Project Description
The National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) received funding from the Gates Foundation for this project. The American Institutes of Research (AIR) was the main contractor and worked with subcontractors from several universities, including Duke University, who, among them, have experience working with rich administrative data in North Carolina, Texas, Florida and Washington. The Duke University team worked primarily with the North Carolina data but interacted extensively with the other research teams.
CALDER received funding from the U.S. Department of Education in 2006 as a national R&D center on state and local education. CALDER examined state and local K-12 education policies and practices using state-specific longitudinal administrative data files. The purpose of this was to build on the prior work by developing a new line of inquiry focused on the relationships between secondary and postsecondary outcomes of students and their labor market success.
We augmented the administrative data sets in four of the original CALDER states with data on postsecondary activities and labor market outcomes. Researchers used the new expanded data sets to examine a variety of pathways to both postsecondary and labor market success. The focus throughout was on success for youth from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Project Goals
The project addressed two main sets of issues:
- The kinds of postsecondary certifications and degrees the labor market rewards over the long term.
- The educational policies and practices that can lead to more such certifications for disadvantaged youth.
Related to these two main issues were a large number of questions such as whether some types of investment strategies are likely to be more successful for some types of students than for others, the extent to which training in one sector is transferable to another sector, and which returns are likely to survive over time in a dynamic labor market in which demands can shift markedly across jobs and sectors.
Project Findings
Do Master’s Degrees Matter? Advanced Degrees, Career Paths, and the Effectiveness of Teachers
Project Description
This includes an evaluation of the Hill Center Reading Achievement Program (HillRAP) as implemented in the Durham Public Schools from September 2008 to June 2010. The Center for Child and Family Policy conducted this evaluation in collaboration with the Durham Public School System and the NC GlaxoSmithKline Foundation. This study is an extension of a previous evaluation of HillRAP in the Durham Public Schools that took place from 2003 to 2006, carried out by RTI International.
In addition, a two-year evaluation of the Hill Center Reading Achievement Program (HillRAP) was implemented in a middle school setting from September 2008 to June 2010. The Center for Child and Family Policy conducted this evaluation in collaboration with the Davie County Schools and the Mebane Charitable Foundation.
Project Goals
The purpose of this evaluation was to examine the effectiveness of HillRAP in helping public school students in grades 1 through 8 whose reading skills are compromised. A preliminary evaluation of the HillWrite program, designed for students with writing difficulties, is also included. Specifically, we addressed the following questions:
- What are the effects of HillRAP instruction on reading achievement over time?
- How do program outcomes vary for different subgroups of children? Specifically, do the effects of the Hill Center programs vary by race/ethnicity, sex, age, grade level, English language proficiency, free/reduced lunch eligibility, exceptional children status, exceptional children classification, IQ, or history of grade retention?
- How well does the Hill Center teacher training prepare teachers to deliver HillRAP in a public school setting? What is the level of intervention fidelity for these teachers?
- What are the effects of attendance and model fidelity (i.e., faithful implementation of HillRAP) on reading achievement?
- What preliminary information can we deduce about the effectiveness of the HillWrite program?
Project Findings
Evaluation of the HillRAP Intervention in Durham County Schools 2008 - 2010
Evaluation of the HillRAP Intervention in Davie County Middle Schools 2008-2010
Project Description
Amy Schulting has partnered with Macomb County Intermediate School District (MISD) in Michigan to implement and evaluate teacher home visiting as a kindergarten transition practice. MISD kindergarten teachers will be trained by Dr. Schulting to conduct a 30-minute home visit for each of their students at the beginning of the 2015-2016 school year. Teachers also will participate in a fall session to share best practices and a mid-year feedback session with Dr. Schulting. Teacher, parent and administrator feedback, and student outcome data will be collected and analyzed by the Duke research team to determine levels of participant satisfaction and student achievement.
Project Goals
The goals of this program are as follows: 1) to pilot the implementation of universal teacher home visiting in MISD kindergarten classrooms; 2) to improve home-school relationships and collaboration to support students’ successful transition to kindergarten; 3) to obtain parent, teacher and administrator feedback about their participation in the program; and 3) to evaluate the impact of teacher home visiting on student outcomes.
Project Findings
Project Description
What features of adolescents’ neighborhoods, families, and peer groups trigger early substance use? How can contextual triggers of early substance use be targeted to promote healthy development during the transition to middle school? Exposure to alcohol and drugs during early adolescence carries significant costs to adolescents’ future lives. As a result,parents, teachers, and those interested in promoting the well-being of young people struggle with the question of how to delay early substance exposure and reduce associated health-risk behaviors.
