ECR Projects

Explore past and current fundamental STEM education research projects across the three research areas that NSF's EDU Core Research (ECR) program funds, as well as across ECR funding types. Other search filters draw from both NSF's data and the ECR Hub's hand coding of award abstracts.

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Uprooting children: The risks and rewards of mobility for vulnerable students in California's public schools

Effective Years: 2019-2024

This EHR Core Research project will investigate K-12 learning in mathematics within the broader context of the impact of student mobility on an interrelated set of student outcomes. The researchers will focus specifically on how student mobility influences and interacts with the following student outcomes - mathematics achievement, behavior, social-emotional learning and other forms of development, such as language acquisition and disability status ? for vulnerable populations in California. Student mobility is defined as students changing schools either midyear or from one year to the next (i.e., during the summer) in grades that do not correspond to the terminal grade of the school. Vulnerable populations are defined as economically disadvantaged students, English learners (ELs), students with disabilities (SWDs), homeless (HL), and foster youth (FY). Student mobility, unlike residential mobility, occurs in the public realm, so that its potentially negative effects are more malleable and amenable to policy solutions. Mobility is disproportionately high for poor and vulnerable students. Such students often face profound challenges associated with family instability, and schools often struggle to recognize and accommodate mobile students' social, developmental, and intellectual needs. Knowing how vulnerable students rebound after a move, how long it takes, and how responses to moves differ by the grade level in which moves occur is key to shaping supports for these students. Findings from this project have the potential to aid districts and schools in understanding and grappling with the incidence and consequences of non-promotional student mobility.

The study will focus on all K-12 students in six large California school districts that are part of the Project CORE initiative - a group of districts that collaborate on data collection and analysis for continuous improvement. These include Los Angeles, Oakland, Fresno, Long Beach, Garden Grove, and Santa Ana. These districts have embraced systematic measurement of social-emotional learning and school culture and climate for school accountability. These CORE districts serve more than 900,000 - the longitudinal sample includes several million student-level observations over the 2010/11-2016/17 period. Using a careful framework designed to account for the incidence and consequences of student mobility and using statistical regression techniques, the researchers will comprehensively assess (1) the incidence of mid-year and summer mobility among vulnerable students in California and (2) the impact of mobility on these students' mathematical, behavioral, and social-emotional outcomes, as well as how these outcomes interact with one another. The researchers will track student outcomes before and after moves, distinguishing among moves of different types - structural, non-structural, voluntary, involuntary - comparing school changers to stayers. Since mobility could have positive effects in some situations and negative effects in others, the research will account for the timing and reasons why students change schools and identify variation in the incidence and consequences of mobility across vulnerable and other demographic groups. Moreover, the study will use information on school characteristics, culture and climate that students leave and enter and the degree to which mobile students "match" or fit in with their environments to determine the effect of school features on the outcomes of vulnerable students who are mobile. Too often STEM outcomes are investigated in isolation - in this study, the focus is on understanding how mathematics achievement interacts with emotional development and behavior for vulnerable students grappling with the challenge of changing schools. The holistic approach taken in this study will ensure the intertwined academic and social-emotional responses of students to changing schools is fully investigated.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.