Grade Book Game Evaluation Among 6th Grade Students

Overview

School engagement is associated with children's long-term health and success. Students who are engaged in school have better academic outcomes and lower rates of risky health behaviors. The investigators partnered with Alliance College-Ready Middle Academy 12 (Alliance 12), a charter school in Los Angeles, to develop the "gradebook game", an intervention that aims to improve academic achievement, peer support, and school engagement. The game involves frequent feedback on students' school performance, team-based competition aligned with the school mission, and peer mentorship by team captains. For the 2016-2017 academic year, the investigators will assist Alliance 12 in implementing the gradebook game in two of its five 6th grade homerooms. The investigators plan to evaluate whether the game, as hypothesized, is effective in increasing school engagement, including academic performance and positive behavior. In order to conduct this evaluation, the investigators plan to enroll 6th grade students by obtaining parental consent and student assent at the beginning of the school year. Students will be enrolled for the entire 2016-2017 academic year. All study procedures except for parental recruitment will occur during the school day. Participation in the study involves completing 2 student surveys and permitting the collection and analysis of student data from the online gradebook and behavior system. The investigators plan to use an interrupted time series design that will analyze student gradebook and behavior data at multiple time points before and after the game starts. The surveys will be completed at the beginning and end of the study period. Surveys will include measures of self-reported school engagement, age, gender, race/ethnicity, primary language at home, social and emotional well-being, social status, and peer support. Surveys will be administered via iPad. If the pilot study demonstrates that the gradebook game is effective in promoting school engagement and academic achievement, it is anticipated that it could be widely adopted and more rigorously evaluated in a larger study. Because the gradebook game is a low-resource intervention, it could easily and sustainably be replicated, providing a much-needed tool for schools with low engagement.

School engagement is critical to students' long-term success and appears to be strongly influenced by peer relationships. School engagement results from the interaction of the individual with the school context and is a multi-dimensional concept involving behavioral, emotional, and cognitive components. These include attendance, conduct, effort, participation, emotions towards school, identification with school, interest, and psychological investment in learning. Children who are engaged in school have higher levels of academic achievement and increased likelihood of occupational success as adults, even beyond that predicted by achievement. Children who are successful in school are also healthier adults, which is due in part to health risk behaviors that begin in adolescence. School engagement appears to protect against substance use and delinquency. Factors that have been associated with low levels of engagement (or disengagement) include trauma, stress, discrimination, and bullying, whereas supportive relationships with parents, peers, and teachers promote school engagement. Because school engagement is modifiable, it is an obvious target for school-based intervention. Prior studies have documented interventions that improve school engagement, but effect sizes are generally small and they are resource-intensive and therefore difficult to implement widely. As far as the investigators know, none have used a social network or team-based behavioral economics approach. A partnership between UCLA and Alliance College-Ready Middle Academy #12 (Alliance 12), a charter middle school in Los Angeles led to the development of the novel Gradebook Game. This intervention aims to induce supportive social pressure aligned with a school's mission in order to promote school engagement and achievement. Sixth grade students are organized into teams by Advisory period and mentored by 8th grade team captains. Throughout the regular school day, students are assigned points for effort, achievement, and citizenship (as captured by the online gradebook and behavior tracker), which then get repackaged into weekly team scorecards for the Game. Teams compete against each other for total points in bi-weekly match-ups, and wins are rewarded with incentives tailored to the school's needs. This intervention is unique in bringing a team-based behavioral economics approach to impact school engagement. It is grounded in principles from two successful interventions: the Good Behavior Game and Peer Connection. The Gradebook Game Intervention has been piloted for feasibility in one Advisory group of 6th grade students at Alliance 12 during the Spring of 2016. If effective, it could feasibly be implemented widely and has the potential to transform social norms and school culture, providing a much-needed tool among schools with low student engagement. The investigators plan to study the effectiveness of the Gradebook Game in promoting school engagement and achievement. This study would likely be the first to evaluate an intervention that utilizes team competition to generate social pressure and peer support around behaviors that promote success in school. This study has the potential to inform whether the Gradebook Game intervention should be adopted by other schools struggling with low student engagement; and depending on the results, it could lead to a larger, more rigorous study that would evaluate whether the Gradebook Game is effective in promoting school engagement and achievement among a diverse study population, which could be beneficial to schools and families across the nation.