Project Goals
Research has informed our understanding of who is most likely to use substances at an early age. Unfortunately, very little attention has been paid to the settings in which young adolescents are first offered and exposed to substances. Odgers tested whether neighborhood settings or youth perceptions of family, peer, and neighborhood settings predicted early exposure to substances. Through the use of mobile phone technology and online tools, such as Google Street View, she hoped to produce new methods for assessing youth settings. Her studies also offered the opportunity to leverage genetically informative research designs to help isolate key environmental triggers of early exposure and test whether certain adolescents are more susceptible to both positive and negative life events and daily experiences.
Project Description
Project Goals
The goal of this project is to investigate the Early College High School model and its impact on students.
Project Findings
Preparing Students for College: The Implementation and Impact of the Early College High School Model
Project Description
The Durham Children’s Data Center was established in January 2015. Initial partners include the Durham County Manager’s Office, the Durham Public Schools, the Durham Partnership for Children, and Duke University.
Project Goals
Children and families in Durham deserve the best policies, programs, and practices that are available. The Data Center collaborates with Durham community leaders to identify important public policy questions for which the community seeks answers, identify administrative data files that can be examined to answer these questions, and complete research briefs for community leaders. The Data Center will host periodic public assemblies during which policy questions will be generated, reports of research findings will be presented and discussed, and new research studies will be planned.
Project Findings
Project Description
The Justice and Mental Health Collaboration was an outreach program designed to provide intensive follow-up to police service calls involving persons with mental health issues and to divert them into community-based treatment. The Center for Child and Family Policy contracted with the Durham Police Department to provide technical assistance, data analysis and development of a report highlighting key program outcomes.
Project Goals
The program had four key goals including; (1) increasing the percentage of calls to the police that result in individuals becoming engaged in mental health services; (2) reducing the rate of repeat arrest for persons with mental illness charged with minor or non-violent offenses; (3) decreasing the number of repeat calls for services; and (4) increasing the number of patrol officers trained in de-escalation and identification of mental illness.
Project Findings
Mental Health Outreach Program (MHOP) Evaluation Report 2012
Project Description
Accountability programs are intended to induce teachers and schools to adopt more effective and efficient means of achieving set educational goals using a system of extrinsic punishments and rewards. In North Carolina, two different accountability systems were jointly adopted in 2002. NCLB focused on punishment for underperforming schools by introducing parental choice, after-school tutoring, or more drastic interventions upon continued failures to meet the set standard. The NC accountability system focused on rewarding teachers for achievement test score improvements through recognition or monetary incentives. We studied which system, if either, produced more significant gains in student learning.
Using a detailed longitudinal administrative data set collected by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (from 1994/95 academic year onward), which collects academic and behavioral information on all students attending public schools and data on their teachers, schools, and districts, along with the many educational policy changes which occurred during the data collection years, the impact on the academic and social development of students in schools was systematically evaluated.
The data was collected into the future, with the quality of data improving yearly. The many anticipated structural changes to come in NCLB as well as the state accountability system will expand our ability to examine the impact of different sanctions on students. By analyzing the relative effectiveness of sanctions to improve achievement, and alter the distribution of achievement gains, we hope to inform future efforts to craft accountability programs.
Project Goals
This study aimed to examine the impact of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act and state-level accountability sanctions on the academic and behavioral outcomes of students, especially the segment of the population that is traditionally socially, economically, and academically disadvantaged, using regression discontinuity (RD) methods and instrument variable (IV) analysis.
Project Findings
The Impact on School Performance of No Child Left Behind Program Sanctions
Project Description
This project examined how cognitive control skills such as attention, working memory, and response inhibition relate to social-information processing skills and serious adolescent conduct problems (e.g., substance use and offenses). It also assessed the impact of computerized cognitive enhancement training on cognitive control and social information processing skills.
Project Goals
The primary goal of this project was to generate evidence on whether intensive cognitive enhancement training improves cognitive control and social information processing skills, identifying whether it might be useful as a preparatory adjunct to treatment.
Project Findings
C-StARR - Effects of Cognitive Control Training Among Adolescent Offenders
Project Description
This project represents the first efforts to ascertain the extent and potential repercussions of wealth and net worth poverty among minority youth.
Project Goals
1. Analyze racial and ethnic disparities in wealth among households with children, and identify potential mechanisms that explain such disparities.
2. Estimate levels and trends in net worth poverty for non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Black, and Hispanic households with children.
3. Examine if parental net worth helps to explain racial and ethnic disparities in young adult’s educational and fertility outcomes, as measured by high school completion, college attendance and graduation, and non-marital childbearing.
