Early Literacy and Math

With funding from the US Department of Education and Arnold Ventures, the Youth Policy Lab is partnering with MDRC to conduct an evaluation of the Reading Partners program. The three-arm randomized control trial will compare both the Reading Partners traditional in-person tutoring program and their online tutoring program called Reading Partners Connects to a business-as-usual control group. The evaluation will look at both the immediate (one-year) and longer-term (two-to-three year) impacts of Reading Partners tutoring on student reading skills.

Many states (including Michigan) have instituted laws requiring support or retention for students who do not meet grade-level expectations in reading at the end of third grade. The Youth Policy Lab received funding from the American Education Research Association to look at the effects of North Carolina’s Read to Achieve law, which has been in place for the last decade. The analysis will look at medium term academic outcomes, and will focus on effects for English Language Learners, a growing population in North Carolina and elsewhere in the U.S.

When early high-quality math instruction is aligned across grades, it can have a positive effect on children’s math skills, attitudes toward math, and working memory. However, evidence-based pre-K learning trajectories and instructional practices are not typically integrated into the curriculum for the early elementary grades. This lack of integration can have negative results: Children may encounter the same content more than once from pre-K to kindergarten through third grade. Conversely, the math instruction they receive may not cover the areas or progression of learning that research says ...

High-quality early learning programs boost children’s kindergarten readiness and effects can last into adulthood. However, defining and measuring quality is difficult and expensive. Classroom video observations are a classic method used by education researchers to understand how the instructional environment relates to student learning. Although videos provide rich context on what occurs in the classroom, they require a significant amount of human labor and time to accurately code, which can lead to delays in acquiring information. Moreover, early education researchers have found that construc...

With support from the National Science Foundation, the Youth Policy Lab is partnering with colleagues at the University of Connecticut and Michigan State University to conduct a meta-analysis of Early Science Interventions over the past twenty years. This research will provide information about the features of science interventions that are most effective at improving teacher and student learning for young students.

High 5s is a small-group math enrichment program, developed at the University of Michigan with the help of MDRC and leading early childhood math experts Doug Clements and Julie Sarama. Participation in the program closed almost a fifth of the achievement gap between low-income children and their peers. Working closely with teachers and schools in Taylor, MI, and New York City, NY, we hope to adapt, expand and then evaluate a more integrated and scalable version of the High 5s program.