Staying on Track: Comprehensive Case Management to Prevent High School Dropout

Last registered on December 21, 2022

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Staying on Track: Comprehensive Case Management to Prevent High School Dropout
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0007124
Initial registration date
February 03, 2021

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
February 04, 2021, 7:24 AM EST

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Last updated
December 21, 2022, 2:21 PM EST

Last updated is the most recent time when changes to the trial's registration were published.

Locations

Primary Investigator

Affiliation
University of Notre Dame

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Affiliation
University of Notre Dame, Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities
PI Affiliation
Stanford University, Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities

Additional Trial Information

Status
On going
Start date
2017-09-18
End date
2023-12-31
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
Low-income students are at greater risk of becoming disengaged with their schooling, including lower attendance, disciplinary actions, and drop-out. This evaluation will assess the effectiveness of a program designed to provide the necessary support for students to overcome such adversity, increasing the likelihood of high school graduation and post-secondary success, in schooling and/or the labor market. This effort is conducted in partnership with two urban school districts in the eastern United States. The program provides students with wraparound services including a professional, trained mentor in addition to academic support (e.g., tutoring, state exam prep). Students also receive job readiness training, employment support, and opportunities to build life skills. The participating school districts serve more eligible students who exhibit risk factors for dropping out than can be served. This randomized controlled trial (RCT) study will involve 2,500 eligible students over two years with approximately 1,500 students offered treatment. Control students will not have access to this program, but will have access to standard services provided by the school, district, and community. Youth are recruited to enroll in ninth grade and, if interested, participate in the program throughout high school. Enrollment occurred in the 2017-18 and 2018-19 school years. Given the current ages of these student cohorts, current outcomes of interest include an index of indicators contributing to a student being “on-track” for high school graduation.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Dee, Thomas, Chloe Gibbs and James Sullivan. 2022. "Staying on Track: Comprehensive Case Management to Prevent High School Dropout." AEA RCT Registry. December 21. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.7124-2.2
Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
This evaluation will assess the effectiveness of a program designed to provide support for students in high school, increasing the likelihood of high school graduation and post-secondary success, in schooling and/or the labor market. This effort is conducted in partnership with two urban school districts in the eastern United States. The program provides students with wraparound services including a professional, trained mentor in addition to academic support (e.g., tutoring, state exam prep). Students also receive job readiness training, employment support, and opportunities to build life skills.
Intervention Start Date
2017-09-25
Intervention End Date
2022-08-31

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
Primary outcome: “on-track to graduation” index (e.g., Kemple, 2013; Allensworth & Easton, 2005) that includes dropout, on-time grade promotion, and benchmarks for other common predictors of graduation such as attendance, course credit accumulation, GPA, state exam completion, and disciplinary actions. The index will be a composite measure incorporating a student’s status on each benchmark. The inclusion of some potential components in the index will depend, in part, on whether we are able to obtain data of sufficient quality on the benchmark.
Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
In addition to our primary outcome (the "on-track to graduation" index), we will examine the effect of the program on each of the separate components of the index. As part of our exploratory analyses we will also consider the impact of the program on various subgroups defined by gender, race/ethnicity, age, and predicted outcomes (above and below median, terciles).
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
We will evaluate the impact of a comprehensive case management program for at-risk high school students (hereafter, “the program”) using an RCT research design. The study includes two separate cohorts of students—the 2017-2018 entering cohort and the 2018-2019 entering cohort, resulting in an expected total study sample of 2,500. Students were enrolled from two mid-size, urban school districts (hereafter, “District A and District B”) in the first cohort, but only from District B in the second cohort. At the start of the school year for each of these cohorts, the school districts sent a de-identified list of eligible incoming ninth grade students to the research team (n=1,005 in District A and n=739 in District B for the 2017-2018 cohort). The research team then generated random numbers for each of these eligible students to specify the order in which they were recruited to enroll in the program (i.e., the treatment). Total capacity for participation in the program for incoming ninth-grade students was approximately 250 in District A and 200 in District B with available program slots varying across schools.

To accommodate differences in capacity, the randomization was stratified by school, generating 14 randomly sorted lists of students for the 14 schools participating in the study in the first cohort. The research team sent the randomly ordered lists to the program’s senior administrators, who then linked this de-identified list of students to personal identifying information. They then provided program staff at each school the names of students that they should recruit for program participation. The names were provided to program staff in the order randomly generated by the research team. With this process, the treatment group will be defined as those from the list who were offered the opportunity to enroll in the program (i.e., those at the top of the list) and the control group will be students who were never offered the opportunity to enroll (i.e., those at the bottom of the list). We will use two definitions of “treatment offer” to address endogeneity of program take-up in a randomized waitlist setting (Behaghel et al., 2017). The first approach, “ever offer,” as described above will assign the treatment offer to any student whose name was released to the program staff for recruitment. Those names not released constitute the control group. We will also use a predetermined “initial offer” in which we assign 60% of each school’s randomly ordered list, in numeric order, to the treatment group and the remaining 40% to the control group. This “initial offer” designation is free of the bias induced by any individual student’s probability of offer being conditional on the take-up rate among the preceding students on the list.
Experimental Design Details
Randomization Method
Randomization done in office by a computer
Randomization Unit
Individual students
Was the treatment clustered?
No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
N/A
Sample size: planned number of observations
Approximately 2500 students
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
Approximately 1500 students treatment, 1000 students control
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
Supporting Documents and Materials

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IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
University of Notre Dame
IRB Approval Date
2017-09-12
IRB Approval Number
17-07-3971
Analysis Plan

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Post-Trial

Post Trial Information

Study Withdrawal

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Intervention

Is the intervention completed?
No
Data Collection Complete
Data Publication

Data Publication

Is public data available?
No

Program Files

Program Files
Reports, Papers & Other Materials

Relevant Paper(s)

Reports & Other Materials