4. Test whether net worth poverty is a better predictor of these outcomes than income poverty.
Project Findings
The Wealth of 'America's Dependents'
Net Worth Poverty in Child Households by Race and Ethnicity, 1989–2019
Project Description
Project Goals
The main goal of this data center is to provide researchers with access to data in user-friendly formats that are conducive to sophisticated modeling.
Project Findings
Project Description
An important part of the U.S. safety net, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) provides cash-like benefits to low-income people that can only be used to purchase food. My proposed project will investigate relationships between the timing of SNAP benefit receipt and children’s achievement test scores in North Carolina (NC), using a unique dataset I have created that links administrative data on student test scores from the NC Department of Public Instruction and data on SNAP receipt from the Department of Health and Human Services. Using this dataset, I will examine whether recency of SNAP benefit receipt affects children’s test scores, by comparing children who take tests at the beginning of their families’ monthly benefit cycle to children who take tests at the end of their families’ benefit cycle. Importantly, in NC, timing of benefit receipt within the month varies randomly by household based only on the last digit of the recipient’s social security number.
Project Goals
This project relates strongly to the Center’s core research theme of “Children and the intergenerational transmission of poverty.” My unique contribution will be findings with implications for inequality between low-income and higher-income children. Standardized test scores provide information on children’s cognitive functioning. If children have poorer test performance at the end of families’ SNAP benefit months, this implies that for a portion of each month, children in SNAP-receiving families operate with reduced cognitive functioning. Even if, for example, cognition is only affected for three days per month, over the course of a school year, these experiences will accumulate as a 10% decline in the share of schooling for which SNAP-receiving children are fully attentive relative to their higher-income peers. This design will identify the extent to which such accumulation over the school year may account for the test score gap between low-income and higher-income children.
Project Findings
Panel Paper: The Timing of SNAP Benefit Receipt and Children's Academic Achievement
Food Instability and Academic Achievement: A Quasi-Experiment Using SNAP Benefit Timing
Project Description
Candice Odgers is a newly elected member of the Child Brain & Development Program sponsored by the Canadian Institutes for Advanced Research (CIFAR). This award supports new and innovative research related to the goals of the Program led by Odgers and her research team.
Project Goals
- Researchers with the program in Child & Brain Development want to know how adversity and enrichment in early childhood affect mental, physical and emotional health throughout a lifetime, and how the problems caused by early adversity can be abated or reversed. This program has led the way in moving beyond the debate about “nature vs. nurture,” and instead has helped establish that it is interactions among genes and environments during early childhood that guide human development.
- The program examines the neurobiological mechanisms that are governed by those gene-environment interactions and how they determine individual differences in children’s development and health.
- Researchers are also concerned with the larger societal differences in outcomes when children grow up in poverty and when they are reared in more supportive, sustaining environments.
Project Findings
Project Description
This Senior Scientist Award supported a portion of the principal investigator’s salary. Dr. Dodge’s research contributed to the societal prevention of serious problem outcomes, including substance abuse, behaviors that place one at risk for HIV/AIDS, and child abuse, in two related populations: multi-problem adolescents and young high-risk mothers.
Project Aims
The specific aims of his research were:
- to understand how chronic problem behaviors develop in these two populations;
- to translate findings from basic science into tests of ongoing prevention programs for these two populations; and
- to learn how to translate efficacious prevention models into communitywide change.
Project Findings
A Dynamic Cascade Model of the Development of Substance-Use Onset
Project Description
Project Goals
This study offers insight into how U.S. public policies for curbing criminal offenses affects the children of those who are subject to the criminal sanctions.
Project Findings
How Incarceration Affects the Health of Communities and Families
Project Description
Project Goals
Examine long-term academic and behavioral outcomes for children with ADHD and whether this is moderated by gender, race, and the receipt of treatment.
Project Findings
Project Description
We combined the quasi-experimental data we have constructed on mass job losses by month in every county in North Carolina and by quarter in every state in the US (Ananat, Gassman-Pines, and Gibson-Davis 2013) with local area statistics on mobility by cohort (Chetty, Hendren, Kline, Saez, and Turner 2014) to identify how changing local job opportunities have affected the relationship between family income and college attendance and between family income and own income at age 26 over the past 20 years. Recent work has shown that parental job loss the year a child is 17 significantly decreases the probability that the child attends college (Coelli 2009; Oreopoulos, Page, and Stevens 2008), but it is unclear whether these effects are large enough to significantly affect aggregate mobility. We measured the effect of area job losses when a cohort is 17 on college-going at the population rather than individual level, and, further, explore the consequences of downturns for later earnings inequality. In addition, we examined how state-level policies around unemployment insurance, K-12 school funding, and college tuition affect the relationship between job destruction and the income-college gradient.
