Developing, Testing, and Scaling Up Psychological Interventions Through Networked Improvement Communities

• In Event: 25.015 - Improving the Evaluation and Scalability of Social Psychological Interventions in Schools

Abstract

An emerging approach to enhance student learning involves social-psychological interventions that target students’ perceptions of themselves and their school context. Psychological interventions, such as growth mindset (Blackwell et al., 2007), utility value (Hulleman & Harackiewicz, 2009), or belonging uncertainty (Walton & Cohen, 2011), have resulted in moderate to large effects on student outcomes (Lazowski & Hulleman, 2016). Given evidence that psychological interventions can have powerful effects, the next step is learning how to translate emerging psychological interventions into teaching practices. Unfortunately, the process of translating promising research into practice can be notoriously slow. Teachers often lack expertise to adapt emerging principles from the research literature, and researchers often lack appreciation of additional factors that could limit the generalizability of their findings.

Therefore, our approach was to bring researchers and practitioners together where we utilized a continuous improvement process to develop, test, and refine new practices (Bryk et al., 2015). We started by uniting researchers from two universities with educators from one public school district (whose students are racially diverse, limited in in English proficiency, and economically disadvantaged), and then we joined a networked improvement community sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation to share and exchange ideas with other school districts across the country engaged in similar improvement work.

In our talk, we will showcase how to develop, test, and scale up a psychological intervention as part of a networked improvement community. For example, one of our initial improvement projects focused on increasing students’ growth mindset (Dweck, 2006) to address the motivational barrier our teachers felt that they most encountered with their middle school students. Working with our partner teachers, we adapted previous materials used to promote a growth mindset for an older student population (Paunesku et al., 2015) in two major ways for our particular middle school population: (1) to ensure younger students and students with limited English proficiency could understand them, and (2) to shorten a 90 minute presentation shown to students on a computer to a 15 minute presentation shown to students as an app on a hand-held tablet. We then tested and refined the app using improvement methodology of Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles, where small scale tests are initially conducted before scaling. For example, we started PDSA testing in classrooms with older students before moving to classrooms with younger students, and we adopted practical measures that could be easily collected to evaluate the app’s effectiveness on changing students’ growth mindset and students’ overall engagement and user-experience with the app. After reliably finding the app increasing students’ growth mindsets, we next partnered with our local school to scale up and embed the app in their school curriculum and established how the intervention was associated with key academic outcomes and a practical measure of motivation adopted by each school in Carnegie’s networked improvement community to evaluate the success of any given improvement project. As a result, we are poised in the upcoming year to scale the intervention more broadly in our local school district and across our national networked improvement community.

Authors

• Kenn E. Barron, James Madison University

• Chris S. Hulleman, University of Virginia

• Thomas Hartka, James Madison University

• R. Bryce Inouye, Commonwealth Computer Research Inc.