Who Benefits from Engagement-related Interventions? The Influence of Early Patterns of Engagement Behaviors

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  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 01. Social Interaction and Socialization.

Abstract

In general, education policies tend to focus on promoting cognitive growth of students, mitigating existing achievement gaps, and raising graduation rates, as reflected in the goals and provisions of national education legislation in the last two decades (e.g., No Child Left Behind Act, Every Student Succeeds Act). However, there has been a growing movement advocating for schools as institutions that are capable of, and should centrally engaged in, socializing all students by promoting school-relevant skills and engagement. In this paper, I reanalyze results from a social belonging intervention that intends to improve entering middle school students’ engagement in school through treatment effects on socioemotional, behavioral, and academic outcomes. To better understand which students stand to benefit from the intervention the most, I differentiate treatment effects among students based on their elementary school engagement behavior trajectories. I find that the intervention has the greatest effects on students who began school with high engagement behaviors that subsequently declined over time.

Author

• Jaymes R. Pyne, University of Wisconsin-Madison