Project Goals
The goal of this project is to identify how changing local job opportunities have affected the relationship between family income and college attendance and between family income and own income at age 26 over the past 20 years.
Project Findings
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Project Findings
Project Description
Center researchers Nicole Lawrence, Joel Rosch, Liz Snyder, and Anne-Marie Iselin helped Alliance Behavioral Healthcare secure a six-year $5.4 million federal grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). This grant builds upon the existing infrastructure of Durham’s child and adult System of Care by targeting transition-age youth (16-21) with mental health and other life challenges.
The program evaluation, conducted by Lawrence and Snyder, includes both quality improvement and outcomes measurement at the system, program and individual levels. The national evaluation, managed by Macro, Inc., consists of three core studies: the longitudinal outcome study, the cross-sectional descriptive study, and the services and costs study.
Project Goals
This project enables Alliance Behavioral Healthcare to expand upon the community’s capacity to serve transition-age youth with serious emotional disturbances through the development of: a coordinated identification and referral process, programs and services that meet the unique needs of transition-age youth, training for clinicians on evidenced based practices to better serve this population, and comprehensive care management/coordination.
Project Findings
Project Description
Project Goals
The goal of this project was to evaluate the effectiveness of two promising interventions – computerized attention training and CAI – for 77 first-graders identified by their teachers as having attention difficulties.
Project Findings
Project Description
Over the past decade, the United States has seen a marked increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activities. We propose to analyze a potentially harmful, but unintended, consequence of such activities: its effects on the health and well-being of immigrant pregnant mothers and their children. We investigate the impacts of 287(g) programs and Secure Communities, two ICE policies enacted over the past decade that had led to a spike in detentions and deportations of undocumented immigrants. Data come from North Carolina, a state that has seen rapid influx in the number of Hispanic migrants, but was at the national forefront of tougher immigration enforcement policies. We hypothesize that immigrant mothers living in communities where these policies were enacted, relative to immigrant mothers living in unaffected communities, will negatively alter their pregnancy behaviors and will be more likely to have infants with adverse birth outcomes.
Project Goals
These policies may have changed how mothers accessed medical care and likely also increased stress (physiological stress can harm the fetus, or can lead to the adoption of adverse maternal coping mechanisms). We will provide important, policy relevant information as to the linkages between ICE activities and newborn health. Understanding such linkages is critical because adverse birth outcomes carry substantial societal and individual-level costs, and conditions during pregnancy can determine long-term well-being.
Project Findings
Project Description
This project provided a preliminary evaluation of the National STEM Career Platform, a web-based system for helping high school students identify STEM careers that match their interests and to become aware of the educational and career opportunities that are available to them.
Researchers in the Center for Child and Family Policy created and analyzed two surveys to assess students’ interest in and awareness of STEM career opportunities and how that may change after being exposed to this platform.
Project Goals
The goal of this project was to evaluate the National STEM Career Platform and assess students’ interest in and awareness of STEM career opportunities.
Project Description
The goal of the P30 Duke Transdisciplinary Prevention Research Center (TPRC) was to facilitate the translation of basic-science knowledge about regulatory processes and peer influences into innovative research efforts to prevent substance use and related problems in adolescents. As stipulated by the National Institutes of Health, a P30 Center does not directly conduct empirical investigations but, rather, exists to enhance funded projects and members. The TPRC successfully initiated a broad intellectual community that included 19 faculty members from eight administrative departments and seven disciplines, ranging from pharmacology and genetics to economics and sociology, who led 25 externally funded collaborative research grants.
Project Aims
The specific aims of the TPRC were:
- Foster innovative translation of theories across disciplines and projects for the purposes of enhancing currently funded projects and generating new studies.
- Provide advanced methodological and data-analytic services to funded projects.
- Contribute to nascent science of dissemination and implementation by discovering ways to influence practitioners, agency directors, school leaders, and policy makers to implement evidence-based prevention efforts at scale with fidelity.
- Contribute to the training of the next generation of prevention scientists by enhancing ongoing funded training programs by employing predoctoral and postdoctoral scholars-in-training to serve as junior investigators.
Project Description
The North Carolina General Assembly in July 2001 mandated that the state Division of Social Services develop and pilot a county-level differential response system that used a family assessment track for selected reports of child maltreatment in addition to the traditional investigative process. North Carolina developed seven strategies as part of the larger Multiple Response System (MRS) reform, including the family assessment track, collaboration between Work-First and CPS, strengths-based structured intake process, the re-design of in-home services, implementation of Child and Family Team (CFT) meetings, facilitation of shared parenting in placement cases, and improved coordination with law enforcement.
In 2002, the North Carolina Division of Social Services (NCDSS) requested that the Center for Child and Family Policy conduct an evaluation of the new system to determine its effectiveness within the 10 pilot counties as well as 10 additional counties that began MRS implementation in mid-2003.
