black students are also less likely than any other group to be assigned to a bus. Specifically, among students who live far enough from school to be eligible for the bus, Black students are 4.3 percentage points less likely than White students and 4.8 percentage points less likely than Asian students to be assigned bus service. Hispanic students are least likely to be eligible for the bus based on how far they live from school. However, Hispanic students who are eligible for bus service are also less likely to receive it than White or Asian students.  

We identified two possible explanations for these disparities—routing restrictions and whether a school offers the bus. Bus routes in NYC cannot exceed 5 miles and cannot cross certain administrative boundaries. For example, a student cannot take a school bus from one borough to another. Due to these restrictions, there are some students who are eligible for the bus but cannot be placed on a route that follows these restrictions, so they receive a MetroCard instead. The second and main explanation for these disparities is that Black and Hispanic students are significantly less likely to attend a school that provides bus service, as the decision of whether to provide bus service is at the discretion of individual principals.

What potential policy implications does your research have?

Based on our findings, there are three important policy implications to consider. First, districts should consider mandating school bus service in all schools. Second, in the absence of universal bus service, districts should increase transparency about school-level bus provision so that families can factor this into their decisions about where to send their children to school. Finally, districts should consider the consequences of policies around school bus provision, such as route restrictions.

Amy Ellen Schwartz is the dean of the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration, University of Delaware. Her research spans a broad range of topics in education policy and urban economics, focusing on the nexus of schools, neighborhoods and public services and the causes and consequences of children’s academic, social and health outcomes. Dr. Schwartz is currently a co-PI and director of transportation research for the IES-funded National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice.

Sarah A. Cordes is an associate professor of policy, organizational and leadership studies within Temple University’s College of Education and Human Development and former IES Predoctoral Fellow. Her research focuses on the ways in which the urban context, including neighborhoods, housing, and charter schools, affect student outcomes.

This blog was produced by Katina Stapleton (Katina.Stapleton@ed.gov) and Virtual Student Federal Service Intern Audrey Im. It is part of a larger series on DEIA in Education Research.