Literature Review Assignment Peter Sorrentino, Sept 23, 2008
Introduction: Successful Strategies for Dropout Prevention 1
Literature Review 2
Why Students Dropout 2
The Patterns of Dropouts 3
Divide and Conquer 4
Parents’ Involvement 4
Dropouts’ Regret 4
What Helps Students Stay in School 5
How to Help Students Stay in School 6
Student Focus 6
Program Scope 6
Specific Activities 7
Similarities and Differences of Research 8
Comparisons to our textbook readings 9
My Observations on the Applicability of the Ideas 9
Single Most Important Idea in the Article 10
Works Cited 11
Introduction: Successful Strategies for Dropout Prevention
Public schools in the United States haven’t kept up with the academic achievement of schools in most other developed countries. Many people have heard of and know something about the federal government’s effort to improve public schools by enacting the “No Child Left Behind” legislation. The educational issue less discussed, and in some ways exacerbated by NCLB, is the student dropout rate, or what is sometimes reported as the high school graduation rate. Is there a source for this statement?
Fortunately, progress has been made in the effort to reduce the dropout rate, see the chart above (The Child Trends Databank, 2007). Unfortunately, some schools have not made very much progress. Additionally, the necessity of a high school diploma continually increases as the information age unfolds. A great chart, Peter.
Literature Review
Presented in this paper are the findings of a literature search on “why students dropout” and “what schools are doing to try to reduce their dropout rate.” Very large topics.
Why Students Dropout
It’s well established that many factors are involved in a student’s decision to drop out of school and that no single factor can be used to predict the likelihood of dropping out (Bridgeland, DiIulio, & Morison, March 2006; Bost & Riccimini, Sep/Oct 2006; Christle, Jolivette, & Nelson, Nov/Dec 2007; Crain-Dorough, 2003; Hammond, Smink, & Drew, May 2007). Good job presenting a common view of multiple sources. Nonetheless several factors are present much more frequently than most others. Students more than two years older than their peers when beginning a new school year were more likely to dropout than any other studied group (Christle, Jolivette, & Nelson, Nov/Dec 2007; Hammond, Smink, & Drew, May 2007). Overage students dropout at a rate of 58.3% (Hammond, Smink, & Drew, May 2007).
Sixty-nine percent of dropouts indicated that they were not motivated and would have worked harder if more was demanded of them. Forty-seven percent indicated that classes were not interesting. Sometimes personal factors were indicated as to why students dropped out: to get a job, 32%, they became pregnant, 26% and 22% said they had to care for a family member. Some students dropped out due to the significant academic challenge: 35% said they were failing, 45% said they fell behind in elementary and middle schools were unprepared to start high school and could not catch up, 32% had repeated a grade and 29% didn’t think they could complete graduation requirements. Seventy percent indicated that they were confident they could have graduated had they tried (Bridgeland, DiIulio, & Morison, March 2006).
The Patterns of Dropouts
In order to identify students likely to dropout, researchers have sought and found patterns in their lives in and out of school. Almost all dropouts experience a gradual process of “disengagement” from school (Bost & Riccimini, Sep/Oct 2006; Bridgeland, DiIulio, & Morison, March 2006; Christle, Jolivette, & Nelson, Nov/Dec 2007; Hammond, Smink, & Drew, May 2007). A little over 66% of all dropouts had high absenteeism for a year prior to dropping out (Bost & Riccimini, Sep/Oct 2006; Bridgeland, DiIulio, & Morison, March 2006; Crain-Dorough, 2003; Hammond, Smink, & Drew, May 2007). Many other patterns exist, but none apply to more than roughly one third of dropouts. Source of this data?
Divide and Conquer
With the understanding that the numbers of factors behind a student dropping out are very large and that only a few patterns have been found to be common to most dropouts, research has been done to categorize students. (The previous sentence is a run on sentence. Because you are a good writer, I will pass on something my advisor told me when I was doing my dissertation… good writers tend to write complicated sentences because they have some very complex thoughts to put into writing. Write simple sentences so the ideas are clear and distinct to others. This has certainly helped me with being more clear and focused in my writing) The goal of the research was to determine if different patterns and factors might be found to be common in different categories of potential dropouts. If so, then categories of potential dropouts could be addressed more specifically. This approach should allow districts to have several dropout prevention programs designed to address specific sets of potential dropouts. Together, the programs would reduce the total number of dropouts more than applying one general program to all potential dropouts (Crain-Dorough, 2003).
