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What We Know, Gaps in the Field, and Promising New Directions
Ensuring equitable access to high-quality pre-K requires being able to measure quality, particularly at a large scale. This brief describes existing widely used measures of pre-K quality and their limitations, examines some of the newer measurement work being developed, and discusses future directions for the field.
A large proportion of students in public colleges are assigned to developmental education, which is intended to prepare them for college-level courses. However, research suggests that colleges’ typical developmental education policies may hinder students’ academic progress. Here are three recommendations for reforming developmental education based on a decade of research.
Evidence from Child First
This brief presents results from a proof-of-concept exercise that examined the potential benefits of using predictive analytics to improve service delivery by Child First, a program that provides therapeutic support to families with young children. The information may be useful for other organizations interested in implementing these cutting-edge tools.
Research suggests that pretrial policy reforms supporting arrested individuals’ release pending trial—unless evidence shows they will not return to court or they pose a threat to public safety—have positive results. This post discusses several policies that were established to prevent the overuse of pretrial detention.
In this commentary originally published in The Hechinger Report, Meghan McCormick and JoAnn Hsueh explain how the surprising findings from a study of the Tennessee state-run, voluntary pre-k program highlight the need to collect better data so we can understand what really works.
Career pathways programs, which offer education and training in targeted industry sectors, have emerged as a strategy colleges can use to help people earn credentials and obtain jobs with family-sustaining wages. This brief offers recommendations drawn from rigorous research for how states and colleges can implement effective career pathways programs.
Three Steps for Assessing Benchmarks in All-Hands Meetings
How does your organization keep track of its progress toward meeting key performance benchmarks? In this edition of InPractice, we share a few tips on how to use staff meetings to make sure your team is staying on-target.
A Model for Postsecondary Career and Technical Education
This brief highlights lessons from the City Colleges of Chicago Centers of Excellence model, which has redesigned each of the system’s seven campuses as a “college-to-career center” and consolidated academic programs in high-demand industries at particular campuses.
Holistic advising (which offers students personalized, seamless, and timely support) is critical for increasing college persistence. However, adopting holistic advising means committing to collaborative, data-informed, and student-centered decision-making—which requires resources. This brief offers recommendations for how states and colleges can make these targeted investments to serve students more effectively.
Attempting to Correct for Follow-Up Selection Bias
A companion post discussed a kind of selection bias that can typically lead meta-analyses to overestimate longer-term effects for a range of interventions under consideration. This post describes a way to use information on short-term outcomes to estimate how much the effects on long-term outcomes are overstated.
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