Project Goals
This comprehensive evaluation focused on multiple dimensions of MRS reform:
- Case distribution, choice of two approaches to report child maltreatment,
- Safety, including rates of assessment and repeat assessments,
- Timeliness of response and case decision,
- Frontloading of services,
- Redesign of in-home services,
- Implementation of CFT meetings,
- Collaboration between Child Welfare and Work First,
- Shared parenting activities, and
- Feedback from families.
Project Findings
Project Description
Project Goals
By assembling the available information, the hope was that community partners who are working to prevent and address substance use can better target resources to the current and emerging needs of the residents.
Project Findings
Project Description
Project Goals
This project's goal is to ascertain whether family structure per se has become more important over time in explaining economic inequality, or whether it is the constellation of factors associated with family structure that have grown in importance.
Project Findings
Children and the Elderly: Wealth Inequality Among America’s Dependents
Project Description
The William T. Grant Scholars Program supports promising early-career researchers from diverse disciplines, who have demonstrated success in conducting high-quality research and are seeking to further develop and broaden their expertise. Selected as a 2010-11 Scholar, Dr. Elizabeth Ananat received funding from the W.T. Grant Foundation for this research. It will follow several million students in North Carolina public schools over time, from third grade until when they leave school, charting the process of disengagement from school that culminates in school-leaving (measured by enrollment in college preparatory vs. vocational coursework, rates of school absences, and disciplinary actions, as well as eventual dropout). The project will focus on the contexts these youths are in over time, including: the curriculum, the teachers in their classrooms and their peers in the classroom; the neighborhoods they live in and rich information about those neighborhoods; and the local economic and policy context. The research will identify changes in those contexts and identify how such changes affect students’ engagement with school.
Project Goals
This project aims to add developmental insights to causal modeling of the educational attainment of American youths. The goal of the project is to put together a more complete picture of how and why youths elect to drop out of school in the United States.
Project Description
The Duke Endowment and the Say Yes to Education programs requested that the Center for Child and Family Policy conduct a Feasibility Study to determine whether a comprehensive information system can be engineered for their proposed Guilford Initiative. The information system will track every child living in Guilford County over time, pull in information from service systems that the child may engage (e.g., health records, school records, other service agency records, etc.), and be useful to the practitioners who will interact with the child’s family.
Project Goals
From the individual-child level data system, evaluators will be able to generate population-wide indicators for major outcomes in the domains of health, education, and social-emotional learning at various points across the lifespan. In addition, the Feasibility Study should generate other outcome measures that can be drawn from community service agency files and administrative records that might not be available at the individual-child level (e.g., child protective services rates).
Project Findings
This project led to continued and larger projects that formed the Get Ready Guilford Initiative.
Project Description
Every summer, The North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (NCSSM) works with four universities (Appalachian State, North Carolina Central University, East Carolina University, and University of North Carolina-Charlotte) to bring rising juniors and seniors from across North Carolina to their campuses for the opportunity to take part in a four week program - Summer Ventures - that allows the students to work directly with a professor within the university on different math and science topics as well as provide them with an introduction to college life.
Summer Ventures has been in operation for 28 years and has served over 12,000 high students during that time.
Project Goals
Researchers from the Center for Child and Family Policy collaborated with NCSSM to develop an evaluation plan, identify data elements and create a logic model for the Summer Ventures Program.
Project Description
Setting the Stage: Planning for Intentional and Effective Spaces and Places for Children is designed to identify best practices in the art of designing the physical and social environments in which children [live, work, and play] in order to promote positive mental health. Using a multi-tiered approach, including the thoughtful and consistent incorporation of Wake County stakeholders, the project defines best practice in children’s spaces and places, provides an implementation framework for future John Rex Endowment grantees working in the field, and generates innovative and effective implementation and improvement tools for the same.
Project Goals
Ultimately, the project will support the vision of the John Rex Endowment’s Strategic Plan by broadening the expertise related to children’s spaces and places in Wake County, engendering stakeholder interest in this area, and setting the stage for promotion of children’s positive mental health through thoughtful and effective transformation of the physical and social environments of children’s places or spaces.
Project Findings
Planning for Intentional and Effective Places and Spaces for Children’s Positive Mental Health
Project Description
Project Goals
The focus of the evaluation was to understand students’ and teachers’ perceptions of the program’s ability to engage students and assist them in completing necessary coursework to graduate and to assess outcomes of the program including attendance, academic performance, and course completion.
