Motivation Matters

This story, written by my colleague Erik Robelen, is about a study of student reward programs conducted by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, which found that such programs improved students' reading scores, but had no discernible effect on math performance. One interesting thing about this study was that it grouped together different kinds of incentives--from cash and MP3 players to certificates of merit.

What I didn't expect to see when reading the article was such a strong backlash against these initiatives in the comments. One reader wrote that educators were turning students into "trained dolphins" that would only perform when a fish was dangled in front of their faces. Other readers responded to this with thoughtful commentary on the line between motivation and bribery, how NCLB factors into the debate, and how different kids are motivated in different ways.

It makes for an interesting read about a topic that obviously touches a nerve for a lot of people. Check it out and weigh in, if you feel so inclined.

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The Learn & Earn program in Fulton County, Georgia that I reported on awhile back just finished up its 15-week pilot program, and this article in the Atlanta-Journal Constitution profiles one of the participants who found the program, which offered students $8 an hour for studying, successful.

"It was his success that really got him excited," said [Jailyn Brown's] mom, Alanna Taylor. "He got more benefit from his good grades than the money."

We'll have to wait until the summer to get the official results from the program, and there's no word yet on whether the program will continue past the pilot stage, according to the article.

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A story in The Houston Chronicle yesterday once again brought up the ever-controversial topic of student incentives. This time, though, the article focused on giving away prizes for perfect attendance, rather than high test scores. According to the article, under No Child Left Behind, the amount of federal funding each school receives is partly contingent on attendance rates, so even schools with attendance rates in the 96th percentile feel pressured to motivate kids to come to school more often, since even one percentage point could mean thousands more dollars in federal funding.

However, not everyone thinks this is a good idea.

School leaders see these perks, ideally, as part of a portfolio of programs to inspire better attendance. But critics of academic incentives brand them as foolish. And reactions by school nurses, concerned about sick children spreading their illnesses to classmates, are lukewarm at best.

Whether or not students--who are promised prizes such as bicycles, gift certificates, and cash--are actually responding to the incentives is still up in the air. Some districts have noticed a change, while others haven't seen any improvement. The article also mentions a similar program in Massachusetts, which rewarded kids for good grades or perfect attendance, that was eliminated this school year after the district decided it wasn't making enough of a difference.

So what does all that mean? As usual, it's unclear. It seems like the gains that schools are seeing in attendance rates because of incentive programs are fairly small, if they see gains at all. As the article mentions, a lot of the factors that lead to a child missing school can't be solved by offering them a bike. That doesn't make a sick kid well or help a parent who has to work an early shift be home in the mornings to get the kids moving.

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Here's an article in The Christian-Science Monitor about using cash-incentive programs to motivate students. It talks about the programs in Baltimore and Fulton County, Ga., which I have wrriten about in the past, but also about a new program in Baltimore and D.C. that allows students to invest and manage money. Check it out.

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This story in the Rocky Mountain News is about one high school that decided to pay their students to take their state tests in order to increase attendance. Students received about $50 each total, $5 for each test they took and an additional $1 for good behavior. The result? They had almost 100 percent attendance.

At least as interesting as the story is the comments left at the end. The general consensus from commenters seems to be that giving incentives to take tests is a bad idea. There are a lot of interesting ideas down there, before the comments begin to deteriorate into personal attacks. Apparently, cash incentives are a very touchy subject.

Also, in the March 2008 issue of American Teacher, there's are two columns side-by-side, one written by a teacher who does not believe in cash incentives and the other by one who does. Both columns are well-written and address this issue in a thoughtful way, so I highly encourage you to read them. The only bad news is that to view the columns, you have to download the pdf version of the magazine, but like I said, for those who are following this issue, it's a worthy read. The columns are in the Speak Out section on page 4 of the download.

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And now, for our (seemingly) weekly update on motivating students with rewards:

It looks like the proposal New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was considering back in November that would reward students for doing well in school with cellphones equipped with prepaid minutes has actually come to pass.

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. For one thing, cellphones are banned in NYC classrooms, making this proposal a bit counterintuitive. Critics say that rewarding students with a prize that's banned from schools is sending the wrong message. But Roland Fryer, the creator of the program and a leader of the student incentives movement, says that educators have to motivate students by reaching them "where they are."

And, presumably, cellphones could help teachers do that. (Students will receive text messages from their teachers reminding them of upcoming assignments and tests.) Also, I imagine Fryer means reaching students where they are a little less than literally--in that schools should tap into students' interests and try to transfer that motivation into the classroom.

