The e-Serve Initiative

The e-Serve Initiative --An Education Technology Product Providing Data Analysis and Pro-Social Intervention Development for School Personnel K-12 to Improve Teacher Efficacy and Enhance Student Outcomes

The Beach Center, in collaboration with Software Outfitters, Inc. in Overland Park, KS, is researching and developing the eServe Initiative, a prototype web-based educational product designed to improve teacher efficacy and enhance student behavioral and academic performance.  A Phase 1 feasibility study, funded by the Small Business Innovations in Research (SBIR) initiative through the U. S. Department of Education/ Institute for Education Science, found that the eServe prototype application achieved promising results in helping teachers make critical decisions about the selection of effective evidence-based behavioral and academic interventions for students in K-12 school settings.  When students lose instructional time due to behavior problems, schools and districts are at-risk for academic failure (i.e., failure to make Annual Yearly Progress). 

Project staff have determined that it is technologically feasible to capture student management system data, recognize trends in these student data, establish decision-making rules, set individual/group student "alerts" and then, based upon patterns of student data, link the teacher (user) to a rich, individually tailored menu of evidence-based instructional and behavioral strategies that will address specific classroom instructional and disciplinary problems, improve teacher efficacy, and enhance student outcomes. 

Through SBIR Phase II funding, the eServe Initiative project team hopes to research, develop and further refine this technology tool to help teachers select evidence-based classroom strategies that will help better support academically- and behaviorally-challenged students and, thus, both improve teacher efficacy and enhance student outcomes. Project staff believe that high fidelity use of the eServe product will result in several significant outcomes:

1. Increases in use of trend notifications ("alerts"), permitting teachers to adjust instruction for students based on changing needs (consistent with Response to Intervention framework)
2. Increases in use of appropriate intervention recommendations, permitting teachers to implement evidence-based interventions well-matched to a specific disciplinary or instructional problem
3. Increases in teachers' perceptions of productivity, job satisfaction, and classroom/school climate