Seven New Research Grants to Build Theory and Evidence in our Focus Areas

We are proud to announce seven new research grants, totaling over $2.8 million, in support of five studies on ways to reduce inequality in youth outcomes and two studies on strategies for improving the use of research evidence in ways that benefit young people. These grants will help build theory and empirical evidence in our two focus areas.

Among the grants focused on reducing inequality are studies examining how mindfulness and meditation interventions can improve the mental health of students in Puerto Rico; whether culturally responsive programming in schools lead to better academic outcomes for Black students; how school-based health centers can reduce inequalities in health and education outcomes for children from low-income families; whether state minimum wage increases reduce inequalities in labor market outcomes between young adults from low-income families and those from higher-income families; and how a participatory process that centers youth perspectives can develop a more accurate measure of transgender and nonbinary youth well-being.

In the use of research evidence focus area, one study will investigate whether a professional convening intervention can catalyze conditions to improve conceptual use of research evidence and research epistemology among turnaround school leaders. The second will study whether engaging in a cross-state research-practice partnership can facilitate state-level educational technology leaders’ use of research evidence to inform more consistent education technology practices.

“These studies have proposed exciting areas of research that are especially critical at this moment, from centering joy in measures of well-being for transgender and nonbinary youth to testing mindfulness interventions for Puerto Rican youth. We are confident they will greatly contribute to our knowledge of strategies to reduce inequality among young people,” said Senior Program Officer Jenny Irons, who oversees grants in the reducing inequality focus area.

“Research evidence can play a significant role in helping inform policy decisions that shape the experiences of youth. Both of these studies will provide valuable insights on strategies that may improve evidence use among decision-makers in education,” said Kim DuMont, Senior Vice President of Program.

Focus Area: Reducing Inequality

A series of traumatic events—from Hurricane Maria in 2017 to the COVID-19 pandemic—have led to a heightened need for mental health resources and care for Puerto Rican children. Yet access to mental health care is insufficient to meet this growing need, especially in rural areas. The Building Resilience Project, a comprehensive, island-wide initiative undertaken in partnership with the Puerto Rico Department of Education, will examine the efficacy of Start with the Heart, a preventive yoga and mindfulness intervention for all students, and Cue-Centered Therapy, a treatment for students with moderate to severe post-traumatic disorder (PTSD) symptoms. The team will implement the yoga and mindfulness intervention in 40 schools serving 6-12th grades using a waitlist, cluster randomized approach. For the therapy intervention with school counselors, students who score high on a scale measuring post-traumatic stress syndrome symptoms will be randomized within schools to a treatment or control-waitlist condition. The team will use hierarchical linear modeling to explore the efficacy of the interventions on improving mental health outcomes for students, teachers, and counselors. In addition to publishing findings in academic outlets, the team will share findings and provide resources to the Puerto Rico Department of Education. The study will inform the implementation of trauma-informed care in schools and seeks to transform access to mental health care for young people in Puerto Rico.

In 2017, in response to disproportionate non-completion and discipline rates among Black students, the Fresno Unified School District implemented the African American Academic Acceleration (A4) initiative. Grounded in a culturally responsive approach that leverages students’ cultural and linguistic knowledge as assets, the initiative offers programming that focuses on literacy, positive youth development, and academic achievement. Using a quasi-experimental design, the study will evaluate the implementation and impact of two focal programs of A4: a summer and afterschool literacy initiative and an academic advising program. The team plans to use a regression discontinuity approach to examine the student-level impacts of the literacy initiative and a difference-in-differences design to examine the school-level impacts of the advising program. They will also conduct semi-structured interviews and focus groups with program staff, teachers, students, and caregivers to contextualize quantitative findings. Findings will provide causal evidence on culturally responsive programming that could be adapted for urban and rural schools across the country.

Inequalities in health and academic outcomes persist for children from low-income families. School-based health centers (SBHCs), in-school clinics operated by outside providers that provide healthcare directly to students, may improve these outcomes by lowering barriers to care such as transportation, time, and financial cost. In partnership with the New York City Office of School Health, this study will provide causal evidence on whether SBHCs reduce inequalities, and which aspects of SBHCs matter most. The team will use school administrative data on the entire population of NYC public-school children (ages 5-17) from 2006–2028, including about 1 million students per year, of whom 75% are living below 185% of the federal poverty level, and about 200,000 are enrolled in one of 400 SBHC schools. To estimate student-level effects on health and education outcomes, the team will use quasi-experimental methods that exploit the natural experiments created by the opening of SBHCs in new schools during the study period and by the random and quasi-random assignment of children to schools through the school choice system. They will also use regression models to explore how SBHC features, such as the range of care offered or enrollment percentage, are related to their effectiveness. Findings will provide evidence on whether SBHCs improve youth outcomes and, if so, what features are most important. Findings will also directly inform NYC school health programs.

