All of us at Empirical Education wish you a happy holiday. As a token of our appreciation for you, we want to share this list of books we read in 2023. It comprises contributions from many of our team members. We hope you like it. Cheers to a healthy and prosperous 2024!
photo in the image from Annie Spratt
We’ve had an interesting year, to say the least. We are grateful for your colleagueship and friendship through it all. To ring in the new year, we want to share this one-hour playlist with you. It comprises songs from each person on our team. We hope you like it. Cheers to a healthy and prosperous 2022!
Empirical Education is excited to share that we recently completed two Investing In Innovation (i3) (now EIR) evaluations for the Making Sense of SCIENCE program and the Collaboration and Reflection to Enhance Atlanta Teacher Effectiveness (CREATE) programs. We thank the staff on both programs for their fantastic partnership. We also acknowledge Anne Wolf, our i3 technical assistance liaison from Abt Associates, as well as our Technical Working Group members on the Making Sense of SCIENCE project (Anne Chamberlain, Angela DeBarger, Heather Hill, Ellen Kisker, James Pellegrino, Rich Shavelson, Guillermo Solano-Flores, Steve Schneider, Jessaca Spybrook, and Fatih Unlu) for their invaluable contributions. Conducting these two large-scale, complex, multi-year evaluations over the last five years has not only given us the opportunity to learn much about both programs, but has also challenged our thinking—allowing us to grow as evaluators and researchers. We now reflect on some of the key lessons we learned, lessons that we hope will contribute to the field’s efforts in moving large-scale evaluations forward.
Making Sense of SCIENCE (developed by WestEd) is a teacher professional learning model aimed at increasing student achievement through improving instruction and supporting districts, schools, and teachers in their implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). The key components of the model include building leadership capacity and providing teacher professional learning. The program’s theory of action is based on the premise that professional learning that is situated in an environment of collaborative inquiry and supported by school and district leadership produces a cascade of effects on teachers’ content and pedagogical content knowledge, teachers’ attitudes and beliefs, the school climate, and students’ opportunities to learn. These effects, in turn, yield improvements in student achievement and other non-academic outcomes (e.g., enjoyment of science, self-efficacy, and agency in science learning). NGSS had just been introduced two years prior to the study, a study which ran from 2015 through 2018. The infancy of NGSS and the resulting shifting landscape of science education posed a significant challenge to our study, which we discuss below.
Our impact study of Making Sense of SCIENCE was a cluster-randomized, two-year evaluation involving more than 300 teachers and 8,000 students. Confirmatory impact analyses found a positive and statistically significant impact on teacher content knowledge. While impact results on student achievement were mostly all positive, none reached statistical significance. Exploratory analyses found positive impacts on teacher self-reports of time spent on science instruction, shifts in instructional practices, and amount of peer collaboration. Read our final report here.
CREATE is a three-year teacher residency program for students of Georgia State University College of Education and Human Development (GSU CEHD) that begins in their last year at GSU and continues through their first two years of teaching. The program seeks to raise student achievement by increasing teacher effectiveness and retention of both new and veteran educators by developing critically-conscious, compassionate, and skilled educators who are committed to teaching practices that prioritize racial justice and interrupt inequities.
Our impact study of CREATE used a quasi-experimental design to evaluate program effects for two staggered cohorts of study participants (CREATE and comparison early career teachers) from their final year at GSU CEHD through their second year of teaching, starting with the first cohort in 2015–16. Confirmatory impact analyses found no impact on teacher performance or on student achievement. However, exploratory analyses revealed a positive and statistically significant impact on continuous retention over a three-year time period (spanning graduation from GSU CEHD, entering teaching, and retention into the second year of teaching) for the CREATE group, compared to the comparison group. We also observed that higher continuous retention among Black educators in CREATE, relative to those in the comparison group, is the main driver of the favorable impact. The fact that the differential impacts on Black educators were positive and statistically significant for measures of executive functioning (resilience) and self-efficacy—and marginally statistically significant for stress management related to teaching—hints at potential mediators of impact on retention and guides future research.
After the i3 program funded this research, Empirical Education, GSU CEHD, and CREATE received two additional grants from the U.S. Department of Education’s Supporting Educator Effectiveness Development (SEED) program for further study of CREATE. We are currently studying our sixth cohort of CREATE residents and will have studied eight cohorts of CREATE residents, five cohorts of experienced educators, and two cohorts of cooperating teachers by the end of the second SEED grant. We are excited to continue our work with the GSU and CREATE teams and to explore the impact of CREATE, especially for retention of Black educators. Read our final report for the i3 evaluation of CREATE here.
While there were many lessons learned over the past five years, we’ll highlight two that were particularly challenging and possibly most pertinent to other evaluators.
