The What Works Clearinghouse has released a new practice guide that offers research-based recommendations to reduce dropping out in secondary school. Preventing Dropout in Secondary School will help educators and administrators learn strategies for identifying at-risk students and addressing the challenges they face.

Compiled by a panel of national experts and practitioners, the Practice Guide offers four recommendations:

• Monitor the progress of all students, and proactively intervene when students show early signs of attendance, behavior, or academic problems;

• Provide intensive, individualized support to students who have fallen off track and face significant challenges to success;

• Engage students by offering curricula and programs that connect schoolwork with college! and career success and that improve students’ capacity to manage challenges in and out of school’ and

• For schools with many at-risk students, create small, personalized communities to facilitate monitoring and support.

Each recommendation includes research-based strategies and the guide contains more than 30 specific examples for implementing these strategies in secondary schools, including sample tools for organizing school and student level data; strategies for incentivizing, recognizing, and rewarding students; and case studies that demonstrate the recommendations.

This new practice guide updates the Dropout Prevention practice guide, published in 2008. The new guide reflects improvements in monitoring at-risk students and recent evidence on dropout prevention practices, which was assessed using more rigorous standards.

The guide can be downloaded for free from the What Works Clearinghouse website. Additional resources to help with implementation will be added in the coming months.

Preventing Dropout in Secondary School is one of more than 20 Educator’s Practice Guides published by the WWC. To view these guides and learn about other resources, visit whatworks.ed.gov.

The Institute of Education Sciences, a part of the U.S. Department of Education, is the nation’s leading source for rigorous, independent education research, evaluation and statistics.