The Evaluator's Summary Statement: Ten Years Of The Appalachian Rural Systemic Initiative

INTRODUCTION: The following evaluator´s summary statement was written by Mark St. John, President of Inverness Research Associates, in the summer of 2005 as the ARSI project was concluding.

THE EVALUATOR’S SUMMARY STATEMENT: TEN YEARS OF THE APPALACHIAN RURAL SYSTEMIC INITIATIVE

In our role as evaluators of the Appalachian Rural Systemic Initiative (ARSI), we at Inverness Research Associates offer the following summary of the major contributions ARSI has made over the last ten years. We also describe how ARSI has helped to create local assets which can be drawn upon in future improvement work.

From our perspective ARSI represents a long-term investment in improving science and mathematics education in roughly 30 of the nation’s poorest rural counties. This investment has yielded returns in multiple forms. Over ten years the ARSI project has:

• Helped hundreds of individual teachers deepen their knowledge of math and science content and pedagogy.
• As a result of their greater knowledge, these teachers have improved their classroom practice.
• The ARSI classrooms we have observed show a quality better than the national average and comparable to the classrooms of other NSF-funded projects that have been studied and documented across the country.
• The work of the ARSI project has also helped teachers and administrators working together in hundreds of schools to more closely examine their overall math and science programs, and then to work collaboratively to pursue systemic improvements.
• As a result, thousands of Appalachian students have benefited from better overall programs, and thus enhanced opportunities to learn mathematics and science. In our interviews many ARSI counties attribute gains in student achievement scores to the work of ARSI.

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