School Readiness
Create strong foundations for early learning.
A collection of education research funded by Overdeck Family Foundation.
As a leading education funder, Overdeck Family Foundation supports novel, rigorous, and actionable research that strengthens evidence-informed decision-making and supports the adoption of evidence-based programs and practices. Our goal is to surface what works for students by generating research that highlights promising models, effective programs, and outstanding opportunities to improve school readiness, school success, and future readiness outcomes.
Aligned with our value of “learn better, together,” we are committed to promoting transparent and accessible research practices. We share timely findings from the studies we fund—whether or not they show evidence of impact—and update the Research Repository as new research is funded, completed, and published.
Chronic Absenteeism
Completed
Connection, Trust, and Learning: Student Attendance in the Middle and High School Grades Following the COVID-19 Pandemic
This study examines how student absenteeism changed in Chicago Public Schools following the COVID-19 pandemic and explores how attendance relates to academic outcomes and school climate.
Completed
Effective Family-School Partnerships Lead to Improved Student Attendance: How the TalkingPoints Universal Family Engagement Platform Decreased Absence in Tulsa Public Schools
This study involved over 30,000 students from 71 schools within the Tulsa Public School District. The research team used observational data and propensity score matching to evaluate the impact of TalkingPoints on student attendance rates.
Family Engagement
Completed
Evaluation of the National Expansion of PBS SoCalʼs Family Math Initiative
This mixed-methods study evaluated the implementation of workshops and activities for Family Math, a bilingual, free, play-based tool designed by PBS SoCal that focuses on building math positivity, confidence, and knowledge of foundational math skills for families, particularly those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged, with children ages two to five years old.
Completed
Hidden in Plain Sight: A Way Forward for Equity-Centered Family Engagement
This is a national online survey of 1,405 parents, 300 teachers, and 317 principals who work in public elementary, middle, and high schools.
Joyful & Rigorous STEM
Completed
Evaluation of NBA Math Hoops: Impacts on Middle School Students’ Math Outcomes and Engagement
This randomized controlled trial (RCT) evaluates the impact of NBA Math Hoops, a basketball-themed board game, on middle school students’ math achievement, engagement, and attitudes toward math.
Completed
Messages Matter
This is a report on a series of national online surveys of high school students and parents.
K-12 EdTech
Completed
Scaling Teachers’ Professional Development for ASSISTments Companion Report: Implementation Analysis of the ASSISTments Intervention
This QED was designed to estimate the impact of the ASSISTments platform, a freely available educational technology platform for teachers and students to support math achievement, alongside a virtual professional learning community (vPLC), designed to connect rural teachers and those with limited access to in-person learning.
Completed
Long-Term Effects of an Online Math Tool on U.S. Adolescents’ Achievement
This randomized controlled trial (RCT) examined the effects of ASSISTments, a freely available educational technology platform to support formative assessment and provide opportunities for assisted practice in math, on eighth graders’ math achievement a year post-intervention in 63 North Carolina schools.
K-12 High-Quality Instructional Materials
Completed
Evaluation of Zearn Supplemental with Dedicated Implementation Support
This is a quasi-experimental study with propensity score matching to evaluate the impact of the Zearn Math Supplemental with dedicated implementation support platform on student mathematics achievement and learning in grades four through eight across three Louisiana school districts.
Completed
Efficacy of Zearn Math Over Two Years in Grades 3 to 5: An Experiment in Texas
This randomized controlled trial (RCT) examined the impacts of Zearn, a software platform for mathematics learning, on math assessment scores in a sample of 64 schools in an urban Texas district over two years.
Maternal and Child Health & Well-Being
Completed
Validation of the Kidsights Measurement Tool: A Parent-Reported Instrument to Track Children’s Development at the Population Level
The Kidsights Measurement Tool (KMT) is a parent-report, population-level measure for children from birth to age five that tracks group-level differences in motor, cognitive, language, and social-emotional development. This validation study examines KMT’s feasibility for use in large-scale, representative surveys to generate population-based estimates of early development and address the current gap in scalable, holistic indicators of child well-being.
