Catalyzing Change in Secondary Education in Africa and India

Mathematica Policy Research started working with the PSIPSE in late 2014 as its learning partner. In this brief, the organisations share their independent analysis of the PSIPSE approach to effecting change in secondary education—starting with the partnership's theory of change, countries of focus, and interventions supported. They end by presenting the monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) framework developed for the PSIPSE and distilling some implications of an analysis for the future

Evaluating Basic Science Investments: Toward a More Robust Practice

Our understanding of the world—even our well-being—is shaped by advances in basic science knowledge. Philanthropic organizations play a crucial role in supporting the research that leads to such advances. For example, they support scientists, build organizations' research capacity and help train new generations of scientists. Philanthropies making such investments in basic or discovery science share a common goal—to catalyze advances in knowledge that improve our lives by enhancing our understanding of ourselves, our world and our universe. They also share a common challenge: establishing that their investments in basic science indeed contribute to advancing knowledge. This brief summarizes learning from early efforts by a working group of philanthropies and other organizations that are tackling this challenge together

Building Youth Life Skills: 6 Lessons for Government Officials

There is growing recognition that youth need more than academic knowledge and technical expertise to transition successfully into employment and adulthood (Dupuy et al. 2018). They also need "life skills," a set of cognitive, personal, and interpersonal strengths that position them for success in their lives and livelihoods. Life skills can enhance young people's agency and resilience, improve their psychosocial well-being, and predict a range of long-term outcomes, including health, job performance, and wages (Kwauk et al. 2018; OECD 2018; Kautz et al. 2014). The Partnership to Strengthen Innovation and Practice in Secondary Education (PSIPSE), a donor collaborative, has invested in 18 projects that focus on developing life skills among youth (see left). Mathematica, the PSIPSE's learning partner, recently conducted an in-depth study of these projects. The study used interviews with implementing organizations, an extensive review of project documents and evaluation reports, and high-level literature and landscape scans to examine project experiences, set them in context, and draw out lessons for a range of stakeholders. This brief summarizes the lessons for government officials—on how to successfully devise, roll out, scale, and strengthen life skills policies for youth in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs)

Building Youth Life Skills: Lessons Learned on How to Design, Implement, Assess, and Scale Successful Programming

There is growing recognition that youth need more than formal or vocational education to thrive in school, work, and life. They also need life skills - a set of cognitive, personal, and interpersonal strengths that position them for success in their lives and livelihoods. To leverage the growing momentum and give youth access to these vital tools for success, the Partnership to Strengthen Innovation and Practice in Secondary Education (PSIPSE) supports grantee partners testing diverse approaches to strengthening life skills. The PSIPSE commissioned an in-depth study of 18 projects in 7 countries, uncovering actionable lessons on how to design, implement, assess, and scale youth life skills programming in low- and middle-income countries. The study is intended for practitioners and government officials interested in building, improving, and expanding work around life skills, as well as donors looking to advance this field and provide useful guidance to their grantees

Characterizing and Modeling the Experience of Transfer Students in Engineering—Progress on NSF Award 0969474

Characterizing and Modeling the Experience of Transfer Students in Engineering— Progress on NSF Award 0969474Quantitative analysis of MIDFIELD databaseOur analysis used records for 94,732 undergraduate students from the Multiple-InstitutionDatabase for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD). MIDFIELDcomprises a census of undergraduate students who attended 11 public institutions between 1988and 2008. MIDFIELD institutions represent public universities that educate large numbers ofengineering students.From the 977,950 records available, we restricted our sample to those who (1) were domesticstudents (927,350), (2) were in the data set early enough for us to observe the possibility ofgraduation within six years (677,691), and (3) declared a major in engineering or otherwiseexpressed the intent to study engineering in the fifth semester of their programs (94,732). Fortransfer students, we estimated placement using transfer hours, assuming that 15 credit hoursequals one semester; we also used the fifth semester as the reference point to capture mosttransfer students at the point of matriculation to ensure a valid comparison of transfers to non-transfers. This approach resulted in a sample of 21,542 transfer and 73,190 non-transferengineering students included in this analysis.Semi-structured interviewsCampus representatives at two MIDFIELD institutions sent an invitation to all engineeringstudents who had transferred into the institution in the two semesters preceding the semester ofthe interview. Interested students completed a survey to provide demographic and schedulinginformation. Participants were chosen from six engineering majors - civil, chemical, computer,electrical, industrial, and mechanical - and were diverse with respect to gender and ethnicity.Selected students were interviewed in Fall 2011 and in Spring 2012.We used a semi-structured interview protocol to learn more about student experiences with thetransfer process. We used a constant comparative coding method, whereby emerging conceptswere constantly compared to data that had already been coded.Overview of Progress Identifying and Describing the Entry Points into Engineering Transfer Pathways: A preliminary study relied on 52 of the 86 students who were interviewed across five campuses to understand their reasons for choosing engineering as a field of studies and the transfer pathway to enter the field. Studying the Motivations and Experiences of Older Transfer Students in Engineering: Of the 86 students who were interviewed on the five campuses, the 15 students who were 25 years of age or older at the time of the interview were selected for this study. Studying the Performance of Black transfer students: based on a logistic regression model refined to include transfer pathway (2-year vs. 4-year), we learned that: Studying the Mean Grade Differential by Course Discipline: For engineering transfer and first-time-in-college (FTIC) students, we computed average grades in STEM courses by discipline, and by institution

