School dropout interventions: Assessing what works

By Carmen Pannone, University of Cagliari, Italy

School dropout is a problem of global concern due to the negative personal and social consequences it can lead to. Numerous intervention programs, targeting either all students or specifically those identified as at-risk, have been developed and implemented to reduce the dropout rate, although they have shown mixed results regarding their effectiveness. To investigate whether these inconsistent results are due to intervention characteristics and/or study methods, Wang and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of 26 experimental or quasi-experimental studies related to school completion in K-12 US education.

The meta-analysis found a positive and statistically significant effect of dropout programs (ES= +0.19). Findings revealed that using randomly assigned methods or quasi-experimental matched methods produced a larger effect size than non-random methods. Moreover, compared to interventions that exclusively targeted academics (ES = +0.12), behavioral interventions (that address emotional and/or behavioral factors contributing to a student’s decision to leave school) and combined interventions produced greater effect sizes (respectively, ES = +0.33 and ES = +0.31).

These results suggest integrating both behavioral and multicomponent interventions to tackle school dropout, and ensuring equivalent baseline participant characteristics between treatment and control groups in school dropout studies.