What will we learn from SUMI’s first set of research projects?
The Student Upward Mobility Initiative (SUMI) recently announced our first $3.5 million in grants for 16 projects. These ambitious projects will help us accomplish two goals:
- Increase our understanding of which of the skills schools currently measure are most strongly associated with long-term success.
- Develop new measures of skills that may turn out to be even stronger drivers of economic mobility than what schools measure today.
Right now, there is a limited research base on which elements of PK–12 education are connected to economic mobility. These projects, which will be completed over the next two years, will exponentially increase our understanding.
Funded projects will be carried out by a diverse set of research teams across many disciplines and institutions. These teams will regularly come together to share insights and feedback, galvanizing an emerging field of education-to-economic-mobility researchers.
A brief overview of these inaugural projects across three drivers of economic mobility—academic skills, career preparation, and nonacademic factors—shows how these new studies will add to our collective understanding of what it takes to move students from poverty to prosperity.
Studying which academic skills matter most
Research consistently links student performance on math and reading tests to lifelong success, including earnings. But only two studies have examined the kinds of state tests school use today, and no studies have looked beyond math and reading. As a result, educators and policymakers know that academics matter, but they have little concrete guidance on which skills to prioritize and how to measure them.
Seven SUMI-funded research teams plan to fill this knowledge gap by linking test data from millions of students across Louisiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Oregon, and Texas to indicators capturing their success beyond school. Most studies will examine college enrollment and graduation, as well as employment and earnings, and some will have even more nuanced outcome data, such as voting behavior, contact with the criminal justice system, residential stability, and debt.
These studies will identify the skills that matter most across and within an array of subjects (including math, reading, science, and social studies) and grades (from K–3 measures of early literacy to course grades and test scores in high school). They will seek to measure not just general performance in broad subjects but specific skills, such as those captured by the “using data to make predictions” section of an algebra test or the “evaluating sources and evidence” section of a government test.
Some research teams will go beyond the scores generated by testing companies by using students’ responses to individual test questions to understand which most strongly predict economic mobility and which skills those questions seem to be capturing. And all studies will test whether results vary by student characteristics, such as race, gender, and disability status, and how they intersect with contextual factors, such as school segregation and local labor market conditions.
Learning how to measure career preparation
Employers want workers who have not just academic knowledge but practical, technical skills. Career and technical education (CTE) programs seek to meet that need, but understanding which CTE pathways are most likely to lead to a good career requires knowing which job-oriented skills matter for success in the workplace. Existing research offers little guidance, but five SUMI-funded studies will change that.
Two SUMI projects will connect student performance on widely used measures of CTE skills to employment and earnings data. One study will look at how the skills the ACT’s WorkKeys assessment measures—including graphic literacy, applied math, and workplace document comprehension—are valued in the workplace. Another will use data from 52 technical assessments developed by the credentialing firm NOCTI to measure how these skills and the industry-recognition credentials they can lead to pay off in the labor market.
In addition to these analyses of standardized CTE assessments, one study will test whether a high school network’s highly structured work-based learning program produces useful data on these skills, such as through daily timecards and performance ratings, and how this relates to later financial outcomes.
Two studies will dive into how students’ social context affects their career preparation. One SUMI team—with the support of a community advisory board of young people and educators—will develop the first-ever measure of “critical career readiness,” which will reflect how discrimination, social stigma, and contextual factors shape marginalized young people’s career aspirations, exploration and planning, and ability to access community resources. Another team will test whether students’ course enrollments and other administrative data can be used to construct useful measures of their social capital, which affects students’ ability to secure good-paying jobs.
Measuring “soft skills” in schools
Academic knowledge and technical skills capture only a portion of what students need to succeed in college, work, and life. The other critical skills go by many names, such as soft skills, “noncognitive” factors, character skills, durable skills, and social and emotional learning competencies. Research links these factors to economic success, but this evidence is rarely based on measures schools collect, in large part because few school systems measure these skills at scale.
Two SUMI teams will produce new evidence linking noncognitive measures to long-term outcomes, including educational attainment and earnings, and examine how those relationships are shaped by contextual factors. One study will offer a national view, and another will examine schools in Promise Neighborhoods in rural Mississippi.
Part of the reason noncognitive measures are not widely used is that they often rely on self-reported surveys that are time-consuming and costly to collect. Two SUMI studies will seek to develop measures based on data that schools already collect. One will use data from young children’s interactions with a digital learning platform to measure executive function, and the other will use data from student responses to English language arts test questions to measure critical thinking.
Study findings will help us make big-picture changes
The SUMI team is excited to learn from these amazing researchers and to help them collaborate in ways that ensure the whole of their findings is greater than the sum of the individual studies. We look forward to translating findings for educators and policymakers and to working with research teams to ensure they give careful consideration to contextual factors, such as neighborhood segregation and labor market discrimination, so that findings are actionable for schools serving students who are furthest from opportunity.
Today, most schools largely rely on the same measures of student success they’ve used for decades, such as reading and math scores, attendance, and graduation rates. This new generation of research will help schools measure a broader set of skills that drive economic mobility, so that students have the best chance at success regardless of their background.