Focus Areas
Product Types
This paper describes Teachers and Students for Community Oriented Research and Education (TSCORE), a community-university partnership that focuses on CTE health science teachers and provides pedagogical tools, knowledge, and connections needed to bring local, cutting-edge health disparities research into classrooms. Framed in critical pedagogy, TSCORE delivers 1) teacher empowerment, 2) implementation support, and 3) student conscientization. The CTE partnership project challenges the academic-vocational divide by moving past views of CTE as a job training platform for entry level positions and invites students to experience first-hand how a career in science and research can have a positive impact on the health of their communities.
Year: 2018
Product Type: Journal Article
Focus Areas: Adult Learners, Career Pathways, STEM Education
What are the essential skills young professionals need to enter and succeed in Kansas City’s regional workplace? The Essential Skills Study explores this question by asking young professionals, 1-5 years into their career, about the skills they utilize most in their current jobs and where they learned those skills. The study, commissioned by The Debruce Foundation with support from KC Rising, KC STEM Alliance, Prep-KC, Workforce Partnership, and the Kauffman Foundation, identifies six essential skills for career readiness. Specific recommendations for educators and employers to support essential skill development are provided at the end of the report.
Year: 2020
Product Type: Report
Focus Areas: Essential Skills/SEL, Career Pathways
Essential Skills Study (Webinar)
This webinar, provided to members of the KC STEM Alliance, provides an overview of key findings of the Essential Skills Study. Participants learned about the gaps in career preparation in six essential skill areas: Communication, Collaboration, Interpersonal, Critical Thinking, Proactivity, and Executive Function. A discussion of the influence of in-school and out-of-school experiences to the development of essential skills is also covered.
Year: 2020
Product Type: Webinar
Focus Areas: Essential Skills/SEL, Career Pathways, STEM Education
This report examines the potential impact of Project Lead the Way (PLTW) on two cohorts of Missouri students who began high school in 2013 and 2014 (145,619 students). These students were tracked through high school and into post-secondary education and training programs up to and including academic year 2019-2020. Thirteen percent of all cohort members enrolled in at least one PLTW course. Students who took PLTW courses outperformed those who did not on all high school and college outcomes examined, and these positive outcomes persisted even after controlling for school and student characteristics, including students’ achievement prior to high school. Differences between students who did and did not take PLTW courses were substantially larger for those who took two or more PLTW courses compared to those taking only a single PLTW course.
Year: 2022
Product Type: Report
Focus Areas: Career Pathways, STEM Education, Postsecondary Education
This dashboard was commissioned by Latinx Education Collaborative to provide a better understanding of educators of color in the 14-county Kansas City metropolitan area. The dashboard displays 2016 – 2019 educator workforce data provided by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Kansas State Department of Education.
Year: 2021
Product Type: Dashboard
Focus Areas: Teachers Work
This study was commissioned by Revolucion Educativa to better understand the enrollment and completion rates of students of color in teacher preparation programs in Kansas and Missouri. Using 2014-2018 Title II data, the report highlights regional progress toward recruiting and graduating students from their traditional and alternative certification programs. The report provides specific recommendations for recruiting and retaining students of color in the Kansas City region.
Product Type: Report
Focus Areas: Teachers Work
This study was commissioned by the Latinx Education Collaborative to better understand teacher diversity in the greater Kansas City metropolitan area. The report provides a snapshot of full-time elementary, middle, and secondary teachers of color in the 14-county Kansas City metropolitan area –where they work, the demographics of their schools, and their overall three-year retention rates. Links to the interactive maps are provided in the report.
Year: 2021
Product Type: Report
Focus Areas: Teachers Work
Members of the PLTW research team from the UERC, St. Louis University and the University of Missouri-Columbia presented their research at STEM Day at the Missouri Capitol. The presentation shows rates of enrollment and degree completion in STEM programs in college for Missouri high school students. The presentation also extends the results of the final PLTW report (click to view final report) by providing more rigorous estimates of the impact of PLTW on STEM enrollment and degree completion in college.
Year: 2023
Product Type: Report
Focus Areas: Career Pathways
The practice brief provides key study findings and 13 actionable steps to improve experiences for adult learners.
Year: 2021
Product Type: Checklist
Focus Areas: Adult Learners
The final report includes complete and detailed study findings by functional area (teaching and learning, information technology, student-facing services, admissions and recruitment, and administration) as well as key recommendations for institutions, both in the midst of and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.
Year: 2021
Product Type: Report
Focus Areas: Adult Learners
This dashboard was commissioned by Show Me KC Schools (https://showmekcschools.org/) to provide a detailed and dynamic understanding of applications to Kansas City schools for the 2019-20, 2020-21 and 2021-22 academic years. SchoolAppKC is intended to streamline the school application process for families in the Kansas City Public School boundaries.
Year: 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022
Product Type: Dashboard
The purpose of this study was to report on teachers’ perceptions of using health disparities content to engage high school students in urban communities. To understand teachers’ experiences of integrating health disparities content in the classroom, focus group were conducted before and after a three-week, 80-hour summer PD with three cohorts of high school teachers. The study found: 1) Teachers showed increased awareness of the social challenges students face; 2) Teachers appreciated the role of community engagement and student activism as a solution to health disparities and felt that they would be able to engage students with this material; 3) Teachers needed resources, mostly in the form of community connections, to fully integrate health disparities lessons. Findings suggest that teachers are prepared to integrate information about community context in their classes and could be furthered empowered to teach about health disparities with the right community connections and engagement infrastructure.
Year: 2018
Product Type: Journal Article
Focus Areas: Teachers Work, STEM Education
For teachers, COVID-19 related school closures resulted in a transformation of many facets of their work, requiring them to take on new and often shifting roles, including learning new technologies and juggling work and home responsibilities. While a number of studies have begun to shed light on how teachers navigated these rapid, unplanned changes to their working conditions, prior research shares a fundamental limitation—most existing studies rely exclusively on evidence collected after schools closed. This paper provides, to the best of our knowledge, the first detailed evidence of teachers’ work before and after schools closed in response to COVID-19. We leverage unique longitudinal data on teachers’ daily work activities and affect collected across the 2019–2020 school year using the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM). Beginning in fall 2019, participants completed DRMs on up to three timepoints prior to school closures and one additional timepoint in May 2020, after schools had closed. Given the scope of our longitudinal data, we are able to describe in detail, the changes in teachers’ daily work in the initial months of the pandemic.
Year: 2021
Product Type: Journal Article
Focus Areas: Teachers Work, Career Pathways
