As the transition point between middle and high school, ninth grade can either set a student up for long-term success or diminish a student's likelihood of graduating high school altogether. The Ninth Grade Success Initiative is a dropout prevention program, piloted in five Washington State high schools in 2019-2020. We evaluated the effects on…

U.S. Department of Education research indicates that early warning indicator systems are being used in at least half of high schools in the United States. Previous findings from an efficacy study of one early warning indicator and response system, the Early Warning Indicator (EWI) team model, indicated that ninth grade students in schools using…

A history of trauma can have a significant negative impact on the functioning of a student in the school environment. Check & Connect, a school engagement and dropout intervention program, has been found to have positive effects on student school engagement and decrease the likelihood of dropping out of school. However, a review of the Check…

The transition into high school is a critical time to act for students with a history of academic difficulty. In this study, researchers examined the impact of a learning strategies intervention program called High School Success on performance of students demonstrating deficits in literacy and academic skills. Data were collected on performance…

High schools around the nation are attempting to find a solution to the "9th-grade bulge," and the ever-growing systematic problem of 9th grade retention. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of the daily bell schedule on ninth-grade student achievement and overall school performance. A mixed method, sequential…

Using administrative data from an urban school district, two series of predictive models were tested for their ability to project a student's high school graduation status. The models included student grades, attendance, behavior, demographic predictors, and school-level variables. Eighth and ninth-grade variables were tested for two graduation…

The purpose of this program evaluation was to evaluate the impact of CORE District's Breakthrough Success Community (BTSC) Program at an urban Title I high school located in Southern California. BTSC aims to improve the ninth-grade experience through a focus on five key change drivers and the implementation of improvement science. Through teacher…

The Legislature established the Graduation: A Team Effort (GATE) Advisory (originally known as Building Bridges Workgroup) in 2007 to keep all students visible and on track to graduate from high school. The state's ongoing engagement and reengagement efforts are based on the three major recommendations of the original Building Bridges Workgroup:…

The focus of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the Student Success Skills group counseling (SSSGC) intervention with grade 9 students identified as at risk to dropout. This study analyzed two years of non-identifiable student data (N = 167) collected by school counselors at one high school in south Florida. An analysis of covariance…

The "leaky pipeline" with regard to students' engagement in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) has triggered extensive research to understand and prevent students dropping out from STEM. To boost enrolment and interest in STEM fields, integrated STEM (iSTEM) education could be harnessed by providing students with…

The Promise Fellow Program is an intervention designed to prevent dropout amongst students in grades 6-12 in Minnesota that show early warning signs of school disengagement. The program is led by interventionists known as Promise Fellows and provides three research-based supports that align with the National Dropout Prevention Center's "Basic…

This report summarizes grade-level promotion and graduation outcomes for 2,163 Austin Independent School District (AISD) students who participated in the DELTA Program in 2019-2020. Seventy-four percent of DELTA students in 9th through 11th grades were promoted to the next grade level and of the DELTA students in 12th grade, 83% graduated from…

The College and Career Readiness Expansion project was a five-year, federally funded effort to implement early college strategies in comprehensive high schools. This report presents the results from a quasi-experimental impact study of the project and a mixed methods examination of its implementation. Results showed that the program increased the…