Poster #10 - Enhancing Literacy Development, Peer Engagement, and Goal Structures Through Semi-Self-Contained Sixth-Grade Learning Communities: Project SUCCESS

• In Event: 43.081 - MTCC Poster Session Nine
  In Poster Session: 43.081-1 - Contemporary Issues in Educational Evaluation 2

Abstract

This paper reports findings from an experimental study of the impacts of replacing most departmentalization of curriculum and instruction in sixth-grade with a reform featuring heterogeneously-grouped semi-self-contained learning communities in which students stay with the same teacher and same classmates for interdisciplinary instruction in 4 subjects. Rising 6th-graders entering two mid-size, low-income middle schools were randomly assigned to Project SUCCESS (Student Unified Curriculum Combining English, digital literacy, Science, and Social Studies), or to business-as-usual departmentalization. The study found statistically and educationally significant impacts of Project SUCCESS in raising students’ literacy development and social engagement with peers, and in reducing the reading achievement gap between FARMS and Non-FARMS students and perceptions that the school environment had an invidious performance goal structure.

Authors

• Robert W. Dodd, Montgomery County Public Schools

• Douglas J. Mac Iver, Johns Hopkins University