SOE News
Institute of Education Sciences Funds $10 Million Center for Rural Education Support
November, 2005
Over 25% of public school students in America are from small towns and rural communities. These communities stretch across the United States and are home to 30% of the schools in our country¹. The National Research Center on Rural Education Support (NRCRES), a newly established research center housed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is conducting research to produce and disseminate research-based strategies to help rural schools meet the diverse educational needs of their students.
Funded in the fall of 2004 with a $10 million, five-year award from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, the center is led by School of Education professors Tom Farmer and Lynne Vernon-Feagans. The center’s works force includes more than 40 faculty, staff, and graduate research fellows from a variety of disciplines and fields.
"The needs of rural schools and communities nationwide are extremely diverse," Farmer said. "Their populations are diverse, they are geographically diverse, their resource issues are diverse and they face diverse issues regarding economic development. For example, in some rural schools, the student population is declining and financial resources are dwindling. Others are maintaining stability while still others are experiencing major changes such as suburbanization."
In the face of this diversity, rural schools confront many common challenges. They all are working to meet the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, particularly to attract and retain highly qualified teachers. They are striving to boost their students’ achievement. They are seeking to meet the needs of all students, including the increasing number of English Language Learners. They are looking for ways to contribute to the economic development and vitality of their communities.
NRCRES has launched three rural education research initiatives to address the needs of rural schools nationwide. In the first ─ the Early School Transition Collaboration ─ researchers are working with kindergarten and first-grade teachers to identify effective strategies for improving academic success of struggling learners. The goal is enhance the learning of these struggling learners early in school so that they can succeed later in school.
"We are focusing on struggling learners because these are the children most at risk for continued poor school achievement," said Vernon-Feagans, who directs this initiative. "Our model emphasizes one-to-one interaction between the teacher and the child during literacy-focused diagnostic teaching. We are developing a variety of research-based strategies for struggling learners based on their assessed level of skill."
The intervention is conducted collaboratively by the UNC intervention professionals and the teacher. "This professional development model of collaborative consultation allows teachers to have input and gives them control over the progress of the intervention," Vernon-Feagans explained.
In its initial stage, the Early School Transition Collaboration is being conducted in a rural N.C. county, one of the 10 poorest counties in the state and one where there is significant adult illiteracy. Four schools are participating, two in the intervention condition and two in a control condition. The classrooms involve a total of 120-140 children in each condition, and the researchers are focusing on five struggling learners in each classroom.
"We are in the first step of this study," Vernon-Feagans said. "After we learn more about how to tailor the intervention to each school and teacher in order to meet the particular needs of each child, we will broaden the study to a much larger sample in a variety of poor counties around the United States through distance education and technology."
The second research initiative ─ the Rural Early Adolescent Learning Program (Project REAL) ─ is investigating strategies to support fifth- and sixth-grade teachers who have high concentrations of low-achieving early adolescents. Currently being implemented in two school districts in Virginia and West Virginia, Project REAL is exploring ways of improving students’ academic engagement, social engagement and motivation to learn. Other key aspects of this initiative are helping teachers address behavior issues in the classroom and strengthening parent involvement. The work builds on previous longitudinal research conducted by UNC investigators.
"The early adolescent period is a critical time for a child," said Farmer, director of Project REAL. "We are studying methods that schools will be able to implement to improve students’ success."
REAL has identified a few teachers who are leaders at each participating school and provided a weeklong training program to them, teaching them strategies to improve the academic, social and behavioral dynamics in their classrooms. "We know that these strategies work," Farmer said. "We need to learn from the teachers what they need in order to implement these strategies in their schools."
The teachers bring their new knowledge back to their colleagues through meetings and in-service training. "We are working to develop a model that addresses the unique issues of differing communities while also identifying fundamental strategies that can be applied in many settings," Farmer said.
After the initial stage, Project REAL will expand to work with a broad range of school districts throughout the country. Currently, efforts are being made to extend this work to North Dakota, Kansas and Iowa during the 2006-07 school year. The project also intends to focus on immigrant families and the unique issues they face.
The third research initiative ─ Distance Education ─ is exploring how to use technology to improve achievement in geographically remote rural schools. Led by Wallace Hannum, NRCRES associate director for technology and faculty member at the School of Education, the Distance Education initiative has conducted a national survey of leaders of rural schools to determine their current use of distance education, the technologies used, their level of satisfaction, their needs for additional distance education and the barriers they encounter.
The telephone survey reached nearly 400 rural schools, a random sample of 10 percent of rural schools in the country. Sixty-eight percent of the respondents said they used distance education last year. Ninety-two percent of those indicated they were satisfied or very satisfied with it. "I was somewhat surprised to learn that so many rural schools are already using distance education," Hannum said. "We didn’t find many schools without Internet connectivity."
Sixty-five percent of the rural schools surveyed also said they need to add to their distance education in order to provide richer curriculum offerings to their students. They want to offer more advanced level courses, such as enrichment or Advanced Placement courses, in all subject areas, but especially in mathematics, science, history and foreign language. "Leaders of rural schools want to enable their students to remain in rural schools and get a full curriculum," Hannum noted.
The survey respondents identified several barriers they have encountered in their efforts to offer distance education. In many cases, distance education is not a priority of the district. Also many rural schools lack trained instructional personnel who understand how to incorporate distance education effectively into their work.
Based on the results of the national survey and a comprehensive literature review, the Distance Education initiative is designing research studies to investigate how to enhance distance education in rural schools. "Our goal is to find better ways of doing distance education that can work in rural schools and to disseminate those findings widely," Hannum said.
The center will host a national conference in rural education in the final years of the project, in order to facilitate national dissemination and collaboration. Updates of the center’s activities and research findings are posted on its Web site at www.nrcres.org.
The center’s national Advisory Board ─ comprised of rural education researchers, practitioners and heads of national rural education organizations ─ held its first meeting in Chapel Hill in September 2005. After reviewing the center’s work to date, the Advisory Board focused on the importance of disseminating what is being learned to rural schools across the nation.
"The level of thoughtfulness has been great," said one Board member. "The center has been very responsive and productive. We all share responsibility for the results."
Johnson, J. & Strange, M. (2005). Why Rural Matters 2005: The Facts About Rural Education in the 50 States. Arlington, VA: The Rural School and Community Trust, pp. 1, 3.
National Center for Education Statistics (2005). Common Core of Data File: Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey: School Year 2003-04.