The Effects of Success in Sight as a School Improvement Intervention
Key outcomes and measures
Success in Sight uses five outcomes to represent how the intervention builds whole-school capacity for change. The primary outcome of this study is student academic achievement. The other four outcomes relate to the use of four school improvement practices: data-based decisionmaking, purposeful community, shared leadership, and effective school practices. These outcomes reflect the contexts, structures, and procedures associated with the organizational changes that the intervention targets. The effects of Success in Sight are examined one to two years after the intervention using scale scores from state assessments in reading and math and from the Teacher Survey of Policy and Practices on the extent to which a school engages in each of the four school improvement practices.
Data-based decisionmaking refers to an understanding of and engagement in activities that use data to support teaching and learning, including monitoring of student progress at various levels within the school. Purposeful community denotes a shared belief in the staff's ability to accomplish goals and access resources, structures, and procedures that support teachers in working together to accomplish them. Shared leadership refers to having a common vision and distributing leadership to attain it. Effective school practices include school improvement practices shown to be related to improved student achievement and targeted by the intervention: differentiated instruction based on data, safe and orderly school climate, and a focus on improving academic achievement.
Data for the four outcome measures on school improvement practices are assessed using the Teacher Survey of Policies and Practices (Apthorp et al. 2004; Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning 2005). This instrument was developed by McREL in 2004 to assess the characteristics of low-performing schools that perform better than expected, not to assess the impact of Success in Sight or the five stages of this intervention. Instead, the survey reflects common school characteristics related to student achievement: instruction, school environment, professional community, and leadership.
Other instruments were identified and reviewed for scales that might be used in the study. But the Teacher Survey of Policies and Practices was selected because it addressed all four outcomes for this study in the most comprehensive manner, was designed for use in low-performing schools, has questions worded appropriately for the school as the unit of analysis, and demonstrated the highest quality technical characteristics (reliability and validity). To fully capture the construct of purposeful community, a Collective Efficacy Scale developed by Goddard (2002) was included in this survey.