The Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative, which was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was a multiyear effort to improve student outcomes--particularly high school graduation and college attendance among low-income minority students--by increasing student access to effective teaching. The RAND Corporation worked…

The "CSE Program Evaluation Kit" is a series of nine books intended to assist people conducting program evaluations. This volume, the second in the kit, provides advice about planning an evaluation--from deciding on the major questions the evaluation is intended to address, through the general approach--and identifying the principal…

This monograph presents the findings of a multiyear study of the effectiveness of reform-oriented mathematics and science instruction. It builds on an earlier RAND study, called the Mosaic project, which found "a weak but positive relationship" between reform practices and student achievement (see Klein, Hamilton, McCaffrey, Stecher,…

It is important to be able to describe instructional practices accurately in order to support research on "what works" in education and professional development as a basis for efforts to improve practice. This report describes a project to develop procedures for characterizing classroom practices in mathematics and science on the …

In 2002, the RAND Corporation launched a project to understand how educators are responding to the new accountability requirements in California, Georgia, and Pennsylvania--three states that represent a range of approaches, regions, and student populations. The researchers aimed to identify the factors that enhance the implementation of SBA…

The purpose of this research is to determine whether we can use classroom artifacts as the basis for making valid judgments about the presence of reform-oriented teaching practices in middle-school mathematics classes. Our approach compares ratings based on collections of artifacts assembled by teachers according to our directions (the "Scoop…