HOPE Online Academy Compiling Data

Posted On: July 6, 2015

Dr. Susan McAlonan, HOPE Academy’s Director of Student Services, was the catalyst behind arranging a BrainWise training for 130 faculty and staff members at the school in November, 2014. Dr. McAlonan’s experience with BrainWise came from her previous job as Director of Student Services for Aurora Public Schools, where she saw how the program would benefit the students at HOPE. She is excited by the feedback from the faculty, and reports that the next school year will be even better. She said that HOPE’s research team adapted the BrainWise Knowledge Survey for their students and found high validity among the measures. These results are forthcoming. However, they discovered that the translated version confused Spanish speaking students, and will resolve this issue for the upcoming school year. In-house collection of data was necessary because they were unable to partner with our academic partner, Dr. Welsh and the University of Northern Colorado, to measure executive functions. Strict data gathering regulations require that parent permission be obtained for students to participate in university-conducted research, and getting more than 2900 HOPE students’ parents/guardians to sign release forms was too difficult for them to do.

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