The Fordham Institute, among others, has long worried that the country’s focus on the “proficiency gap” is leading schools to ignore the “excellence gap”—the divide between white students and students of color at the highest levels of achievement. Now comes good news that this gap can in fact be narrowed. January’s issue of Gifted Child Quarterly features a 2016 longitudinal study by Paula Olszewski-Kubilius et al. that details the outcomes of Project Excite—a STEM enrichment program for “high-potential” black and Latino students in suburban Illinois.
This study addresses the general thrust of previous research that suggests black-white and Latino-white achievement gaps widen faster among high-achieving students, particularly in math and science. The authors indicate that these findings reflect the compounding nature of advantage and disadvantage. Think of compound interest: The further ahead you are, the faster you climb. Knowing this, Project Excite adopts an approach that financial advisors shout from the rooftops: Start early and invest consistently.
Between 2000 and 2013, researchers tracked the performances and outcomes of 361 Project Excite participants. Each cohort consists of third graders from five schools in a suburban Illinois school district. Acceptance into the program is based on math, non-verbal reasoning, reading skills, teacher recommendations, interest in STEM, and academic achievement. The authors make sure to emphasize that “stellar performance on standardized tests” is not the primary focus; students that fall below the seventy-fifth-percentile threshold may be admitted after comprehensive review. This prevents some students that are unlikely to be formally identified as gifted from falling through the cracks. An average of twenty-five students per year embark on a six-year math and science enrichment journey, 77 percent of whom stay the course for the duration.
While attending Project Excite, fourth graders might spend Saturdays wrapping their heads around the scientific method, eighth graders may fight summer attrition with lessons on Newton’s Laws, and parents can workshop ways to foster their child’s potential. From third through eighth grade, the participants attend a minimum of 445 hours of summer and after-school STEM enrichment activities. The program also leverages its connection with Northwestern University’s Center for Talent Development, exposing participants to some of the most rigorous summer programs in the nation. Additionally, parents are included in a variety of seminars and trainings throughout the course of the program, allowing academic excellence to be a family affair.
The bottom line: Project Excite made headway, accomplishing what it set out to do. The study’s authors compared the performance data collected from the participants to that of their district and state peers. Students who stuck with Project Excite made “larger gains in science, reading, and math.” For example, in third grade, participants and their non-participant counterparts in the same district scored identically on the math portion of a prominent Illinois standardized test. By eighth grade, however, Project Excite students, on average, scored nearly 10 points higher than the district average—and similar results were found for the reading portion of the same assessment.
On the state science test, Project Excite students scored just 0.79 points below white Evanston/Skokie School District students, while black and Latino non-participating students both scored nearly 4.0 points below their white peers, indicating the program’s success in narrowing the science achievement gap.
It was also found that of Project Excite’s first nine cohorts, 76 percent of the students were placed in above-grade-level math classes in ninth grade, approximately on par with the district-wide average, and much higher than non-participating black and Latino students’ rate of 50 percent.
Before claiming a golden ticket, however, the authors acknowledged analytical limitations of their findings. First, there was no true control group because the participants were compared to their local school, district, and state peers—many of whom are interacting with each other in some capacity. Second, test scores from grades before students started Project Excite were not available, so it is difficult to say whether the participants were equal to their “comparable peers” before entering the program. Finally, achievement gaps during high school were not calculated, so the impacts of Project Thrive beyond ninth grade are unknown, aside from college enrollment.
Despite these limitations, Project Excite is clearly heading in the right direction. Other programs hoping to help students of color soar may benefit from gleaning insights on its family involvement, holistic identification, and curriculum techniques.
SOURCE: Paula Olszewski-Kubilius, Saiying Steenbergen-Hu, Dana Thomson, and Rhonda Rosen, “Minority Achievement Gaps in STEM: Findings of a Longitudinal Study of Project Excite,” Gifted Child Quarterly (October 2016).
