Overdeck Family Foundation helped LENA, a nonprofit that accelerates child language development using data from “talk pedometers,” scale its impact and build innovation and research capacities. Amidst the pandemic, LENA adapted its 10-week in-service professional development program into two stackable five-week sessions, increasing support for implementing partners and making it easier to both run and participate in the program. Teachers who participated in just one five-week session made 85 percent of the gains seen in the full program.

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Overdeck Family Foundation worked with the New Jersey Pandemic Relief Fund to launch the New Jersey Tutoring Corps, a high-dosage, small-group, tutoring program designed to accelerate learning recovery for students impacted by pandemic-related learning losses. Piloted during the summer of 2021, the program effectively increased participants’ math proficiency and excitement for math.

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Overdeck Family Foundation funding helped Zearn, a top-rated online math platform, identify strategies that most effectively catch up students who struggle in math. Zearn conducted a quasi-experimental study exploring the differences in student performance when directed to a learning “acceleration” versus remediational approach. Researchers found that when students were directed to an accelerated learning approach, they successfully completed twice the amount of grade-level lessons and struggled less in their overall math learning, compared to their counterparts.

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Overdeck Family Foundation’s funding allowed Next Education Workforce to grow the reach of its work, which reimagines the teaching profession and classroom design through team-based staffing models. In the organization’s second year of work, Next Education Workforce increased teacher reach by 97 percent and student reach by more than 1,000 percent. A 2022 evaluation revealed that teachers in Next Education Workforce were statistically significantly more satisfied with their jobs, collaborated more, and had better teacher-student interactions.

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Imagine Science, a collaboration of four leading national youth organizations and the STEM Next Opportunity Fund, aims to implement high-quality, out-of-school STEM programming in communities nationwide. The organization utilized Overdeck Family Foundation funding to expand its ability to provide summer and afterschool STEM opportunities to new communities, leading to an increase in the total number of sites implementing programs to 15 in 2023. Post-program surveys show that 71 percent of students demonstrate an increase in STEM engagement following participation in an Imagine Science program.

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