Check & Connect Research

Of the dropout prevention interventions reviewed by the U.S. Department of Education's What Works Clearinghouse, Check & Connect is the only program found to have strong evidence of positive effects on staying in school.

Check & Connect began in 1990 with a five-year grant from the Office of Special Education Programs, U.S. Department of Education. Since then, many grants have furthered the development of Check & Connect, including replication, efficacy, theory development, sustainability, adaptation, and evaluation studies. See Selected Findings and Current Research for details.

Because Check & Connect is an empirically-supported intervention, the goal of the Institute on Community Integration’s ongoing research agenda is to modify and improve Check & Connect to improve student outcomes.

Of the dropout prevention interventions reviewed by the U.S. Department of Education's What Works Clearinghouse, Check & Connect is the only program found to have strong evidence of positive effects on staying in school. Read the blog article, A Tour of Check & Connect’s What Works Clearinghouse Report, part II in the series on evidence-based interventions in education.

Current Research

Presently, the two primary Check & Connect research foci are: 1) ongoing theory development on student engagement and 2) understanding and improving assessment-to-intervention linkages. Current research studies serve at least one of four functions to answer specific questions:

• Establishing greater efficacy: For whom does Check & Connect work and under what conditions?
• Investigating student engagement: How can parents and teachers support student engagement? How can Check & Connect contribute to developing better environments for increasing student engagement?
• Developing a toolkit for Attend – Engage – Invest: What strategies promote each and all of these three steps (attending school, being engaged, and investing in one's future) toward full student engagement with school and learning?
• Adapting Check & Connect to other contexts: How has Check & Connect been adapted to other contexts and student populations?

Acknowledgements

Research on Check & Connect began in 1990 with five years of funding support from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP). The principal investigators on this grant were Drs. Bruininks, Thurlow, and Christenson, but many professionals from Minneapolis Public Schools were instrumental in obtaining the initial funding. Most importantly, the development of Check & Connect (1990-1995) was a collaborative effort between researchers at the Institute on Community Integration (ICI), University of Minnesota, and school-based professionals in Minneapolis Public Schools. All subsequent research on Check & Connect has been based at ICI.

Many university and school-based professionals have contributed to the design of and research on Check & Connect (see Manual for specific acknowledgements by edition).

Funding for Original Research

The original research on Check & Connect was funded in part by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs.

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