Date of Conferral

2021

Degree

Doctor of Education (Ed.D.)

School

Education

Advisor

Rollen Fowler

Abstract

The transition from middle school to high school is challenging for students and canmanifest in poor academic performance, chronic absenteeism, and increased discipline incidents. The Freshman Academy (FA) is designed to improve these outcomes. The problem is that FA has been mainly studied in suburban and urban schools, not rural schools. The purpose of this causal-comparative study was to compare the FA program on rural 9th graders’ attendance, behavior, and end-of-course achievement test scores to a control-group school. Eccles and Midgley’s stage-environment fit theory framed this study. Research questions focused on whether there were any significant differences between the two groups. Archived data on 95 freshman students from each rural high school were collected. A two-way multivariate analysis of variance was used to analyze whether the FA intervention significantly improved outcomes. Statistically significant results were obtained; however, findings only showed a moderate effect size for improving attendance and a small effect size for raising achievement and improving discipline. The findings did not demonstrate that the FA implemented in the rural school setting had an overall practical benefit on academic achievement, discipline, or school attendance compared to the control school. The main implication of the results is that, to improve freshman student transition outcomes, FA needs additional, research-based interventions combined with it. The social change implications of this study are that these results will inform public school leaders about whether the FA program is a practical and worthwhile use of district resources.

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