Educational tools like EdPuzzle, PlayPosit, and Kaltura have gained recent attention, as they purportedly empower educators to incorporate questions, quizzes, and discussions into instructional videos. However, there is no empirical evidence on how or under what circumstances these platforms may impact students' learning. A quasi-experimental…

Teacher evaluation reform has been among the most controversial education reforms in recent years. It also is one of the costliest in terms of the time teachers and principals must spend on classroom observations. We conducted a randomized field trial at four sites to evaluate whether substituting teacher-collected videos for in-person…

This memo, which is the first in the series, explores some of the assessment for learning practices that the initiative is supporting at Del Lago Academy of Applied Sciences, a small public high school in Escondido, California that educates a diverse group of scholars to develop industry-specific skills and expand their social networks and access…

In addition to excelling in subjects such as science, math, arts, and social studies, students must also develop skills like resiliency, adaptability, and collaboration in order to truly succeed in the world. But how do schools effectively measure those skills when they so often rely on standardized assessments? This article provides a thorough…

Measures of student disadvantage--or risk--are critical components of equity-focused education policies. However, the risk measures used in contemporary policies have significant limitations, and despite continued advances in data infrastructure and analytic capacity, there has been little innovation in these measures for decades. We develop a new…

Educators aim to equip students with learning strategies they can apply when approaching new problems on their own. Teaching design-thinking strategies may support this goal. A first test would show that the strategies are good for learning and that students spontaneously transfer them beyond classroom instruction. To examine this, we introduce…

Background: Evaluating diversity, inclusivity, and equity remains both a prevalent topic in education and a difficult challenge for most evaluators. Traditional metrics used to evaluate these constructs include questionnaires, focus groups, and anonymous comment solicitations. While each of these approaches offer value, they also possess a number…

California is taking a bold new approach to the evaluation of school performance, the provision of data to parents and educators, and the use of accountability to improve student learning. Broadly speaking, the state is stepping away from the consequential accountability that was compelled under No Child Left Behind and toward a system that relies…

The academic achievement, bilingual proficiency, and sociocultural competence of exiting middle school students was analyzed to provide dual-language program stakeholders with evaluative information for local control funding and accountability planning. Informed by equity as a guiding principle of additive bilingualism, researchers used…

The Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning (C-SAIL), funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, examines how college- and career-readiness (CCR) standards are implemented, if they improve student learning, and what instructional tools measure and support their implementation. This brief presents findings from C-SAIL's…

Social presence (represented by salience of instructor and fellow students) in an online teaching environment has been shown to influence perceptions of course activity and self-estimates of learning. An experiment is described here in which teacher presence is manipulated via personalized messages from the teaching assistant throughout the…

The Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) requires faculty from educator preparation programs to provide evidence of credential candidates' impact on K-12 student learning. However, there is a paucity of information on preparation programs' use of direct assessments of student learning to gauge credential candidate…

This article combines original interviews, secondary policy analysis, and non-ideal theory to determine the "least unjust" approach to budget-driven "Reduction in Force" teacher firings in Los Angeles. Building from the a priori claim that schools should serve children's interests, this article addresses the following…

Measuring a teacher's effectiveness in quantifiable ways is a logical step in a society driven by the SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely objectives) that pervade modern management. The idea of using student performance on standardized tests to judge a teacher's effectiveness picked up steam after the Obama…

College completion rates in the U.S. are stubbornly low despite the large and rising returns to a college degree. Efforts to increase student success in college have largely ignored a potentially key factor: the instruction that students receive in the sequence of courses that add up to a college education. Improving the quality of instruction may…