2025
Oyserman, D., Burbidge, A. & Sorensen, N. (in press). Repeating the benefits of investment: National datasets to support educational success. Social and Personality Compass. DOI:10.1111/spc3.70108
We describe core tensions about the federal government’s role in the funding, focus, and locus of education in the United States: Is public education a federal responsibility? If so, does that imply funding public schools or allocating public funds to education, irrespective of setting? We trace changes in legislation connected to these core tensions and what they imply for American education. America’s founders viewed an educated public as vital for democracy. Congress consistently supported this value of quality education for all and funded the data collection needed to measure progress, find out what needs fixing, and whether proposed fixes work. We trace this process from establishing the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in 1867, to changes in legislation when NCES data highlighted shortfalls. As we describe, Congress responded repeatedly, starting in the 1900s, highlighting goals and providing funding. Because successful innovation requires humility, persistence, and future focus, Congress established the Institute for Education Science and, within it, the What Works Clearinghouse to provide a systematic record of efforts to improve. We describe Pathways-to-Success, a middle school teacher-led program benefiting thousands of children across multiple states, developed, tested, and disseminated with Department of Education funding. Current federal legislation reduces the federal role in monitoring and testing education innovation, reduces funding to states, and incentivizes the growth of alternatives to public schools, including parochial, private, not-for-profit or for-profit charter schools, and homeschooling. These alternative settings are not included in the scope of the NCES data collection. Programs like Pathways-to-Success might work across these settings. However, less funding, reduced research, and monitoring will make it harder to find out.
Oyserman, D., Lai, M., Burbidge, A., & Sorensen, N. (2025). Supporting Identity-Based Motivation: Next-Year Continuation Effects of High-Fidelity Pathways-to-Success. The Journal of Experimental Education, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220973.2025.2565170
We document the next-year carryover effects on grades and risk of course failure (N = 875) of Pathways-to-Success, a whole-class, teacher-trained, and teacher-led universal intervention. Structural equation modeling reveals that higher fidelity is associated with higher identity-based motivation. Through identity-based motivation, higher fidelity is associated with better 8th-grade academic outcomes, and through 8th-grade outcomes, 9th-grade outcomes. Providing support for the theorized process model, effects are robust across tools for coding and modeling the identity-based motivation construct. Pathways-to-Success supports school-focused identity-based motivation and hence, academic attainment, via activities that bolster students’ existing identity-based motivation in three ways. Activities help students see that they and their peers all (1) have skills and abilities to succeed in school this year and into the future, (2) imagine some future as an adult with school as the path to get there, and (3) interpret difficulties and setbacks as indicators of importance, not only of low odds or impossibility. Our results contribute to studies documenting the effects of Pathways-to-Success on 8th-grade outcomes by extending effects to 9th-grade and suggesting the robustness of the key mediating construct, increasing confidence in the effects and process model.
Oyserman, D., Burbidge, A., Huang, Y., & Sorensen, N. (pending revisions). Supporting fidelity of implementation: Evidence from Pathways-to-Success replications. School Psychology osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/23trp_v1
Research shows that when teachers implement with fidelity, students receiving Pathways-to-Success experience more identity-based motivation and hence better academic trajectories. We asked if with implementation support, first-time implementing teachers can attain fidelity across time, training, teachers, and variations in school contexts across four states, ten years, and 8,367 students. We review the literature on implementation fidelity, distinguish fidelity from implementation support and institutional climate, describe the supports we provided, and consider the implications of our results. First, on average, first-time implementing teachers implemented with above-threshold fidelity. Second, implementation supports matter. Teachers engaged with training, preparation, and delivery aids despite variability in teacher-trainers, teacher-training method (in-person, virtual), school climate, urbanicity, classroom size, and student features (English Language Learners, Free-or-Reduced-Price Lunch, Standardized Test Proficiency, Racial-Ethnic Composition). Third, on-going evaluation of fidelity makes dynamic investment in implementation support possible. To make on-going fidelity testing sustainable, at scale, artificial-intelligence-based coding is necessary.