Check & Connect
Study: Sinclair et al. (2005)

Describe how students were selected to participate in the study:

These students were selected because they went to a school district, which was one of the 100 largest in the country with a diverse population ethnically, linguistically, and economically; providing special education services to about 14% of the students, Less than half of the district’s entire 2000 graduation class (the 1996-1997 cohort of ninth graders) completed high school in 4 years-38% dropped out, 11% moved out of district, and remaining 8% were still enrolled in school. These students received special education services for an emotional or behavioral disability.

Describe how students were identified as being at risk for academic failure (AI) or as having emotional or behavioral difficulties (BI):

Students were identified following district identification procedures for identifying students with an emotional or behavioral disability.

ACADEMIC INTERVENTION: What percentage of participants were at risk, as measured by one or more of the following criteria:

• below the 30th percentile on local or national norm, or
• identified disability related to the focus of the intervention?

%

BEHAVIORAL INTERVENTION: What percentage of participants were at risk, as measured by one or more of the following criteria:

• emotional disability label,
• placed in an alternative school/classroom,
• non-responsive to Tiers 1 and 2, or
• designation of severe problem behaviors on a validated scale or through observation?

%

Specify which condition is the submitted intervention:

The intervention has seven elements: routine monitoring of alterable indicators of engagement, individualized and timely intervention, relationship building, persistence plus, following mobile students from school to school, problem solving, and promoting affiliation with school and learning. Routine monitoring of alterable indicators of engagement: Daily information about students such as grades and number of skipped class is collected daily to monitor the students’ progress Individualized and timely intervention: Students received basic or intensive intervention based on individual needs Relationship building: mentors build a trusting relationship with students by working with a caseload of students sand families over a period of 4 to 5 years. Persistence plus: persistence plus refers to a persistent source of academic motivation. Mentors consistently deliver the following message to the students “education is important for your future-stay in school”. Following mobile students from school to school: Mentors follow the student from school to school throughout the metropolitan area. Problem solving: Check and Connect mentors use a cognitive-behavioral problem-solving approach, intended to promote the acquisition of conflict resolution sills. The mentors help students to follow problem-solving steps to solve conflicts. Students are guided through real or hypothetical problem suing five steps: stop, thinking about the problem, what are the choices, choose one, do it, how did it work? Promoting affiliation with school and learning: Monitors inform students about options of school-related activities and events and check with program staff and students for feedback on their experiences.

Specify which condition is the control condition:

Students in comparison conditions receive regular special education services provided by schools based on their IEPs.

If you have a third, competing condition, in addition to your control and intervention condition, identify what the competing condition is (data from this competing condition will not be used):

Using the tables that follow, provide data demonstrating comparability of the program group and control group in terms of demographics.

Grade Level

Race–Ethnicity

Socioeconomic Status

Disability Status

ELL Status

Gender

What method was used to determine students' placement in treatment/control groups?

Random

Please describe the assignment method or the process for defining treatment/comparison groups.

A longitudinal randomized controlled trial was used in this study. All participants were randomly assigned to the treatment or control group prior to a stratified sampling procedure. The variables on which the participants were stratified include disability, ethnicity, eligibility for free or reduced lunch program, gender, adult with whom the youth reside, and the high school.

What was the unit of assignment?

Students

If other, please specify:

Please describe the unit of assignment:

What unit(s) were used for primary data analysis?

Schools
Teachers
Students
Classes
Other
If other, please specify:

Please describe the unit(s) used for primary data analysis:

How was the program delivered?

Individually
Small Group
Classroom

What were the background, experience, training, and ongoing support of the instructors or interventionists?

The coordinator of the monitors/mentors (interventionists) was a former Check & Connect mentor for 4 years and a school psychologist in the district high schools. The coordinator was available to the interventionists on a daily basis to provide case consultation and modeling interactions with students, teachers, and parents. The background and experiences of the interventionists were not provided.

Describe when and how fidelity of treatment information was obtained.

Although measures of treatment fidelity were not quantified, mentors submitted the attendance records of the students to the coordinator to review to verify the accuracy of the form.

What were the results on the fidelity-of-treatment implementation measure?

Was the fidelity measure also used in control classrooms?

For any substantively (e.g., effect size ≥ 0.25 for pretest or demographic differences) or statistically significant (e.g., p < 0.05) pretest differences, please describe the extent to which these differences are related to the impact of the treatment. For example, if analyses were conducted to determine that outcomes from this study are due to the intervention and not pretest characteristics, please describe the results of those analyses here.

Please explain any missing data or instances of measures with incomplete pre- or post-test data.

If you have excluded a variable or data that are reported in the study being submitted, explain the rationale for exclusion:

Describe the analyses used to determine whether the intervention produced changes in student outcomes:

The researchers used post comparisons using chi-square tests depending on the type of data. The outcome measures are nominal, thus the attributes are only names. For example, the measure student attendance has four names (persisters, forced persisters, interrupters, and students who were out all years). Due to the level of measurement of type of data obtained in this study, the authors did not compute the means or unadjusted means were not reported for students in the control and experimental groups.