The purpose of this study is to evaluate the implementation and impacts of the Building Assets, Reducing Risks (BARR) model in its first year of implementation in 66 schools across the U.S. and to document scale-up progress during the Investing in Innovation (i3) grant period (2017-2021). The impact evaluation included 21,529 9th grade students…

Background: Cluster-randomized experiments that assign intact groups such as schools or school districts to treatment conditions are increasingly common in educational research. Such experiments are inherently multilevel designs whose sensitivity (statistical power and precision of estimates) depends on the variance decomposition across levels.…

Project GEAR UP (Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs) is a federally funded program focused on encouraging disadvantaged youth to have high expectations, stay in school, and take academically rigorous courses to prepare them for college. A GEAR UP grant in rural north-central West Virginia funds academic and support…

A West Virginia Project revised instruments and processes and developed procedural guidelines for evaluating prevocational exploration programs. Evaluation processes were initiated during the 1978-79 school year, when Berkeley, Fayette, and Ritchie counties entered their third year of this program for ninth and tenth grade students. Instruments…

Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), standardized test scores are the indicator used to hold schools and school districts accountable for student achievement. Each state is responsible for constructing an accountability system, attaching consequences--or stakes--for student performance. The theory of action implied by this…