Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk: Report #25

The Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk (CRESPAR) was established in 1994 and continued until 2004. It was a collaboration between Johns Hopkins University and Howard University. CRESPAR’s mission was to conduct research, development, evaluation, and dissemination of replicable strategies designed to transform schooling for students who were placed at risk due to inadequate institutional responses to such factors as poverty, ethnic minority status, and non-English-speaking home background.The Talent Development Middle School model is a comprehensive school-changedesign aimed at raising the academic proficiency of all children in schools where large proportions of children are at risk of failure. Thirty-one teachers in two Philadelphia public middle schools where the model has been piloted evaluated the implementation of training and curricular components of the model in six focus groups covering major subject areas (math, science, and Reading and English Language Arts [RELA]). Respondents were asked to appraise the helpfulness of the professional development training and materials in supporting their own teaching proficiency and the achievement level of their students, as well as obstacles they faced, their prediction of future use in the school, their evaluation of their students’ capacity to meet the standards of the curriculum, and their sense of whether they made a difference.Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education (R-117-D4005