<p> Educational leaders have many choices of organizational, curricular, and instructional interventions for academically underprepared high school freshmen. In the past decade, doubled instructional time in core subjects has become an increasingly popular intervention in large public school districts. Results so far have been mixed and there are no studies investigating the effects of this strategy in the private school sector. The purpose of this retrospective, pretest-posttest quasi-experiment with nonequivalent groups was to examine whether significant differences existed in the academic achievement gains of academically underprepared Catholic high school freshmen who received double-dosed mathematics and/or English instruction during ninth grade compared to equally underprepared peers who did not. The study used a dataset of 493 cases from an urban Catholic diocese in the San Francisco Bay Area. Academic achievement data consisted of archived mathematics and reading scores from two standardized, norm-referenced batteries with a published predictive validity metric of <i>r</i> = .83 (pretest: HSPT, posttest: PLAN). Independent <i>t-</i>test, ANCOVA, and ANOVA analyses were conducted to identify differences between group means and variances. Analyses revealed no statistically significant differences in posttest scores in mathematics or reading between the groups, challenging existing assumptions from previous effectiveness findings in the public school sector. The results indicate that, as a stand-alone intervention, doubled instructional time in the core subjects does not accelerate achievement gains for academically underprepared freshmen at urban Catholic high schools.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PROQUEST/oai:pqdtoai.proquest.com:3570376 |
| Date | 09 July 2013 |
| Creators | Marlatt, Eva Strohm |
| Publisher | University of Phoenix |
| Source Sets | ProQuest.com |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
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