Also, as Teacher Magazine's Elizabeth Rich notes in the Web Watch blog, the students earn extra minutes (beyond the 130 that come standard on the phone) based on grades along with good behavior and attendance. This seems to be something that educators are turning towards more often. Like the program in Baltimore, student incentives are being tied to progress, rather than just the outcome of test scores.

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It seems like lately every week there's been something new about cash-incentive programs, and this week is no exception. Debra Viadero's follow-up story about a three-year-old rewards program in Coshocton, Ohio reveals that their cash incentives have worked--sort of. Scores in math have improved, but reading scores have stayed the same. Test scores in science and social studies have also improved, although not significantly. Because of the mixed results, it seems like educators on both sides of this debate are using the study's results to support their position.

Also, I was a little surprised to see that an overwhelming majority (81%) of responders to last week's edweek.org poll did not think schools should offer cash rewards to students. Only 43 out of the poll's total 230 responders thought schools should offer cash incentives. And just a reminder: the poll is an informal feature and not a scientifically sound survey, but it's interesting nonetheless.

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Here's a new twist on the student incentives debate: Prison officials in California are considering offering inmates special privileges if they make use of academic classes.

The brief article doesn't go into much detail, but says that prison classes don't have enough teachers and are frequently disrupted by fights, which might be why participation in classes is low. In addition to considering incentives for inmates, officials are also hiring more teachers and addressing behavior issues.

Also, if you'd like to view all posts about incentives and rewards on Motivation Matters, check out our Incentives/Rewards topic page.

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Over the past few days, a number of readers have pointed my attention to a variety of sources where you can find out more about cash-incentive programs. In the interest of providing as much information as I can about this topic, here's a roundup of some of the links that have been sent my way.

This blog post by eduwonkette, available from edweek.org, gathers links to some papers presented at a panel about student incentives at the American Economic Association's annual meeting. Overall, the studies found that giving students incentives was not very effective.

Independently of the cash-incentive program in New York City's public schools, Rewarding Achievement (REACH), which pays students for passing AP exams, is active in 31 NYC high schools. The privately-funded program was launched last summer as a part of The Council of Urban Professionals.

This AP story, published today, talks about yet another program opening up in Alabama that will pay students for passing AP exams. Students will receive $100 for each AP exam they pass.

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I wrote a story about cash incentives for the upcoming issue of Education Week, and it's up now on edweek.org, if you'd like to take a look.

One thing I didn't have room to address in the story itself was assertions by both Andres Alonso, the chief executive officer of Baltimore public schools, and Gregory Fields, the assistant superintendent for high school curriculum for Fulton County, Ga., schools, that students regularly receive monetary incentives from their parents for good grades. Mr. Alonso, in particular, stressed that these programs were making those kinds of rewards available for students whose parents may not be able to provide such incentives. Paying students for high test scores isn't new, he told me, it's just the idea of doing it in an organized way that is causing controversy.

His point is well-taken, although to play the devil's advocate, there are some fundamental differences between parents paying their kids for good grades and schools doling out money to high-achieving students. The most obvious to me is that it is a parent's choice to offer those kinds of rewards to their children. I know some students who were paid for good report cards, and many others who were simply given a pat on the back. I happened to be one of those in the latter category, although I'd venture to say it had less to do with my parents having a moral objection to rewarding me for grades and more to do with the fact that it just wasn't necessary. If it makes a difference, I do remember being rewarded for other things, like not fighting with my sister and keeping my room clean, which makes me think that my parents would be open to trying rewards-for-grades if that had ever been an issue.

But in talking this story over with some of my friends, I had more than one tell me that when they were students, their parents were morally opposed to offering incentives to them for high grades. Their parents believed studying and performing well on tests was something their children were expected to do, not something above and beyond the call of duty for which they should be rewarded. By instituting these kinds of programs into school districts, school officials are taking away the parent's choice to either reward, or not to reward, their children. On the other hand, they're also giving parents who may not have the means to reward their children financially for high academic performance, the option to do so.

It's hard to know how to weigh-in on this complicated issue, and quite honestly, I'm not sure where I stand on it. For now, I'm just eager to see what the research looks like, when it finally starts rolling in.

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Diane Ravitch, over on her Bridging Differences blog, has written a post about cash incentives. She discusses how paying low-income students for test scores is supposed to promote equality, and why she's critical of that movement. It's a thoughtful post, and worth checking out.

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Once again, offering students cash incentives to boost test scores has been in the news a lot lately, and the idea seems to be gaining traction. According to this commentary in the Christian Science Monitor, a cash rewards system in Texas has had some positive results so far.

Check out our incentives and rewards page for past posts about this topic.

