Building Student Ownership and Responsibility: Examining Student Outcomes from a Research-Practice Partnership

This paper is situated at the intersection of two trends in education research: a growing emphasis on the importance of co-cognitive traits and emergence of research-practice partnerships to more effectively scale effective practices. Our partnership focused on building student ownership and responsibility for their learning, which means creating school-wide practices that foster a culture of learning and engagement among students. We report evidence showing that participating in this improvement process was related to small but desirable improvements in grades and course failure rates, while the impact on absences and disciplinary infractions were not statistically significant. We also use qualitative data about the quality of implementation to understand how school-level adaptations may be related to observed outcomes. [A version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Association of Education Finance and Policy in Denver, CO, March 17-19, 2016.]