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Supporting Underidentified and Underserved Advanced Middle School Students Through Online Platforms

Fri, April 28, 8:15 to 9:45am, Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, Floor: Meeting Room Level, Room 221 D

Abstract

The explosion of online, digital instructional platforms offers both promise and caution to the field of gifted education. In this session, we present emerging findings of two large projects (Project A and Project B) that both employ online platforms to design and deliver English language arts (ELA) curricula to support approximately 1,200 advanced learners from historically underserved populations, specifically students in low-income settings. Both online platforms are designed and managed at institutions of higher education, but implemented in approximately seven diverse urban, suburban, and rural school districts in the Midwest.

The objective of this session is to report on emerging findings on both implementation and impact, illustrate similarities across the two platforms in how online learning can expand opportunities for historically underrepresented and disadvantaged students, and discuss arising challenges and limitations.

Each project is built on a different framework. Project A employs culturally responsive models, which should be central to any systemic approach to improve achievement for all students, especially those from underrepresented groups (Banks, 2014; Gay, 2010; Klingner et al., 2005; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Winn & Johnson, 2011). Culture is central to the education process, where culture is a “dynamic system of social values, cognitive codes, behavioral standards, worldviews, and beliefs used to give order and meaning to our own lives as well as the lives of others” (Gay, 2010, p. 8). Children see and make sense of the world, new concepts, and skills through the frame of culture. For learning to occur, therefore, the educational process must reflect and respect students’ cultures. Project B is based on three time-tested learning and talent development models: Integrated curriculum model (VanTassel-Baska, 1996, 1998, 2003), Gifted LearningLinks (GLL) online learning (Olszewski-Kubilius & Lee, 2004), and Talent Search (Stanley, 1976, 1988).

The two projects employ a mixed-method design for research and evaluation. In this session, we will report findings based on both quantitative and qualitative data that have been (or will be) collected in the third (Project A) and second year (Project B) of the projects in 2016-17. Quantitative data include student level data on approximately 700 student participants in grades 6-8 specific to demographics, program participation, program dosage, school attendance, academic achievement on standardized tests, and academic achievement on a standardized writing assessment. Qualitative data include field observations of instructional sessions, interviews with instructors, program staff, students, and families.

Key emerging findings from these two ongoing projects include: (1) comparative academic achievement results from the first year of the randomized control trial in one of the urban districts, (2) project effects that are assessed with both quasi-experimental estimates using the propensity score matching and MANCOVA analysis techniques on the quantitative data, (3) descriptive patterns in program participation, and (3) the processes and lessons on project implementation.

These findings offer great significance and insight to the field in providing rigorous research towards better understanding the conditions and models that facilitate opportunities for advanced learners from low-income settings.

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