The first key challenge that both studies faced was the availability of valid and reliable instruments to measure impact. For Making Sense of SCIENCE, a measure of student science achievement that was aligned with NGSS was difficult to identify because of the relative newness of the standards, which emphasized three-dimensional learning (disciplinary core ideas, science and engineering practices, and cross-cutting concepts). This multi-dimensional learning stood in stark contrast to the existing view of science education at the time, which primarily focused on science content. In 2014, one year prior to the start of our study, the National Research Council pointed out that “the assessments that are now in wide use were not designed to meet this vision of science proficiency and cannot readily be retrofitted to do so” (NRC, 2014, page 12). While state science assessments that existed at the time were valid and reliable, they focused on science content and did not measure the type of three-dimensional learning targeted by NGSS. The NRC also noted that developing new assessments would “present[s] complex conceptual, technical, and practical challenges, including cost and efficiency, obtaining reliable results from new assessment types, and developing complex tasks that are equitable for students across a wide range of demographic characteristics” (NRC, 2014, p.16).
Given this context, despite the research team’s extensive search for assessments from a variety of sources—including reaching out to state departments of education, university-affiliated assessment centers, and test developers—we could not find an appropriate instrument. Using state assessments was not an option. The states in our study were still in the process of either piloting or field testing assessments that were aligned to NGSS or to state standards based on NGSS. This void of assessments left the evaluation team with no choice but to develop one, independently of the program developer, using established items from multiple sources to address general specifications of NGSS, and relying on the deep content expertise of some members of the research team. Of course there were some risks associated with this, especially given the lack of opportunity to comprehensively pilot or field test the items in the context of the study. When used operationally, the researcher-developed assessment turned out to be difficult and was not highly discriminating of ability at the low end of the achievement scale, which may have influenced the small effect size we observed. The circumstances around the assessment and the need to improvise a measure leads us to interpret findings related to science achievement of the Making Sense of SCIENCE program with caution.
The CREATE evaluation also faced a measurement challenge. One of the two confirmatory outcomes in the study was teacher performance, as measured by ratings of teachers by school administrators on two of the state’s Teacher Assessment on Performance Standards (TAPS), which is a component of the state’s evaluation system (Georgia Department of Education, 2021). We could not detect impact on this measure because the variance observed in the ordinal ratings was remarkably low, with ratings overwhelmingly centered on the median value. This was not a complete surprise. The literature documents this lack of variability in teaching performance ratings. A seminal report, The Widget Effect by The New Teacher Project (Weisberg et al., 2009), called attention to this “national crisis”—the inability of schools to effectively differentiate among low- and high-performing teachers. The report showed that in districts that use binary evaluation ratings, as well as those that use a broader range of rating options, less than 1% of teachers received a rating of unsatisfactory. In the CREATE study, the median value was chosen overwhelmingly. In a study examining teacher performance ratings by Kraft and Gilmour (2017), principals in that study explained that they were more reluctant to give new teachers a rating below proficient because they acknowledge that new teachers were still working to improve their teaching, and that “giving a low rating to a potentially good teacher could be counterproductive to a teacher’s development.” These reasons are particularly relevant to the CREATE study given that the teachers in our study are very early in their teaching career (first year teachers), and given the high turnover rate of all teachers in Georgia.
We bring up this point about instruments as a way to share with the evaluation community what we see as a not uncommon challenge. In 2018 (the final year of outcomes data collection for Making Sense of SCIENCE), when we presented about the difficulties of finding a valid and reliable NGSS-aligned instrument at AERA, a handful of researchers approached us to commiserate; they too were experiencing similar challenges with finding an established NGSS-aligned instrument. As we write this, perhaps states and testing centers are further along in their development of NGSS-aligned assessments. However, the challenge of finding valid and reliable instruments, generally speaking, will persist as long as educational standards continue to evolve. (And they will.) Our response to this challenge was to be as transparent as possible about the instruments and the conclusions we can draw from using them. In reporting on Making Sense of SCIENCE, we provided detailed descriptions of our process for developing the instruments and reported item- and form-level statistics, as well as contextual information and rationale for critical decisions. In reporting on CREATE, we provided the distribution of ratings on the relevant dimensions of teacher performance for both the baseline and outcome measures. In being transparent, we allow the readers to draw their own conclusions from the data available, facilitate the review of the quality of the evidence against various sets of research standards, support replication of the study, and provide further context for future study.