Project Description
This three-year study set will evaluate four types of courts, general, driving while intoxicated (DWI), drug and hybrid drug. Drug treatment courts (DTC) represent a promising innovation for dealing with crimes committed by offenders who have an underlying addiction problem. Specialty courts combine standard deterrence efforts with treatment.
Project Aims
This study has two aims.
Aim 1 examines effects of drug and alcohol courts on the probability of (1) repeating substance abuse-related crimes for which the person was convicted (recidivism); (2) being convicted of domestic violence related crimes; and (3) being convicted of other crimes to person and to property.
Aim 2 examines whether drug treatment courts have an intergenerational effect by improving the outcomes for the youth whose parents are served.
Project Goals
- examines whether drug treatment courts affect the length of time that youth spend in foster care;
- assesses whether these courts lead to improved educational outcomes for foster children (e.g., improved test scores, retention in grade, lower absences);
- examines the effect of DTCs on the probability that the children of substance abusers commit crimes as juveniles or young adults.
Project Findings
How Does Family Drug Treatment Court Participation Affect Child Welfare Outcomes?
Project Description
Project Goals
- Build an evidence-base for the Book Babies intervention and assess its impacts on kindergarten readiness.
- Follow the assessed children to kindergarten entry, and ultimately to examine the possible impacts of the intervention on 3rd grade EOG scores.
Project Findings
Book Babies Randomized Control Trial Evaluation 2019 Annual Report: Executive Summary
Project Description
This project brings together an interdisciplinary research team from Duke University, SRI International, Teachers College, and the Association of American Geographers to explore relationships between the socioeconomic status (SES) of students and their STEM learning outcomes. The motivations for this project are twofold (1) identify the links between SES and STEM Learning and (2) identify strategies for making data useful to practitioners.
Project Goals
The goals of this project are fourfold: (1) integrate data from state level youth-serving agencies, (2) develop visualizations of inter-agency data, (3) build the capacity of stakeholders, including teachers in STEM learning environments, and (4) collaboratively identify, with stakeholders, interventions to improve STEM learning environments. To accomplish these goals, the project team will integrate and analyze data from the North Carolina (NC) Department of Health and Human Services to obtain granular household-level transaction data from the state’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), i.e., “food stamps.” These data will be merged with data on public-school students’ performance on standardized tests, behavioral records, and absenteeism, which will be obtained from the North Carolina Education Research Data Center (NCERDC), the entity at Duke University that houses administrative data for the state Department of Public Instruction. Along with data analysis activities, the research team will work closely with stakeholders inside and outside of schools to better understand how to make use of data.
Project Findings
Project Description
Project Goals
The goal of this project is to analyze early childhood programs within North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services.
Project Findings
Project Description
This funding supported an interdisciplinary team of scholars from economics, electrical and computer engineering, medicine, psychology, public policy and sociology in developing the capacity to embed ‘intensive measurement bursts’ into two of the most widely accessed and cited cohort studies in the world that, collectively, have assessments spanning from birth to the fifth decade of life. The Add Health and Dunedin studies each have produced rich archives of data on individuals’ social, emotional, cognitive, and physical development from childhood through adulthood. And, these data have been used, generating over 3,000 publications, with countless applications to policy and practice across the fields of education and human development.
Project Goals
- Test ecological momentary assessment (EMA) protocols, measuring individuals’ behavior, cognitions, health and experiences in real time using smartphones among a local sample.
- Integrate streaming information on physiology, activity levels, sleep and other indicators of health, cognition and wellbeing collected with wireless sensors.
- If successful, these data and findings were planned to be used to secure extramural funding to test novel scientific questions related to health and human development.
Project Findings
Violence Exposure is Associated with Adolescents' Same- and Next-day Mental Health Symptoms
Project Description
This grant supported Dr. Jacob Vigdor’s research examining institutional factors that influence adolescent decision making processes. These factors include policies determining the grade configuration of schools and the assignment of students to classrooms, neighborhood-level influences, and incentive systems that aim to induce adolescents to avoid behaviors with long-run negative consequences.
One study published as the result of this research showed that sixth-grade students behave significantly worse and score lower on standardized tests when they are assigned to middle schools rather than to elementary schools. The negative effects persist beyond the sixth grade. The results of this study have influenced administrative grade configuration decisions in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Illinois and elsewhere.
Project Goals
The goal of this project is to examine institutional factors that influence adolescent decision making processes.
Project Findings
Project Description
Project Goals
The purpose of this project is to aid children and their families who are in the juvenile justice system that struggle with mental health or substance abuse issues.
Project Findings
Project Description
The overall goal of this project is to develop an understanding of the effects of housing insecurity on families in Durham County and the conditions and policies that contribute to housing insecurity. We will work with our community partners to identify policies and services that influence the impact of housing insecurity in our community.