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A recent column in Education Week offers an update on the cash for test scores debate, which we have covered on several occasions in this blog.

This update sheds research light on the debate by examining a new report by a professor of labor economics at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. The study found that when students and teachers in some Texas public schools were offered up to $500 for each passing Advanced Placement score, AP participation and scores increased.

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I know we've talked about how rewards affect student motivation many times before, but this article in the American Educator approaches the question "should learning be its own reward?" from the perspective of cognitive science. It is probably the most comprehensive article about using rewards to motivate students I've read so far, so if this is something you're interested in, I highly recommend that you check it out. Here's an excerpt:

Concrete rewards can motivate students to attend class, to behave well, or to produce better work. But if you are not careful in choosing what you reward, they can prompt students to produce shoddy work--and worse, they can cause students to actually like school subjects less. The important guidelines are these: Don't use rewards unless you have to, use rewards for a specific reason, and use them for a limited time.

He goes on to address the question from three different angles: Is a rewards system immoral? Does it condition kids to have unrealistic expectations? And does it actually decrease motivation?

What he talks about reminds me of my experiences teaching a study skills class in college. It was a 10-week course, taught by peer instructors, that all students on academic probation were required to take in order to stay in school. Each week I, and a fellow peer instructor, went over a different skill that could help the students improve their grades--time management, goal setting, etc. Sometimes the lessons were pretty dry, so we decided to reward our class with treats at the end of the day if they paid attention and participated in discussion. What we found was that our students came to expect the reward, and if it wasn't promised to them at the beginning of class, they were much less likely to take the class seriously. And these were college students! By the end of the course, I wished we had never started rewarding them in the first place.

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A new position paper put out by the Association for Childhood Education International outlines the teacher's role in student motivation and how that can be used to bolster achievement.

The paper draws two major conclusions about student motivation. The first is that "children's learning is supported by task-related incentives, both intrinsic and extrinsic, that are responsive to the individual child, the domain of study, and the sociocultural context." The second is that "effective teaching transcends merely imparting knowledge and relies, to a considerable extent, on educators' ability to motivate students to learn. Any characterization of learning that disregards the role of motivation and interest is shortsighted at best and destructive at worst."

Those two statements encapsulate a lot of what we talk about on this blog--making lessons relevant to students, the teacher's role in student motivation, and the importance of motivation in achievement--but what I was really pleased to see was the emphasis on both extrinsic and intrinsic incentives to motivate students.

We've talked a lot about extrinsic incentives in the past, with educators motivating students with the promise of money, cell phones, and even cars. But perhaps a more elusive goal is to motivate kids with the promise of an intrinsic incentive--the joy in the act of learning, for its own sake. The way I see it, unlike physical prizes, that kind of reward is timeless.

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Check out the latest of New York City's ideas to entice kids with cash prizes and other incentives to get them to do better in school. According to this New York Times story, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is considering a proposal to give some students free cellphones and to reward high academic performance with free cellphone airtime.

Of course, this could be at odds with the city's ban on cellphones in the schools. But the Mayor sees no potential conflict.

All this prizes-for-performance stuff is beginning to feel a little ridiculous.

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Lately, it seems like every month or so another school district starts an incentive program in which cash is offered for student academic achievement.

The latest news is from the New York City schools, which plans to expand the use of a cash-reward program. Thanks to donations by philanthropists, the district will start a program this school year to offer cash incentives for students who do well on Advanced Placement exams, according to this New York Times story.

The district had just started its own program to pay some students in the fourth and seventh grades for getting good scores on several standardized tests.

But are such cash-incentive programs truly a good investment, especially in the long run? If you have had a similar program in your district, how effective has it been in raising student motivation?

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Blogger Joanne Jacobs points us this week to the D-Ed Reckoning blog, where specific ideas for using positive reinforcement to motivate students are proposed. The ideas are based on an interview with a teacher who works in a poor, urban school.

Since this was my first visit to D-Ed Reckoning, I must say I did get a chuckle out of the quote from the movie Animal House featured at the top of the blog: "Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life." I didn't care much for Dean Wormer, but he was right on that note.

But back to positive reinforcement. Shouldn't there be a balance between positive and negative reinforcement? When does positive reinforcement become counter-productive or even ridiculous?

Let's get another lively discussion going on those questions.

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Motivation guru Richard Lavoie, the author of The Motivation Breakthrough: 6 Secrets for Turning On the Tuned-Out Child, talks to USA Today in this Q&A session about the importance of not branding kids as lazy, the balance between providing support and encouraging challenges, and the wisdom, or lack thereof, of reward systems, competition, and punishment.

It's a good and easy read, so it's worth checking out.

