Johns Hopkins University researchers undertook an effort to evaluate the quality of existing research on technical assistance teams that work on comprehensive school reform and estimate their relative impact on student achievement. Their results were published in the prestigious education journal Review of Educational Research in the fall of 2003.
Lead author, Dr. Geoffrey Borman, began by isolating those teams that had research evidence that could be evaluated. Of the over 150 teams that had provided technical assistance in comprehensive school reform, 29 of them had served a number of different schools and had some evaluation activities. The remaining 29 teams were first evaluated in terms of the quality of research available and then assessed on their effects on student achievement. The strongest evidence was found for those teams that had been existence over twenty years—Success for All, Comer's School Development Program, and Direct Instruction—with 10 to 49 studies having been completed on their work. Borman classified them as those teams with the "strongest evidence of effectiveness."
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Just after those teams in reliability were three teams—MRSH, Expeditionary Learning, and Roots and Wings—that each had 6 research studies on student achievement. All of them demonstrate statistically significant effects on student achievement. Borman's team classified these teams as having "highly promising evidence of effectiveness." MRSH results are quite robust. In fact, considering all schools that have relied upon the services of the 29 teams, nearly all the schools using MRSH support are in the top 20 percent in achievement gains.
The chart shown here illustrates the size of the effect that MRSH has had on school achievement, compared to the three teams with the strongest evidence of effectiveness. As the chart shows, Borman's estimates show that MRSH has a bigger effect, although statistically significant differences are found only in the comparison of MRSH versus Comer's School Development Program. With more studies, we should be able to discern whether the greater gains for MRSH are also statistically different from the other top design teams.
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