Completed
Validation of the CONNECT Survey Co-Designed with Parents to Strengthen Parent/Caregiver-Clinician Relationships in Pediatric Primary Care
This validation study examines the reliability and validity of the Reach Out and Read (ROR) CONNECT Survey, a brief parent survey co-designed with families to measure the relational aspects of a well-child visit.
Out-of-School Programming
Completed
Voters Say Afterschool Programs are a Necessity
Afterschool Alliance commissioned a national poll of registered voters to understand public support for afterschool programs.
Completed
Bridging the Summer Gap: What District Leaders Say About Learning Beyond the School Year
The National Summer Learning Association (NSLA) and School Superintendents Association (AASA) partnered with Gallup to survey U.S. school district superintendents to better understand the summer learning opportunities their districts offer, including the types of activities provided in 2024 and the activities planned for 2025.
Pre-K Curriculum
Completed
Scaling Up a Kindergarten and Pre-K Curriculum with a Focus on Teacher Agency
In this case discussion, the researchers analyze scaling strategies adopted by Tools of the Mind, a pre-kindergarten and kindergarten curriculum emphasizing active teacher engagement supporting high-quality play and building school readiness.
Completed
Young Mathematicians in Worcester Evaluation
This is a pre-post study of Young Mathematicians-Worcester (YM-W), a preschool math program serving young children and their caregivers in Worcester, MA.
Professional Learning
Completed
SEEDS of Early Learning: A Randomized Controlled Trial of an Early Literacy Teacher Professional Development Program
This clustered randomized controlled trial (RCT) examined the impact of the SEEDS PD program on students’ oral language, literacy, and social-emotional outcomes.
Completed
Elevating Classroom Learning Conditions: An Evaluation of the Elevate Platform’s 2023 Direct Support Implementation Model
This report summarizes an efficacy analysis of the Project for Education Research that Scale’s (PERTS’s) Elevate tool, a progress-monitoring tool for middle and high school teachers to capture insights from students, reflect on the feedback, select instructional practices, and assess changes in student perceptions.
Strategic Staffing
Completed
Evaluating Opportunity Culture: Improving Student Achievement Through Strategic Staffing in West Texas
This four-year mixed-methods evaluation examines the effects of Opportunity Culture in Ector County ISD on student math and reading achievement.
Completed
Early Evidence of Improved Educator Outcomes in Next Education Workforce Models
This is a descriptive study that examined differences in outcomes for teachers in ASU Next Education Workforce strategic staffing models and teachers in non-Next Education Workforce settings that continued business-as-usual instruction.
Tutoring
Completed
The Impact of Tutoring and EdTech in Greenville County Schools, South Carolina
This brief summarizes the preliminary findings of the Personalized Learning Initiative (PLI) partnership with Greenville County Schools in the 2023-24 school year to study two intervention models, both designed to provide personalized mathematics support.
Completed
What’s in a Contract? How Outcomes-Based Contracting Reshapes School District–Vendor Relationships
In this landscape study, researchers examined how school districts are using outcomes-based contracting (OBC), or contracts with vendors that tie at least part of payment to student outcomes, through analysis of 123 contracts related to the purchase of products and services for instructional activities.
Young Children’s Language Development
Completed
Dual-MEG Interbrain Synchronization During Turn-Taking Verbal Interactions Between Mothers and Children
This is a correlational study of brain activity of 23 mother-child pairs as measured by dual MEG (magnetoencephalography) machines during various verbal interactions.
Completed
LENA Grow’s Impact on Children’s Kindergarten Readiness
This white paper summarizes evidence from three quasi-experimental studies of LENA Grow, a professional development program for early educators designed to increase the number of interactions between teachers and children, in three different school districts.
Other
Completed
Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges
This is a QED study that leverages multiple sources of data to understand inequities in admission to highly selective colleges and universities by family income.
Completed
Standardized Test Scores and Academic Performance at Ivy-Plus Colleges
This is a descriptive study analyzing admissions and transcript records for students at multiple Ivy-Plus colleges to study the relationship between standardized (SAT/ACT) test scores, high school GPA, and first-year college grades.
