Mentoring and Counseling Interventions
Exposure to gun violence traumatizes children – and this trauma follows them into the classroom. We partner with community-based organizations to identify and evaluate trauma-informed interventions, including mentorship and counseling programs, that surface and strengthen skills in students that help them navigate difficult situations and succeed in school.
While gun violence may affect boys more directly as participants, our research suggests as high as 38% of school-aged girls in Chicago public high schools exhibit signs of PTSD — double the probability of PTSD in service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan- as a result of high rates of trauma exposure, including gun violence.
Youth Guidance’s Working on Womanhood (WOW) program, a group-based peer mentoring program serving school aged girls in Chicago neighborhood schools, reduces PTSD symptoms by 22% in addition to reducing anxiety and depression.
Our evaluation of Youth Guidance’s Becoming a Man (BAM), a school-based group counseling program for young men in 7th-12th grades, found that BAM participants experienced 50% fewer arrests for violent crimes.
Back to Our Future (B2OF)
Back to Our Future (B2OF) is a state-funded, district-led, evidence-informed effort to re-engage disconnected students at an elevated risk for gun violence involvement.
Post-Secondary Champions
The Education Lab partnered with Chicago Public Schools to help implement a program embedding post-secondary advisors in schools to provide personalized supports for students’ post-secondary career and education outcomes.
Communities in Schools (CIS)
The Education Lab partnered with Communities in Schools to evaluate an intervention program of academic and socio-emotional learning supports for students at risk of dropping out of school.
Chicago Student Success Initiative (CSSI)
The Education Lab partnered with Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to develop new interventions for schools disproportionately serving students at the highest risk of school dropout or violence involvement.
Scaling Promising Practices in Youth Mentoring
This case study by Results for America highlights the Crime Lab and Education Lab’s role in the City of Chicago’s bold initiative to expand the evidence-based Becoming a Man group mentoring model to serve thousands of young men.
Randomized evaluation of a school-based, trauma-informed group intervention for young women in Chicago
Science Advances journal publication.
Working on Womanhood- Research Brief
Research brief for the Working on Womanhood project.
Seizing the Opportunity to Advance Education Equity
2021 Education Lab report on barriers to education faced by CPS students.
Latest Updates
Scaling Up High-Dosage Tutoring: Early Lessons from the Personalized Learning Initiative
Hear from our MDRC partners Leigh Parise in conversation with Barbara Condliffe about early lessons learned from our Personalized Learning Initiative, an effort that is supporting and studying the expansion of high-dosage tutoring programs in school districts across the country.
Inside the Lab: Using tutoring to reverse pandemic-era learning loss
The University of Chicago goes inside the Education Lab to learn how experts are working with public school districts nationwide to tackle learning loss and scale solutions to set students up for future success.
Transform your nonprofit from direct impact to systemic change
The Fast Company covers the University of Chicago Education Lab’s partnership with Saga Education. Together, we’ve amassed evidence through rigorous research that high-impact tutoring leads to significant educational progress.