Crain also analyzed schools with the highest ratio of dropouts to potential dropouts to see if they could be categorized by how effective the schools were at keeping potential dropouts from dropping out. She found that schools could indeed be categorized in this way. Once categorized, schools could identify what attributes they possess common to their category that contributed to their high dropout rate and create initiatives to change attributes. (Crain-Dorough, 2003)
Parents’ Involvement
It’s not surprising that parents of dropouts are less involved in their child’s education than parents of students who complete school. Sixty-eight percent of parents of dropouts were not aware or were “just somewhat aware” of their child’s grades. Most did not know their child was about to dropout. The vast majority of potential dropouts parents were involved due to discipline issues (Bridgeland, DiIulio, & Morison, March 2006; Hammond, Smink, & Drew, May 2007).
Dropouts’ Regret
Eighty one percent of people, who dropped out of school, three to five years later thought graduating high school was important to succeeding in life. Three quarters said that if they had a chance they would go back to high school, and would reenroll in a high school with people of their age, if they could. Fifty percent say finding a good job without a HS diploma was difficult. They wished they had listened to warnings they heard about the difficulty of life without a high school degree. They also expressed that they wished the people telling them of the difficulties of not having graduating high school were more persistent. (Bridgeland, DiIulio, & Morison, March 2006)
What Helps Students Stay in School
Most dropouts blame themselves for dropping out, but say additional “supports” could have helped them complete school. The supports they mentioned came from three primary sources: school, home and the community. They themselves could be considered the fourth source.
One of the largest factors in students leaving school was the students’ perception of the lack of relevance of their courses. The lack of relevance is sometimes described as boring and not connected to work or a career. Lack of relevance was the leading factor behind students becoming disengaged in school. A student centered philosophy would go a long way toward improving relevance of schools (Bost & Riccimini, Sep/Oct 2006; Bridgeland, DiIulio, & Morison, March 2006; Crain-Dorough, 2003).
Eighty percent of dropouts indicated that they would have been much less likely to drop out if they had better teachers and more individual time with teachers. Seventy percent indicated that they would have done better if more supervision and increased classroom discipline existed within their school. Two thirds said that a stronger relationship with an adult in school and more help with problems outside of school would have kept them enrolled. Parents being regularly notified of absences, grades and drop out status would have probably kept about half enrolled (Bridgeland, DiIulio, & Morison, March 2006). Dropouts often indicate that had they been more academically successful in school they would have been much more likely to complete their education (Bost & Riccimini, Sep/Oct 2006; Christle, Jolivette, & Nelson, Nov/Dec 2007)
How to Help Students Stay in School
The follow-up question to why students dropout is usually what can be done to prevent students from dropping out. Even more programs and theories exist on how to keep students from dropping out than the number of factors involved in them dropping out. In the remainder of this literature review, we will present ideas schools can use to lower the dropout rate.
Student Focus
One stark difference between many organizations and public schools is their focus. In many public schools, the priorities of the institution have more to do with following law and regulation, thoroughly implementing standardized curricula, etc. In several cases, dramatic positive changes have been experienced by districts that have made their schools ‘student centered.’ Essentially, decisions are all made with top consideration of what is directly best for the students’ success (Christle, Jolivette, & Nelson, Nov/Dec 2007).
Program Scope
The scope of a dropout prevention program is critical to its success. Studies have shown that the more broadly scoped a program, the higher the likelihood of its success. This breadth is multidimensional. Initiatives should address the greatest number of factors causing students to dropout (Hammond, Smink, & Drew, May 2007). Multiple strategies should be employed and a wide variety of resources; community, district, school and individual, should be leveraged to employ the strategies (Crain-Dorough, 2003; Christle, Jolivette, & Nelson, Nov/Dec 2007; Hammond, Smink, & Drew, May 2007). Students at risk of dropping out should have different curriculum and special programs to support them in their attempt to complete school (Bridgeland, DiIulio, & Morison, March 2006).