Project Goals
- To assess patterns of population movement in Durham County and the relationship of these patterns with housing insecurity
- To examine the effects of housing insecurity and evictions on the education of children in Durham County
- To examine the effects of housing insecurity and evictions on healthcare utilization and health status
Project Findings
Moratorium on Evictions Protects Vulnerable Children
Vulnerable Parents Report Less Well-Being Amid Pandemic
Project Description
Substance abuse is estimated to cost the nation over $180 billion annually, yet relatively little is known about whether current evidence-based preventive interventions can efficiently reduce these costs. In order to conduct high quality benefit-cost analyses of substance abuse prevention efforts, researchers will require (1) comprehensive cost estimates that account for the resources needed to adopt, implement and sustain prevention programs, (2) estimates of the social benefits gained from reducing substance abuse risk factors in monetary terms, and (3) guidance around best practices and research priorities for evaluating prevention costs and benefits.
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Project Findings
Project Description
Students are expected to use their brain power to achieve academic, physical, and social success, although they receive no explicit instruction about how to care for and effectively use their brains. As neuroscientists and educators, we realize that recent advances in neuroscience about how the brain works have not yet been integrated into the curriculum that is currently being offered to students in public high schools. North Carolina’s mandatory public high school Healthful Living curriculum is an ideal venue in which to do this.
We plan to develop and test a new Healthful Living curriculum that will be brain oriented and will also be aligned with the National Health Education Standards. The unique focus of this curriculum is on the impact of behaviors on the brain, leading students to understand the importance of the brain, how to improve its functions, and the immediate benefits to academic, athletic, and life success.
Project Goals
1. Work with teachers and curriculum developers to develop the full curriculum for pilot testing, integrating it into the existing North Carolina Healthful Living course.
2. Develop companion materials for adults who are involved in the lives of students, such as their parents and the additional school faculty who are not directly engaged in Healthful Living curriculum instruction.
3. Pilot test the curriculum in all Healthful Living classes in a high school located in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area. Responses to the curriculum will be gathered from students, parents, faculty, and administrators and will be evaluated. Pre and post-tests will be conducted to assess knowledge, attitudes, and behavior of students. Responses from student, teacher, and administrator focus groups will be used to provide direct feedback about the effectiveness of the curriculum. Similarly, the response of the parents and school-wide faculty to the adult education materials will be evaluated. Results will then be compared to responses from a matched group of comparison classes that received the conventional curriculum.
4. Modify the curriculum in response to feedback provided during the high school pilot study and prepare the curriculum for dissemination. Full outcomes testing of the curriculum will include a random assignment to treatment design and an assessment of the impact on the students’ academic achievement.
Project Findings
Benjamin W. Goodman, Kenneth A. Dodge, Yu Bai, Robert A. Murphy, Karen A. O’Donnell. Jama Network Open (2021) 4(7): e2116024. doi: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.16024
Project Description
In 2017-18 and 2018-19, with funding from the Institute of Education Sciences, we provided training to 54 classrooms in Guilford County to promote the implementation of two of the Incredible Years Series of Programs: Incredible Years Teacher Classroom Management and Incredible Years Dinosaur School. Preliminary results from this cluster randomized trial showed positive effects on two aspects of self-regulation: social-emotional skills and executive functioning.
Self-regulation has been clearly implicated in every aspect of a person’s long-term wellbeing, and its early development lays a foundation for physical and mental health, relationships, academic achievement and socioeconomic success. The development of self-regulation is influenced by a combination of individual and external factors including temperament, skills, caregiver support, and environmental context. It can be derailed by extreme stress and adversity, but it can also be strengthened and taught.
This project supports implementation of these programs to benefit future cohorts of preschoolers by extending coaching and teacher support to anchor in the skills that teachers have learned and motivate them to continue regular delivery of Dinosaur School Lessons. Funding also supports a Teacher Leadership Development Program for teachers who have been certified in Dinosaur School. This program supports teachers in this track to begin mentoring others in ongoing implementation and leading quarterly meetings and Peer Learning Community conversations, thus spearheading sustainability when this project comes to an end.
Project Goals
This funding from the Duke Endowment supports ongoing implementation of these programs to benefit future cohorts of preschoolers by extending coaching and teacher support to anchor in the skills that teachers have learned and motivate them to continue regular delivery of Dinosaur School Lessons.
Related Resources and Projects
- Effects of the Incredible Years Classroom and Teacher Combined Interventions on Preschool Children’s Self-Regulation and Academic Achievement
- Effects of Classroom Management Training on Early Learning Skills (Incredible Years for Teachers)
- Family Connects for Get Ready Guilford Initiative
- Integration of Family Connects and HealthySteps in Guilford County
- Guilford Collaborative Toward Universal Reach and Impact During the Prenatal Period
This brief summarizes the findings from Net Worth Poverty in Child Households by Race and Ethnicity, 1989–2019 in the Journal of Marriage and the Family and offers historical context for U.S. policies that have contributed to racial and ethnic differences in net worth poverty in child households.
