This case study illustrates how rural districts used NCRERN’s continuous improvement cycle to identify, test, and refine attendance interventions—highlighting both evidence of impact and practical lessons about implementation in rural settings.
This brief finds that personalized messaging—and to a lesser extent family engagement—reduced student absences in rural districts, while mentoring and postcards showed no consistent attendance benefits.
This brief shows that absenteeism in rural New York and Ohio districts—particularly in upper grades—is closely linked to lower academic achievement, underscoring the importance of broad attendance improvement strategies beyond focusing solely on
This brief outlines NCRERN’s New York and Ohio Rural Research Network, highlighting how rural districts collaborate through a structured continuous improvement process to pilot, evaluate, and scale evidence-based interventions in attendance and
This brief explains NCRERN’s five-step continuous improvement cycle, which helps rural districts use data and rigorous testing to pilot, evaluate, and scale effective interventions collaboratively.
NCRERN is a research-practice network that partners with rural districts to test, evaluate, and scale evidence-based strategies—using a continuous improvement model—to improve student outcomes and expand research on rural education.
This study shows that parental text messaging is most effective when messages are personalized and thoughtfully framed, with certain combinations of message content producing stronger gains in student reading than others.
