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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
November 10, 2004
RTI International Researchers to Evaluate School-Based Violence Prevention Program
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. -- RTI International has been awarded a $9.7 million contract from the U.S. Department of Education to evaluate the effectiveness of a violence-prevention program in middle schools.
The five-year project, funded by the Department of Education's Institute for Education Sciences, will be the first such study on school violence conducted for the Institute, which was established by the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002.
The Institute is charged with expanding knowledge and providing information on the condition of education, practices that improve academic achievement, and the effectiveness of federal and other education programs.
According to RTI project director Suyapa Silvia, Ph.D., very few school-based violence-prevention programs exist in the United States, particularly at the middle school level. Furthermore, few of these programs have been rigorously evaluated.
"The funding for drug and violence prevention exists, but there is not much information for schools to use about effective violence prevention programs because less is known about them," Silvia said. "This study represents a big step."
In this study, RTI will manage the selection, implementation, and evaluation of a middle school-based violence prevention program. Middle schools will be the focus of this study because more middle school students report being victims of crimes at school than high school students, Silvia said.
To conduct the study, researchers will select 40 middle schools nationwide that have large populations and are experiencing problems with school crime and violence. Of 40 selected, 20 will be randomly assigned to receive the violence prevention program, and the others will serve as a control group.
The violence prevention program used in the study will be selected through a competitive process that is currently under way. The program will either be curriculum based (taught in a classroom) or environmental (targets the entire school, such as school policies), or a hybrid of the two.
Subcontractor Tanglewood Research will lead the implementation of the program. Staff will work with the developer and onsite in the schools in order to ensure the program is implemented faithfully.
RTI and subcontractor Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation will lead the evaluation of the program. The team will evaluate how the program is being implemented, what impact the program is having on the students and schools (e.g., in regard to violence, truancy, school attendance), and whether the decrease in problem behaviors is large enough to warrant the cost of the program.
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