Featured Reports
Grantees regularly submit findings and publish journals articles, working papers, reports, and other publications related to the work we've funded, and the most recent and noteworthy of those follow. In addition, this page also features recent publications or reports by staff members, related to our Current Research Interests.
An Eight-Step Paradigm for Studying the Reliability of Group-Level Measures
This report is based on work supported by the William T. Grant Foundation under the grant “Building Capacity for Evaluating Group-Level Interventions”. The authors provide a concise, step-by-step account of how to conduct a study of the reliability of measures of group quality. This paper is a companion to a more rigorous account provided by Raudenbush, Martinez, Bloom, Zhu, and Lin (2008).
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Anti-Poverty Policy, Racial/Ethnic and Cultural Variation, and Survival Strategies of Young Mothers: Quantitative and Ethnographic Approaches
This featured finding by Hirokazu Yoshikawa, a William T. Grant Scholar, includes information contained in the book Making it Work: Low-Wage Employment, Family Life, and Child Development, on which Yoshikawa served as chief editor. The book's findings suggest that policies that facilitate wage growth, reduce job instability, and increase flexibility in daytime work hours improve children's school performance and classroom social behaviors. These findings argue for increases in “make work pay” policies such as earned income tax credits at the federal and state levels, other wage supplement policies for the working poor, and increases in flextime schedules in low-wage workplaces.
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Reversing the Summer Slide: Experimental Evidence
In this featured finding, Duncan Chaplin describes his study, which found that children in a summer literacy intervention gained about a month's worth of reading skills more than their counterparts in the control group during the summer. This is a modest, yet notable increase in reading skills for a six-week program. The study also found evidence of positive impacts on the degree to which parents encouraged their children to read. These findings were cited in the “STEP UP Act of 2007,” introduced by Senator Barack Obama and signed into law by President Bush. The Act “authorize(s) resources to provide students with opportunities for summer learning through summer learning grants.”
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