NYKids Phase II Cross-case Report Now Available
By Kristen C. Wilcox, Aaron Leo, Lisa Yu, & Jessie Tobin
We are pleased to announce that our new report entitled College and Career Readiness: Students’ Perspectives on Life After High School is now available on our website! Our new report focuses on students’ voices from two of the positive outlier schools that participated in the first phase of this study. These two schools, Malverne Senior High School and Crown Point Central School, qualify as positive outliers because they are “atypical” in the sense that they have achieved a trend of above-predicted graduation rates among different populations of students consistently over time.
In the first phase of this study, we explored the perspectives and practices of educators, but in this second phase our research team interviewed students to get a better sense of their experiences as they transition from high school into college and the workforce. We designed this study to be not just a follow-up to the first phase, but to yield new knowledge from students’ perspectives, relating new findings to Phase I findings as well as to extant research on adolescent development in relation to in- and out-of-school learning.
Our team’s methodology included the use of semi-structured interview and focus group protocols and student-crafted artifacts such as ecological maps (i.e., displays of important places in and outside of school) and timelines indicating key events. In total, 22 students participated in our study.
What We Found
As in our Phase I study, we discovered that Crown Point and Malverne were unique in the ways they approached preparing young people for life beyond high school. Differences in school context as well as student body size and composition and workforce characteristics helped to account for some differences that we discuss throughout the report. Despite some differences, we discovered four commonalities or “themes” that capture what Crown Point and Malverne students highlight as highest priority and most influential experiences in high school—they are:
Theme 1. Cultivating Student Agency
Theme 2. Contributing to a Caring Climate and Meeting High Expectations
Theme 3. Forging Harmonious and Supportive Relationships
Theme 4. Building Skills and Knowledge for Life after High School
Head to our Research Results page to read the entire report and stay tuned for an upcoming blog detailing the methodology used in this study. As always, we welcome your feedback and invite opportunities to share our research and related continuous improvement resources with leaders and educators. Just reach out to us at nykids@albany.edu.