The most pervasive method in the literature for preventing students from dropping out is putting in place and maintaining high academic standards. (Bost & Riccimini, Sep/Oct 2006; Bridgeland, DiIulio, & Morison, March 2006; Christle, Jolivette, & Nelson, Nov/Dec 2007; Crain-Dorough, 2003). In addition, Christle explicitly showed that high academic standards must coincide with high social standards (Christle, Jolivette, & Nelson, Nov/Dec 2007).
Several ideas can be employed to help ensure the success of a dropout prevention program. If an existing program is to be adopted by a school or entire district, the success of the program is maximized if it is adopted fully and as designed. When designing or selecting a program, evidence based programs are much more likely to succeed than less data driven programs. Evidence based programs lend themselves well to the essential task of evaluating and tuning the program over time. Once a program has been tuned, care should be taken to reevaluate the factors involved in students’ decisions to dropout. These factors will evolve over time and a program must adapt to the emerging factors (Hammond, Smink, & Drew, May 2007). Peter, you have include some excellent information in this paper. I can see why this was time consuming. You have done a wonderful job synthesizing the ideas from your sources!
Several specific tactics can be used to reduce the dropout rate within a school. Teachers should scaffold instruction to facilitate independent, self-regulated learning. All three critical forms of knowledge should be taught: declarative, procedural and conditional. Teachers should insure instruction is explicit. There is no reason for students not to understand specific goals, lesson structure and presentation of a class, module, unit or lesson (Bost & Riccimini, Sep/Oct 2006). Any definition for the critical forms of knowledge?
Specific Activities
In order to satisfy students’ desire for seeing the relevance of schoolwork, teachers should design lessons with presentation of specific work related applications. Classroom education should be aligned with students’ work needs and interests (Bridgeland, DiIulio, & Morison, March 2006; Christle, Jolivette, & Nelson, Nov/Dec 2007).
Maximizing learning opportunities is vital to at-risk students’ perception of successful achievement. Lessons should be designed to maximize the time spent on content. Absenteeism must be closely monitored, reported, and action taken, if excessive. Schools should design schedules to improve attendance. Supplemental time to learn content should be provided by tutoring, mentoring, summer school and double periods for extra help. Special situations, like pregnancy and disabilities, should be accommodated (Bost & Riccimini, Sep/Oct 2006; Bridgeland, DiIulio, & Morison, March 2006).
Solution-Focused Public Alternative Schools are an effective option to retaining potential student dropouts and recapturing recent dropouts. The most interesting aspect of Solution-Focused schools was that students could be more successful with high absenteeism than they could be in other programs. This provides a good alternative to students who regularly attend, but have higher than normal absenteeism (Franklin, Streeter, Kim, & Tripodi, July 2007).
Similarities and Differences of Research
My most striking observation of the dropout literature is how well understood the factors involved in students dropping out are, and the large number of ways of effectively dealing with this problem. Certainly eliminating all dropouts is very, very difficult, but dramatically reducing the number of dropouts was quite possible. I expect this knowledge is, in part, why the dropout rate has been slowly dropping since 1979. Nonetheless, although the national average is dropping, many schools continue to suffer from very high dropout rates. Some schools are not doing very much to reduce dropout rates. The papers generally discussed how best to reduce dropout rates, not whether the rates could be reduced or how difficult it was, etc. Why students dropout is understood in great depth.
The two biggest areas of differences between the papers are: how best to predict if a student is on a track or path to dropping out (predicting which students are very likely to dropout), and exactly what the best programs are to prevent students from dropping out. Some of the programs sounded like good solid teaching; good teachers, lessons with practical applications, mixing teaching styles and methods, etc, while others were very different than what is happening today in schools. I never knew about Solution-Focused methods for teaching high school students, but one paper showed that a Solution-Focus was a great alternative to many potential dropouts and even pulled dropouts back into schools. You should have those sources cited here when speaking of the contrasts.