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A high school in Minnesota is trying to motivate kids to get to school on time by linking parking privileges to tardiness, according to a story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

The school has set up a graduated system of consequences for tardiness that suspends students' parking permits.

What's your prediction? Do you think the new policy will yield measurable results?

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Does fining or punishing parents for their children's misbehavior really work? Probably not, suggests a recent story by the BBC.

One researcher looked specifically at whether fining parents worked to discourage British children from skipping school. But he found no link between the parental penalties and improved school attendance.

Rather, the story says, efforts to educate parents about how to discipline their children tend to be more effective than fines. But it says such efforts are expensive and therefore not widespread.

I have known some families in which most of the kids are well-behaved and respectful, but there is one particularly bad child. It just happens. So I am not surprised by this researcher's findings.

Still, for those parents who refuse to hold their children accountable for bad behavior, maybe this is an appropriate last resort. I can think of more than a few parents that might beneft from a jolt of accountability.

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Back in May, I had promised to keep readers up to speed on any developments in the Wisconsin Covenant program, which plans to offer guaranteed college placement and financial aid to high school students in the state who maintain B averages.

Well, here's the latest: Almost 10,000 ninth graders in the state have signed a pledge that promises them a route to a college in Wisconsin if they meet certain goals, according to a recent Associated Press story.

That number seems like a first step toward determining how effective such external motivators can be. But it's also worth noting there are 75,000 ninth graders in the state, meaning only a fraction signed the pledge. That raises the question: Why would they choose not to sign up?

There are also issues that still need to be resolved, as the Associated Press story points out. For starters, the covenant remains a proposal by Gov. Jim Doyle that has yet to get legislative approval. And it's still not clear how the governor plans to pay for the program, especially if its popularity grows.

Stay tuned for future updates.

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Barry Schwartz, a psychology professor at Swarthmore College, wrote a fascinating op-ed piece in the New York Times this week about New York City's plan to pay students up to $500 for doing well in school. Mr. Schwartz argues that offering external perks to students can actually be detrimental in the long run because the expectation of rewards replaces the intrinsic satisfaction students receive from learning.

Fellow Education Week blogger Diane Ravitch also tore into the plan last month in this piece on The Huffington Post.

Growing up, I was always envious of kids whose parents gave them money for getting good grades. Would I have worked any harder in school if my parents had done the same? I was a straight-A student, so probably not. Would I be less interested in learning now, as an adult? I'm glad I didn't get the chance to find out.

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Twenty years ago, George Weiss and his then-wife, Diane, offered an entire class of 6th graders an opportunity that would make many students green with envy. Finish high school, the Weisses said, and we'll pay for your college education.

Some kids took full advantage of the offer. For example, Jarmaine Ollivierre, a former special ed student, has earned a slew of degrees and now works as an engineer for NASA.

Despite the standouts, though, only 20 out of the 112 students ended up getting a bachelor's degree. That's less than 18 percent.

Just goes to show you that not even a free ride can keep some kids in school.

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For Benton Central High School junior Courtney Lavelle, the key to success was simply showing up.

Her school, in Oxford, Ind., has a plan to get kids motivated...at least to come to school, according to a story in the Journal & Courier newspaper. Each student with perfect attendance for the year wins a key that could unlock the door of a new car. Earlier this month, 27 students tried their keys and Ms. Lavelle was the lucky winner of a 2000 Chevrolet Malibu. According to Brad Harper, Benton Central's attendance officer, the school had a 97 percent attendance rate this year.

But is this an appropriate way to motivate high school kids? Do the ends justify the means?

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An article in USA Today, "Passion fuels seniors' ability to achieve," raises interesting questions about what motivates some of the nation's top-performing high schoolers.

For example, Megan Blewett, who won a $50,000 scholarship in the Young Epidemiology Scholars competition last month for her research on multiple sclerosis and Lou Gehrig's disease, said she was driven by the importance of her findings, while Veronica Shi, a pianist who won the Phoenix Symphony Guild Young Musicians Competition in 2005 despite a broken and bloody fingernail, said she was motivated by the beauty and challenges of creating music.

"I think the process of learning and discovering new things is much more important than winning awards," Ms. Shi said.

What do you think? Are students more motivated by learning and discovering new things or winning awards? Do students who focus on the process rather than the prize create better work?

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A program in Wisconsin that begins this week is worth watching to see if it has its intended impact on student motivation.

The program, The Wisconsin Covenant, promises high school students a spot in college or technical schools as well as financial aid if they maintain a B average, take college preparatory classes, stay out of trouble, and do community service work, according to an Associated Press article.

