Teacher collaboration and instructional program coherence across the transition to high school

Abstract

This study explores to what extent principals perceive instructional program coherence (IPC) and vertical collaboration occur in high schools and their mid-level feeder schools. It also measures IPC and its five components' association with different measures of student achievement. The study took place in the state of Missouri, and 312 principals of high schools with separate feeder middle schools were invited to participate. Electronic and paper surveys as well as public data were collected and analyzed using descriptive statistics, bivariate correlations, and linear regression. The findings show that principals perceive their school's IPC to be fairly strong, but their vertical collaboration needs improvement. The findings also indicate that only particular IPC components such as curriculum, instruction positively influenced graduation rates, academic climate positively influenced the EOC Algebra 1 scores, and vertical collaboration positively associated with higher average freshman GPA's. A major limitation to this study was the low response rate.

Instructional System Coherence: A Scoping Literature Review

“…Likewise, we identified only seven papers that even peripherally examine the relationship between measures of system coherence and student outcomes (Atchison et al, 2022;Furtak, Circi, and Heredia, 2018;Moon, Camburn, and Sebastian, 2022;Newmann et al, 2011;Polikoff and Porter, 2014;Sebastian and Allensworth, 2012;Thompson, 2021; see Table 2). In one such study, Newmann and colleagues (2001) identified a strong, positive relationship between school-level increases in coherence as reported by teachers and student achievement.…”