GEAR UP Pennsylvania (GUPA): Student Tracking and Evaluation for Two Urban School Districts

After developing the GEAR UP Online Evaluation System (GOES), HEMS worked with Pennsylvania state administrators to secure a $12.5 million GEAR UP grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The Pennsylvania GEAR UP Program (GUPA) will help as many as 14,000 students in the Philadelphia and Harrisburg school districts prepare for college, and help the students and their families pay their tuition once they get there.

As part of the grant, HEMS has assisted the Pennsylvania State GEAR UP Program with formative and summative evaluation, benchmark development, scholarship modeling, and data collection and performance reporting services using GOES.

The project currently includes 25 middle schools in the Philadelphia and Harrisburg school districts, for which the GOES maintains individual student-level demographic, program participation and performance data on over 5,000 GEAR UP participants for longitudinal analysis. Data are uploaded electronically and/or manually for real-time updates. Information is verified and standardized to ensure accuracy; it is secured to ensure confidentiality.

Currently, in year two of the project, HEMS is implementing a quasi-experimental summative evaluation design to assess whether and to what extent GEAR UP participants succeed in achieving course-taking, grade-point-average, school persistence/completion rates, and college-going rate goals compared to similar non-participating students in the Harrisburg and Philadelphia school systems.

A range of data domains, topics, and sources are being studied, from trends in standardized test scores and patterns of course enrollment, through student transcripts, to behavior to attitudes and awareness of postsecondary costs and options, through structured online and in-person surveys.

The longitudinal impact study is adopting a dynamic cohort design, where each student who happens to be enrolled in a treatment or comparison group school at the time of the data collection will be included in the study.

Data will be analyzed using SAS and SPSS to detect impacts between treatment and comparison groups (i.e., availability analysis) as well as among those within the treatment group (i.e., participation analysis to determine optimal service mix and dosage).

It will examine intermediate, long-term, and cumulative outcomes associated with participation in GEAR UP. Moreover, the evaluation will be supplemented by an implementation analysis to ensure that outcomes and impacts are studied within the context of the environment in, and conditions under, which the program operates.

Follow the below links for more information:

• GEAR UP Kentucky (GUKY)
• Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education
• U.S Department of Education's GEAR UP Website

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