A second challenge was maintaining a consistent sample over the course of the implementation, particularly in multi-year studies. For Making Sense of SCIENCE, which was conducted over two years, there was substantial teacher mobility into and out of the study. Given the reality of schools, even with study incentives, nearly half of teachers moved out of study schools or study-eligible grades within schools over the two year period of the study. This obviously presented a challenge to program implementation. WestEd delivered professional learning as intended, and leadership professional learning activities all met fidelity thresholds for attendance, with strong uptake of Making Sense of SCIENCE within each year (over 90% of teachers met fidelity thresholds). Yet, only slightly more than half of study teachers met the fidelity threshold for both years. The percentage of teachers leaving the school was congruous with what we observed at the national level: only 84% of teachers stay as a teacher at the same school year-over-year (McFarland et al., 2019). For assessing impacts, the effects of teacher mobility can be addressed to some extent at the analysis stage; however, the more important goal is to figure out ways to achieve fidelity of implementation and exposure for the full program duration. One option is to increase incentivization and try to get more buy-in, including among administration, to allow more teachers to reach the two-year participation targets by retaining teachers in subjects and grades to preserve their eligibility status in the study. This solution may go part way because teacher mobility is a reality. Another option is to adapt the program to make it shorter and more intensive. However, this option may work against the core model of the program’s implementation, which may require time for teachers to assimilate their learning. Yet another option is to make the program more adaptable; for example, by letting teachers who leave eligible grades and school to continue to participate remotely, allowing impacts to be assessed over more of the initially randomized sample.
For CREATE, sample size was also a challenge, but for slightly different reasons. During study design and recruitment, we had anticipated and factored the estimated level of attrition into the power analysis, and we successfully recruited the targeted number of teachers. However, several unexpected limitations arose during the study that ultimately resulted in small analytic samples. These limitations included challenges in obtaining research permission from districts and schools (which would have allowed participants to remain active in the study), as well as a loss of study participants due to life changes (e.g., obtaining teaching positions in other states, leaving the teaching profession completely, or feeling like they no longer had the time to complete data collection activities). Also, while Georgia administers the Milestones state assessment in grades 4–8, many participating teachers in both conditions taught lower elementary school grades or non-tested subjects. For the analysis phase, many factors resulted in small student samples: reduced teacher samples, the technical requirement of matching students across conditions within each cohort in order to meet WWC evidence standards, and the need to match students within grades, given the lack of vertically scaled scores. While we did achieve baseline equivalence between the CREATE and comparison groups for the analytic samples, the small number of cases greatly reduced the scope and external validity of the conclusions related to student achievement. The most robust samples were for retention outcomes. We have the most confidence in those results.
As a last point of reflection, we greatly enjoyed and benefited from the close collaboration with our partners on these projects. The research and program teams worked together in lockstep at many stages of the study. We also want to acknowledge the role that the i3 grant played in promoting the collaboration. For example, the grant’s requirements around the development and refinement of the logic model was a major driver of many collaborative efforts. Evaluators reminded the team periodically about the “accountability” requirements, such as ensuring consistency in the definition and use of the program components and mediators in the logic model. The program team, on the other hand, contributed contextual knowledge gained through decades of being intimately involved in the program. In the spirit of participatory evaluation, the two teams benefited from the type of organization learning that “occurs when cognitive systems and memories are developed and shared by members of the organizations” (Cousins & Earl, 1992). This type of organic and fluid relationship encouraged the researchers and program teams to embrace uncertainty during the study. While we “pre-registered” confirmatory research questions for both studies by submitting the study plans to NEi3 prior to the start of the studies, we allowed exploratory questions to be guided by conversations with the program developers. In doing so, we were able to address questions that were most useful to the program developers and the districts and schools implementing the programs.
We are thankful that we had the opportunity to conduct these two rigorous evaluations alongside such humble, thoughtful, and intentional (among other things!) program teams over the last five years, and we look forward to future collaborations. These two evaluations have both broadened and deepened our experience with large-scale evaluations, and we hope that our reflections here not only serve as lessons for us, but that they may also be useful to the education evaluation community at large, as we continue our work in the complex and dynamic education landscape.
References
Cousins, J. B., & Earl, L. M. (1992). The case for participatory evaluation. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 14(4), 397-418.
Georgia Department of Education (2021). Teacher Keys Effectiveness System. https://www.gadoe.org/School-Improvement/Teacher-and-Leader-Effectiveness/Pages/Teacher-Keys-Effectiveness-System.aspx
Kraft, M. A., & Gilmour, A. F. (2017). Revisiting the widget effect: Teacher evaluation reforms and the distribution of teacher effectiveness. Educational Researcher, 46(5), 234-249.
McFarland, J., Hussar, B., Zhang, J., Wang, X., Wang, K., Hein, S., Diliberti, M., Forrest Cataldi, E., Bullock Mann, F., and Barmer, A. (2019). The Condition of Education 2019 (NCES 2019-144). U.S. Department of Education. National Center for Education Statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2019144
National Research Council (NRC). (2014). Developing Assessments for the Next Generation Science Standards. Committee on Developing Assessments of Science Proficiency in K-12. Board on Testing and Assessment and Board on Science Education, J.W. Pellegrino, M.R. Wilson, J.A. Koenig, and A.S. Beatty, Editors. Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. The National Academies Press.
