Evidence from a series of six NIH/NIDA funded studiesdemonstrates that Ripple Effects has been successful in meaningfully and significantly boosting academic achievement for poor and minority students.

The academic and behavioral gap between the economic haves and have nots, and between African American, Latino, and Native American students and all others has been documented extensively.

Why focus on the non-academic factors?

A host of non-academic risk factors in multiple domains - personal, familial, peer, school, community and societal, are correlated with overall school success or failure. Individually or combined, they can:

1. Create chronic stress that impacts attention, working memory, and higher order thinking, especially problem solving
2. Contribute to a fundamental inequity in social-emotional readiness to learn
3. Negatively impact school climate in general, and teacher-student and peer to peer relationships
4. Filter teacher expectations through ethnicity, gender and class-based lenses

The result is disproportionate discipline rates and intolerable academic achievement gaps.  

An innovative model 

To mitigate the educational impact of socio-economic disadvantage, Ripple Effects does not simply increase the dosage of methods that so far haven’t worked.  It takes a completely different approach, one that is both innovative and grounded in science.  Ripple Effects empowers students to privately address personal risk factors, through evidence-based affective, cognitive-behavioral, social skill and social change strategies, using rich media, differentiated instructional methods and extensive training in language arts skills to do it. 

Barriers to learning become the bridges to learning

Ripple Effects takes what previously may have been potential barriers to learning – problematic experiences and risk factors in multiple domains, from social-emotional skill deficits to race-based teacher expectations  – and turns them into bridges to learning. Ripple Effects’ student tutoring software uses the most challenging parts of each students’ own life as the starting point to develop students’:

1. Belief in their capacity to learn and read (self-efficacy)
2. Motivation to learn and read
3. Emotional readiness to learn and read
4. Social-emotional competencies linked to reading comprehension (empathy and problem solving)
5. Responsible, assertive, pro-social behavior
6. Specific Language Arts skills in listening, speaking, reading, writing, media analysis 

Ripple Effects professional development program uses a parallel model to increase teacher effectiveness. It uses each teacher's points of greatest personal challenge, to build core social emotional competencies (the base for personal leadership). It builds cultural competence, classroom management skills, expertise in addressing diverse leaning needs (including ELL and SWD), and program implementation skills. 

The result is improved higher order thinking and problem solving skills, greater empathy, higher grades, fewer discipline referrals, less absenteeism, and in some cases, lowered depression scores.