Second Step Effectiveness in a Large Urban School District | By: Committee for Children A second year has passed since the introduction of the PreK-5 Second Step curriculum, 4th edition into Milwaukee Public Schools. During the first year of implementation (2011–2012), a group of people in my district worked to gather results about the effectiveness of the program, with a primary focus on the early learning and K–5 levels. I shared those results in a blog in early 2013. We learned that songs helped students better remember the social skills, that follow-up and reinforcement beyond the lessons was related to greater student knowledge gains, and that those implementing 88 percent or more of the lessons showed significantly greater student improvements than lower implementers. Now another year has gone by, and more data has been collected. This time, we gathered surveys from K–8th grade students from multiple schools and classrooms across the district. We used the surveys provided in the Second Step curriculum for all grades except 3–5, for which we created a more detailed survey (a copy of this survey can be found here in the online community under the I Love Second Step group in the discussion topic Second Step Evaluation Tools). The surveys are designed to be given after the curriculum is completed, but we decided to use them as pre/post measures. The primary focus was on gathering accurate data, so we worked with students in groups of two to four rather than the whole class. We were fortunate to have a lot of staff working on the project since we trained and worked with local graduate students. Pre-surveys were completed in early October and post-surveys in late May. Lesson implementation was tracked by teacher, so that results could be compared by implementation levels. If you are interested in knowing more about what we used for this, click on the topic Keeping Up with Implementation in the Let’s Talk Implementation Forum here in the online community. A sample middle school lesson tracking chart is posted there. Although our overall implementation was low this year (32–74, varying across grades), improvements still occurred. Below is a breakdown of our results by grade level. K–2 (one year of data; average implementation 74 percent) · Students showed significant knowledge improvements in all areas: Skills for Learning, Empathy, Emotion Management and Problem Solving. Grades 3-5 (two years of data; average implementation 68 percent) · Students showed significant knowledge improvements in all areas: Skills for Learning, Empathy, Emotion Management and Problem Solving. · Students in their second year of curriculum exposure retained their knowledge after the summer months, despite not having the curriculum during that time. · The knowledge gain after year one of the curriculum was maintained in all areas throughout the second year. Grades 6-8 (two years of data; average implementation 31 percent) · Students showed significant declines in their acceptance of social exclusion from pre- to post-test. Here are some other common trends found with the results: · Teachers implementing the entire curriculum consistently saw greater student improvements than those who didn’t. · Students had difficulty understanding the best way to be assertive, even after being taught the assertiveness lesson. It seems students of all grades would benefit from additional support and follow-up in this area. · Teachers with better classroom climates tended to see more positive results. If you are interested in more ideas on this topic, check out the Let’s Talk Implementation! Forum here on the community.