The cost of the program will depend on how many of the state's 75,000 8th graders sign up and meet the requirements, according to AP.

If the program succeeds, we'll have to give a nod to the powers of external motivation. If it fails, we'll be left wondering, yet again, what it takes to motivate today's high schoolers.

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Should pizza be used to motivate students to read more?

An Associated Press story about Pizza Hut's Book It program, which rewards young readers with free pizzas based on the number of books they read, says critics of the program are concerned that it contributes to poor eating habits and encourages kids to read lots of easy books, rather than fewer, more difficult ones.

Company officials claim that Book It is the nation's largest reading motivation program, reaching roughly 50,000 schools across the country, and turning many non-readers into readers. They also discount the idea that Book It is somehow contributing to the nation's childhood obesity problem.

It does seem that a couple of free pizzas is unlikely make a kid fat. So it's hard for me to buy that argument even if the program's use of the phrase "Mouthwatering Motivation" on its Web site seems to send the wrong message.

However, having watched my sons participate in this program, I can say that it did encourage them to read lots of short, easy books rather than longer, more difficult ones. My boys deliberately looked for as many easy books as they could find and plowed through them as quickly as they could. Not exactly the best approach for building smart, analytical readers.

But if pizza (extrinsic motivator) sparks a love of reading (intrinsic motivator), that would be a good thing, right?

What do you think? Is this an appropriate and effective way to motivate kids to read?

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"Show me the money!"

That's the motivational slogan teacher Geralyn Raach uses with her 3rd graders at Central Elementary School in Coshocton, Ohio, to entice the youngsters to work harder, according to a recent story in Education Week that details an unusual research experiment in that Ohio district to pay students modest cash awards for passing or doing well on state exams.

Such an experiment is a virtual slap in the face to advocates of intrinsic motivation, who argue that such extrinsic motivators are educational gimmicks that might have some short-term results, but little impact over the long term. As the Education Week story points out, too, the effort runs counter to the findings from decades of research in motivational psychology.

To be sure, the critics have justifiable concerns. Some are even worried that cash for test scores could actually kill the internal desire to learn.

Still, such efforts are worth investigating. And that is all they are doing in Coshocton. They are testing an experiment. And if a little bit of extra cash can get a kid who hates math to work at it anyway, and eventually learn important concepts, then schools will have to weigh that important philosophical question: Do the ends justify the means?

I can't tell you how many times my kids tell me that my life at work is better than their life at school because I get paid to work, but they don't get paid to go to school. I usually brush off such comments, but maybe they have a point. Maybe they'd like to say to their teachers after acing a test: "Show me the money!"

Then again, maybe not. What do you think?

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If you believe that intrinsic motivation is a prerequisite for success in school, then you should check out a research effort spearheaded by Mark Van Ryzin, a teaching assistant at the University of Minnesota's College of Education and Human Development.

The effort is called the Hope Study and it aims to determine whether motivation to learn increases when schools give students more autonomy, a greater sense of belonging, and more opportunities to pursue individual goals.

The study is relatively small, with about 40 schools participating this school year. But that number was just three schools in 2004 when the study was started. The vast majority of the participants are secondary charter schools, not regular district schools.

In an email interview with Motivation Matters, Mark said regular district schools tend to shy away from the project for two reasons: the large amount of assessment in those schools tends to make them wary of taking on additional assessment; and the ideas represented in the Hope Study are not all that familiar to most teachers and administrators in regular district schools because motivational and developmental psychology are not a big part of traditional teacher or administrator preparation programs.

The Hope Study, Mark said, was informed by a theory from educational psychology research known as "stage-environment fit theory," which posits that student motivation and engagement will be higher when the learning environment matches students' developmental needs.

"We have found that schools that support student developmental needs (i.e. autonomy, belongingness) can promote growth in student hope from semester to semester and year over year," he said. "In other words, these schools can actually spur the development of something in students, over and above actual academic learning, that can benefit them throughout their lifepsan.

"When we have more control over our own lives, and stronger networks of support, we feel more empowered, take more interest in our work, and take more ownership of our results. [But] the standard large comprehensive high school can actually undermine student autonomy by adhering to a set curriculum that provides very little opportunity for student input."

Keep an eye on this study because it is getting some traction.

Starting next fall, Mark said the Hope Study will become an official part of the Coalition of Essential Schools online survey system, making it available to all of the coalition's schools.

In addition, Mark said he will be making a presentation about the Hope Study at an American Educational Research Association conference this spring in Chicago; and he has co-authored a paper about the study for Phi Delta Kappan that will be published in a 2007 issue of the academic journal.

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