The minimum wage is regarded as a key policy tool that can be used to improve the earnings of low-wage workers and reduce income inequality. Young workers are particularly impacted by state and local minimum wage laws, given their prevalence in industries that rely on minimum wage labor, their low geographic mobility, and their early career stage. At the same time, minimum wage increases can also heighten inequality by making jobs more appealing to teenage workers from middle class families or by spurring firms to replace costly labor with technology. The team will use a difference-in-differences approach to examine the short- and longer-term impacts of minimum-wage increases on the labor market trajectories of young adults by economic standing, race, and gender. The study will include demographic and household data on youth who turned 18 during 2000-12 from the American Community Survey and 2000 Census (around 600,000 individuals). Data on labor market outcomes in the short-term (ages 18-24) and longer term (25-29) will come from the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics (LEHD). The team will also examine how firms respond to these policies by constructing a measure of firms’ exposure to minimum wage adjustments and using a difference-in-differences approach to explore whether firms turn to technological tools to counter rising labor costs. Findings will provide evidence on the impact of minimum wage increases and may inform ongoing debates about minimum wage policies.

The majority of research about transgender and non-binary youth and young adults focuses on negative outcomes that result from discrimination and stigma, such as high rates of suicide, unemployment, and homelessness. This damage-centered orientation can simultaneously perpetuate one-dimensional narratives that position transgender and non-binary youth as victims. As a result, interventions to support gender diverse youth often focus on decreasing negative outcomes or helping them to cope with harm. One strategy for shifting this approach is to develop an asset-based narrative of gender diverse youth. A pilot study found that gender diverse youth conceptualized their own wellbeing in ways that emphasized joy, visibility, and community. This study will expand this work by engaging a diverse group of transgender and non-binary youth and young adults in the construction of an intersectional, desire-centered measure of well-being. The team will first recruit and train a team of 10-12 transgender and nonbinary youth who will serve with the PIs as the research team. Together, they will develop an operational definition of well-being. In a second phase, the team will conduct focus groups and interviews with a larger sample of youth to refine the components of the measure. Findings will lay the groundwork for the validation of a new survey measure that can create an asset-based narrative of well-being and provide a new orientation to future research, policy, and programmatic interventions.

Focus Area: Improving the Use of Research Evidence

Since the first state takeover of local public schools in 1989, state intervention has expanded to also include school turnaround, a designation for rapid improvement for schools with persistent low performance. Prior research suggests the conceptual use of research evidence may help leaders better understand what challenges lead to longstanding, taken-for-granted, but ineffective practices in turnaround schools. The use of research epistemology, or the ‘how to’ methods behind research evidence, may help leaders better understand the process for developing meaningful solutions in their own contexts. Leveraging organizational research on field configuring events, Bridwell-Mitchell and team will examine whether an intentionally designed professional convening and consultancy intervention can catalyze conditions to improve turnaround leaders’ conceptual use of research evidence and epistemology. The multi-stage, multi-method pilot study will examine the experiences and turnaround practices of convening participants; it will also examine their use of research evidence and epistemology, making comparisons to similar leaders not attending the convening. Findings will provide evidence for the viability of an at-scale intervention to create a model for state education agencies and others to convene turnaround leaders as a lever for turnaround progress.

Despite the persistence of the digital divide and ongoing challenges presented by advances in artificial intelligence, little evidence has been used to guide implementation of educational technologies (edtech). In 2024, the National Educational Technology Plan (NETP), urged state edtech leaders to address disparities in edtech access and opportunity issues, encouraging the use evidence to analyze and communicate recommendations, assess local needs, and develop implementation and evaluation plans. Despite existing evidence that research-practice partnerships (RPPs) can meaningfully connect research, practice, and policy, few studies have considered the potential of a partnership between state-level edtech leaders and researchers as a vehicle to promote research use. Holland and colleagues will design a multi-state RPP with 30 members from the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA). The team proposes to use a mixed-method, convergent parallel study design to conduct hypothesis testing and assess the role of an RPP in improving the use of research evidence and altering state edtech leaders’ social networks. The findings from the study will contribute to the literature on the use of research evidence among state-level decision-makers in designing, implementing, and communicating policy, while illuminating the role RPPs may play in improving brokering activities.