Improving Teacher Quality: Lessons Learned from Grantees of the Partnership to Strengthen Innovation and Practice in Secondary Education

Drawn from the experiences of eight partners of the Partnership to Strengthen Innovation and Practice in Secondary Education (PSIPSE) testing approaches to in-service teacher training in East Africa and India, the study surfaces a variety of practical lessons on how to design, implement, and scale efforts to train, motivate, and support teachers in order to improve educational outcomes. High-quality teaching is central to creating an educational environment that supports learning for all. In designing, implementing, evaluating and scaling teacher training programs as a pathway to shaping education systems, design a cost-effective model that adopts a streamlined, appropriately sequenced approach to influencing how and/or what teachers teach. Shift towards a long-term focus to improving the effectiveness of the teaching force by being intentional about whom you train, leveraging both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, and engaging both government and pre-service teacher training institutions as key partners. These and other practical, cross-organizational learnings and concrete examples highlighted in the study offer concrete guidance that can be leveraged to strengthen the design, implementation, evaluation and scaling of interventions to improve the quality of teaching.

Building Youth Life Skills: 8 Tips for Practitioners

There is growing recognition that youth need more than academic knowledge to transition successfully into employment and adulthood (Dupuy et al. 2018). They also need "life skills," a set of cognitive, personal, and interpersonal strengths that position them for success in their lives and livelihoods. Life skills can enhance young people's agency and resilience, improve their psychosocial well-being, and predict a range of long-term outcomes, including health, job performance, and wages (Kwauk et al. 2018; OECD 2018, Kautz et al. 2014). The Partnership to Strengthen Innovation and Practice in Secondary Education (PSIPSE), a donor collaborative, has invested in 18 projects to strengthen life skills in young people. This brief offers eight lessons based on the experiences of these projects—on the design, delivery, measurement, and scale-up of youth life skills programming in lowand middle-income countries (LMICs)

Black engineering transfer students what explains their success? /

The transfer pathway, particularly from two- to four-year colleges, is often seen as a vehicle to expand the science and engineering workforce by increasing college participation of underrepresented groups, such as black or African American students. In an earlier study, after controlling for credits earned, we found that black transfer students are more likely to persist in engineering than non-transfer black students - a finding that does not hold for students of other ethnicities. In this paper, we study this somewhat puzzling difference in outcomes for black transfer students. Using an updated version of the longitudinal data set used in the earlier study that enables us to distinguish transfers from two- versus four-year institutions, we find that (1) black students in engineering are more likely to transfer from other four-year institutions than from two-year institutions, and (2) transfers from two- versus four-year institutions differ on several key characteristics, including gender, full- versus part-time enrollment status, and education outcomes including six-year graduation in engineering. Observing that our earlier results were driven by transfer students from four-year institutions, we focus this analysis on transfers from two-year colleges to identify factors associated with their performance and persistence in engineering. We find that gender and academic achievement (engineering GPA) - not transfer status - are driving graduation outcomes for two-year black transfer students. Black women are 28 percent less likely to drop out, IS percent less likely to fail an engineering course, and 25 percent more likely to graduate in engineering in six years than black men. In terms of performance, for every tenth of a grade point increase in engineering GPA, the odds of a black student graduating with an engineering degree in six years improves by 13.7 percent. These results should inform debates regarding the effectiveness of the two-year transfer pathway in engineering for black and other minority students

Understanding engineering transfer students demographic characteristics and educational outcomes /

Abstract—Transfer students make up a significant share ofengineering college graduates, yet their persistence is seldomstudied, largely because of the lack of longitudinal data. Thisanalysis used longitudinal data from 11 universities enrollinglarge numbers of engineering students to investigate thedemographic characteristics and educational outcomes oftransfer students in engineering relative to non-transfers. Wefind that students who transfer to four-year engineeringprograms are more likely to come from under-representedminority groups (URMs) and less likely to be women, althoughboth groups are over-represented at two-year colleges. Thefindings confirm existing research indicating that, on average,non-transfers outperform transfer students, and non-URMsoutperform URMs. But we also find that URM transfers, andespecially Black transfers, are no less successful than nontransferstudents—indicating that the transfer pathway is aneffective bridge to a four-year degree. This is partly true forwomen transfers who do as well as men but are outperformed bywomen non-transfers. Finally, we find significant variation inoutcomes between full- and part-time students, which may bedriving the observed differences by transfer status. Our resultsshould inform debates regarding the efficacy of the transferpathway in engineering, particularly for women and URMs