Project Activities
In Year 1, the research team trained teachers using the original STJ training model and gathered feedback to inform revisions that would allow training and implementation to occur without external support. In Year 2, the research team worked with a second cohort of teachers to test the model's usability and feasibility with a hybrid training model. In Year 3, the research team worked with a third cohort of teachers to test the model's usability and feasibility with a fully peer-trained model. The researchers examined natural variations in implementation fidelity as predictors of student outcomes to determine the promise of the teacher-led, teacher-trained Pathways program for improving student achievement.
Structured Abstract
Setting
This study took place in Chicago.
Sample
The sample consisted of the 8th grade teachers in 10 K-8 schools in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) district, a total of 28 teachers, representing 40 8th-grade homerooms and 1,142 students. Students were mostly (87 percent) from low-income families and most students were Latinx (64 percent) or African American (20 percent).
Intervention
Pathways-to-Success focuses on making the future feel close and relevant to school and on changing the meaning children make of their experienced difficulty in school by helping them see these experiences as normative and as signaling task importance rather than task impossibility. Pathways consists of 12 sessions delivered during home room twice-weekly in the beginning of the 8th-grade school year. The proximal goal of Pathways is to create school contexts that facilitate sustained engagement in schoolwork as a means of attaining future-self goals. In each Pathways session, children engage in activities to (1) link images of their future adult self with school success, (2) make school success and strategies (e.g., studying) feel congruent with important social identities (e.g., race-ethnicity, gender, social class), and (3) help students avoid misinterpreting experienced difficulties while working on or thinking about schoolwork or school identities as meaning that a positive school-identity is impossible for them to attain. In its original form, the intervention was implemented by two external trainers (undergraduate students or people with an undergraduate degree living in the city of Detroit).
Research design and methods
Through three rapid development cycles — each with a unique cohort of teachers — the research team refined the training, implementation manual, and materials so that they are usable and feasible for homeroom teachers to implement after being trained by fellow teachers. Prior to the first development cycle, the researchers tailored existing materials to a single-teacher (versus two external trainers) model and updated other content using new media. In Year 1, the researchers trained eight teachers in three schools to implement Pathways using the original external-trainer manual and materials. Observed fidelity of implementation and receipt and teacher feedback were used to revise implementation and training manuals for a second development cycle in three new schools. In Year 2, the training was led by the two highest fidelity teachers from Year 1 with support from the PI. In both Years 1 and 2, the researchers assessed fidelity, usability, and feasibility as they revised training and implementation manuals and materials to reduce ambiguity. In Year 3, teachers from four new schools were trained by the four highest fidelity teachers delivering Pathways in Year 2. In addition to assessing fidelity, the researchers assessed students' school-focused identity-based motivation, social-emotional self-regulation, responsible decision making, and academic outcomes (grade point average and risk of course failure) to determine whether fidelity was associated with student outcomes.
Control condition
Due to the nature of the research design, there was no control condition.
Key measures
Students' school-focused identity-based motivation (school-focused possible selves and strategies to attain them, difficulty-as-importance and difficulty-as-impossibility mindset scores) was assessed using researcher-developed measures previously used to assess these constructs. Social-emotional self-regulatory competency and responsible decision-making were assessed using previously validated measures. Academic performance was assessed using grade-point average and course failures.
Data analytic strategy
Qualitative data was independently double-coded and inter-rater agreement assessed. The researchers used descriptive analyses to assess fidelity. The researchers used multilevel modeling to test the effect of classroom norms and individual beliefs on students' school-focused identity-based motivation. The researchers used structural equation modeling to see if implementation fidelity predicted student academic risk, social-emotional competency, and responsible decision-making across the three development cycles.
Key outcomes
Additional information about key outcomes and study findings will be reported when peer reviewed publications are available.
People and institutions involved
IES program contact(s)
Products and publications
Journal article, monograph, or newsletter
Horowitz, E., Oyserman, D., Dehghani, M. & Sorensen, N. (2020). Do you need a roadmap or can someone give you directions: When school-focused possible identities change so do academic trajectories. Journal of Adolescence 79, 26-38.
Horowitz, E., Sorensen, N., Yoder, N., & Oyserman, D. (2018). Teachers can do it: Scalable identity-based motivation intervention in the classroom. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 54, 12-28.
Oyserman, D., & Lewis Jr, N.A. (2017). Seeing the destination AND the path: Using identity-based motivation to understand and reduce racial disparities in academic achievement. Social Issues and Policy Review, 11(1), 159-194.
Related projects
Supplemental information
Co-Principal Investigator: Sorensen, Nicholas
- The training model helps teachers train one another to implement Pathways-to-Success, a social-cognitive intervention that fosters school-focused identity-based motivation in 8th grade students. The researchers received an IES grant to test the efficacy of this train-the-trainer model in 2018.
- It is feasible for teachers to implement Pathways with fidelity in their classrooms.
- The project team developed a machine-coding algorithm for coding open-ended responses about possible identities, a key aspect of identity-based motivation.
Questions about this project?
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