Despite a high primary school enrollment in India, the overall learning levels have been low, and the dropout level in secondary school and beyond has been high. One reason for low learning levels and high drop-out rates is the student's lack of motivation to learn in the classroom. We suggest that curiosity may be a useful tool to improve student…

Inefficient targeting of students at risk of dropping out might explain why dropout-reducing efforts often have no or mixed effects. In this study, we present a new method which uses a series of machine learning algorithms to efficiently identify students at risk and makes the sensitivity/precision trade-off inherent in targeting students for…

Retaining people no longer credited toward college completion--a group known in academic parlance as "stop outs"--is a core concern among administrators seeking to remove barriers to education. Preventing stop outs from becoming stay outs means re-enrolling students beset by debt, or targeting vulnerable demos close to graduation.…

Background: Research shows that educators can identify half of future high school dropouts as early as Grade 6--and three quarters or more of future dropouts by Grade 9--by monitoring readily available data on attendance, behavior, and course performance. These data have come to be known as the ABCs of dropout prevention, and the measures are some…

Understanding educators' networks can inform the field of school psychology by offering insight into how the structure of social relationships supports the implementation of school-based programs. However, the difficulties of collecting and modeling network data remain barriers to using network methods in school psychology. To overcome these…

Non-continuation in higher education is rising up the political agenda. In the vernacular, it is often described negatively as 'dropping out'. But despite any terminological confusion, all such measures describe a gap between learners' original stated intentions and their situation when they leave their course. This policy note looks at the scale…

This Perspective builds on a related RAND Corporation report that describes the implementation of Findhelp at four North Carolina community colleges in 2021 and 2022. Findhelp is an online tool to connect students to resources in their communities to help meet their basic nonacademic needs. The North Carolina Community College System, with support…

The purpose of Diploma On! is to re-engage students who have dropped out of school within member districts and ultimately increase the graduation rate in Hennepin County, Minnesota. Program staff obtain student contact information from identified referral sources within each district, normally after a 15-day drop. Next, they contact the student…

In 2019, MDRC launched the Scaling Up College Completion Efforts for Student Success (SUCCESS) project to improve college completion rates for traditionally underserved students, such as students from low-income backgrounds and students of color, at community and broad-access colleges (those that have open or minimally selective admissions…

The Barr Foundation's Engage New England (ENE) initiative was an effort to catalyze high school innovation by developing exemplary schools that support the success of students who are off track to graduate. Grounded in the tenets of positive youth development, the ENE initiative provided grants and technical assistance to support new or redesigned…

Students in high school or secondary school face challenges that too often lead them to drop out of school. Administrators and staff in many of these schools have attempted to address this challenge by adopting a framework of Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) that offers graduated tiers of intervention suited to students' needs.…

This article characterizes and reflects on the possible uses of early warning systems (hereafter, EWS) in the region as effective tools to support educational pathways, whenever they identify risks of dropout, difficulties for the achievement of substantive learning, and the possibility of organizing specific actions. This article was developed in…

School dropout is a structural problem which permanently penalizes students and society in areas such as low qualification jobs, higher poverty levels and lower life expectancy, lower pensions, and higher economic burden for governments. Given these high consequences and the surge of the problem due to COVID-19 pandemic, in this paper we propose a…

Over the past decade, the Washington State Legislature has made significant progress in juvenile justice reforms. However, these investments have not been balanced by equal changes in education. This report provides 10 recommendations for the Legislature to reform institutional education in Washington focused on the following: (1) An…

Although Oregon has made recent gains in its overall high school graduation rate, 21 percent of public school students entering grade 9 in 2014 did not graduate within four years, by 2018. To improve graduation rates, Oregon voters approved Ballot Measure 98 in 2016 to fund dropout prevention and college and career readiness initiatives in high…