Project Description
After decades of improvement, premature mortality is uniquely on the rise in the U.S. among White non-Hispanic adults with low education. Suicide, drug poisoning (particularly from opiates), and alcoholic liver disease appear to be the culprits and have been coined "deaths of despair." These deaths of despair are the focus of this research, as are the pathways to deaths of despair. Despite many years of research and rising suicides and a nationwide opiates public health emergency, we lack accurate and appreciable predictions of who will succumb to deaths of despair and who will be shielded from them.
This study utilizes three long-standing, prospective-longitudinal data sets spanning childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, with recent assessments in young adulthood
- The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health),
- The Great Smoky Mountains Study, and
- Fast Track
to identify who is at risk for diseases of despair in contemporary America, how they came to be, and whether diseases of despair could be prevented by early intervention.
More information available online here.
Project Aims
The project aims to
- look longitudinally at the developmental epidemiology of diseases of despair across the early lifespan using the three longitudinal studies.
- idenitfy the childhood/adolescent pathways to diseases of despair and test protective factors that could intervene on these pathways.
- assess the impact of childhood interventions that were part of the Great Smoky Mountains and Fast Track studies on diseases of despair
Results will provide direct, actionable and fine-tuned knowledge for prevention science and public policy efforts to curb the troubling new premature mortality trends.
Related Study Findings
Project Description
Large numbers of children in United States schools struggle with reading, including a disproportionate number of English learners (ELs). The Targeted Reading Intervention (TRI) is an instructional intervention and professional development program for early reading, designed to help classroom teachers acquire key diagnostic strategies for use with young, struggling readers. The purpose of this study is to determine TRI's efficacy for young ELs, specifically. Previous studies have found that teachers are able to adapt their teaching practices to implement TRI, and that TRI shows positive effects on student reading gains for struggling and non-struggling readers. It is possible, however, that, as second language learners, ELs may face different reading challenges and require different instructional supports as a result. If TRI is also effective for ELs, this result would amplify its potential utility as an intervention for more wide-spread adoption.
Project Goal
The purpose of this study is to determine Targeted Reading Intervention's efficacy for young English learners.
Related Projects
Related Resources
- TRI (formerly Targeted Reading Intervention)
Project Description
This study tests a new teacher professional development program, Bridging English Language Learning and Academics (BELLA)*, for increasing the language and literacy skills of young Latino English learners.
Project Goals
The purpose of this randomized control trial is to test the efficacy of the BELLA professional development program for improving teacher and student outcomes.
Teacher outcomes of interest include:
- Collaboration between the ESL and classroom teachers
- Implementation of high-impact instructional strategies
- Incorporation of the students’ cultural wealth into the classroom
Student outcomes of interest include:
- Foundational literacy skills
- Language and writing skills
- Comprehension for literature and informational texts
- Vocabulary use and functions, and
- Academic engagement
Related Resources
- Teaching Young Multilingual Learners: Impacts of a Professional Learning Programme on Teachers’ Practices and Students’ Language and Literacy Skills (March 2025)
- Multilingual Students Benefit When Grade-Level and Specialist Teachers Collaborate (December 2025)
- Professional Learning for ESL Teachers: A Randomized Controlled Trial to Examine the Impact on Instruction, Collaboration, and Cultural Wealth (June 2024)
- Teaching Young Multilingual Learners: Impacts of a Professional Learning Programme on Teachers’ Practices and Students’ Language and Literacy Skills
- Improving Young English Learners’ Language and Literacy Skills Through Teacher Professional Development: A Randomized Controlled Trial
- The research team is developing an online version of BELLA professional development: BELLA Online
*Note: BELLA was originally developed under the intervention name Developing Consultation and Collaboration Skills
Participants of the study pointed to a number of actionable recommendations to increase program participation and enhance the participant experience in the nutrition assistance programs SNAP and WIC:
- Federal and state WIC programs should strengthen vendor management to improve the shopping experience.
- State and local agencies should develop peer programs to educate WIC participants on the shopping experience.
- Local agencies should collaborate with community-based organizations, food pantries, and churches to disseminate information about how to apply for SNAP and WIC benefits and the COVID-19 policy changes that increased benefits and flexibility.
- State and local agencies, along with community organizations, should advocate for more federal and state funding to support SNAP and WIC workforce expansion amidst the pandemic
10.7812/tpp/20.176