The Study of Deeper Learning: Opportunities and Outcomes—funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation—aimed to determine whether students attending high schools with a mature and at least moderately well implemented approach to promoting deeper learning actually experienced greater deeper learning opportunities and outcomes than they would have had they not attended these schools. In this report, the authors extend the analyses from the original study to explore the connections between deeper learning opportunities, deeper learning competencies (in the interpersonal, intrapersonal, and cognitive domains), and high school graduation.

The findings indicate that students’ opportunities to engage in deeper learning and the deeper learning competencies they developed were positively associated with graduating from high school. The ways in which deeper learning opportunities and competencies were connected to graduation differed across study locations, however.

Key findings include the following:

Students’ deeper learning competencies were positively associated with high school graduation rates, but the nature of the association differed between California and New York City.

• A composite measure of interpersonal and intrapersonal competencies was significantly related to high school graduation for students in California but not for students in New York City: California students with a value on the composite measure one standard deviation above the average had graduation rates 5 percentage points higher than students with average values.
• Conversely, a composite measure of cognitive competencies was significantly related with high school graduation for students in New York City but not for students in California: New York City students with a value on the composite measure one standard deviation above the average had graduation rates 14 percentage points higher than students with average values.

Four of the nine individual deeper learning opportunity measures (opportunities for collaboration, learning how to learn, receiving feedback, and real-world connections) were positively associated with high school graduation in California, but none of the measures were significantly associated with graduation in New York City.

• In California, students with an opportunity measure score one standard deviation above average had graduation rates approximately 4 to 5 percentage points higher than students with average scores.

Some, but not all, of the interpersonal and intrapersonal competencies were positively associated with high school graduation, with differences evident between students in California and New York City.

• In California, six of the eight competency measures (collaboration skills, academic engagement, motivation to learn, self-efficacy, locus of control, and perseverance) were significantly related to graduation: students with a score one standard deviation above average had graduation rates approximately 4 to 5 percentage points higher than students with average scores.
• In New York City, two of the eight competency measures (self-efficacy and perseverance) were significantly related to graduation: students with a score one standard deviation above average had graduation rates approximately 6 to 7 percentage points higher than students with average scores.

Two of the three cognitive competency measures were positively associated with high school graduation in New York City, but none of the competency measures were associated with graduation in California.

• In New York City, students with a reading or mathematics score one standard deviation above average had graduation rates approximately 13 percentage points higher than students with average scores.

The general pattern of results supports the idea that there is a connection between students’ deeper learning competencies and graduation from high school. The different findings for California and New York City, however, raise questions about how state and local context may hinder or promote the connection between deeper learning and graduation.

Deeper Learning and Graduation: Is There a Relationship? by Jordan Rickles is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.