Weisberg, D., Sexton, S., Mulhern, J., & Keeling, D. (2009). The Widget Effect: Our National Failure to Acknowledge and Act on Differences in Teacher Effectiveness. The New Teacher Project. https://tntp.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TheWidgetEffect_2nd_ed.pdf
In 2019, Digital Promise contracted with Empirical Education to evaluate the impact of the Dynamic Learning Project (DLP) on teacher and student edtech usage and on student achievement. DLP provided school-based instructional technology coaches with mentoring and professional developing, with the goal to increase educational equity and impactful use of technology. You may have seen the blog post we published in summer 2020 announcing the release of our design memo for the study. The importance of this project was magnified during the pandemic-induced shift to an increased use of online tools.
The results of the study are summarized in this research brief published last month. We found evidence of positive impacts on edtech use and student learning across three districts involved in DLP.
These findings make a contribution to the evidence base for how to drive meaningful technology use in schools. This should continue to be an area of investigation for future studies; districts focused on equity and inclusion must ensure that edtech is adopted broadly across teacher and student populations.
We, like many of you, were excited to travel to Washington DC in March 2020 to present at the annual conference of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE). This would have been our 15th year attending or presenting at the SREE conference! We had been looking forward to learning from a variety of sessions and to sharing our own work with the SREE community, so imagine our disappointment when the conference was cancelled (rightfully) in response to the pandemic. Thankfully, SREE offered presenters the option to share their work virtually, and we are excited to have taken part in this opportunity!
Among the several accepted conference proposals, we decided to host the symposium on Social and Emotional Learning in Educational Settings & Academic Learning because it incorporated several of our major projects—three evaluations funded by the Department of Education’s i3/EIR program—two of which focus on teacher professional development and one that focuses on content enhancement routines and student content knowledge. We were joined by Katie Lass who presented on another i3/EIR evaluation conducted by the Policy & Research Group and by Anne Wolf, from Abt Associates, who served as the discussant. The presentations focused on unpacking the logic model for each of the respective programs and collectively, we tried to uncover common threads and lessons learned across the four i3/EIR evaluations.
We were happy to have a turnout that was more than we had hoped for and a rich discussion about the topic. The recording of our virtual symposium is now available here. Below are materials from each presentation.
We look forward to next year!
9A. Unpacking the Logic Model: A Discussion of Mediators and Antecedents of Educational Outcomes from the Investing in Innovation (i3) Program
Symposium: September 9, 1:00-2:00 PM EDT
Section: Social and Emotional Learning in Educational Settings & Academic Learning in Education Settings
Organizer: Katie Lass, Policy & Research Group
Impact on Antecedents of Student Dropout in a Cross-Age Peer Mentoring Program
Katie Lass, Policy & Research Group*; Sarah Walsh, Policy & Research Group; Eric Jenner, Policy & Research Group; and Sherry Barr, Center for Supportive Schools
Supporting Content-Area Learning in Biology and U.S. History: A Randomized Control Trial of Enhanced Units in California and Virginia
Hannah D’Apice, Empirical Education*; Adam Schellinger, Empirical Education; Jenna Zacamy, Empirical Education; Xin Wei, SRI International; and Andrew P. Jaciw, Empirical Education
The Role of Socioemotional Learning in Teacher Induction: A Longitudinal Study of the CREATE Teacher Residency Program
Audra Wingard, Empirical Education*; Andrew P. Jaciw, Empirical Education; Jenna Zacamy, Empirical Education
Uncovering the Black Box: Exploratory Mediation Analysis for a Science Teacher Professional Development Program
Thanh Nguyen, Empirical Education*; Andrew P. Jaciw, Empirical Education; and Jenna Zacamy, Empirical Education
Discussant: Anne Wolf, Abt Associates
Empirical Education (Empirical) is collaborating with Digital Promise to evaluate the impact of the Dynamic Learning Project (DLP) on student achievement. The DLP provides school-based instructional technology coaches to participating districts to increase educational equity and impactful use of technology. Empirical is working with data from prior school years, allowing us to continue this work during this extraordinary time of school closures. We are conducting quasi-experiments in three school districts across the U.S. designed to provide evidence that will be useful to DLP stakeholders, including schools and districts considering using the DLP coaching model. Today, Empirical has released its design memo outlining its innovative approach to combining teacher-level and student-level outcomes through experimental and correlational methods.
Digital Promise— through funding and partnership with Google—launched the DLP in 2017 with more than 1,000 teachers in 50 schools across 18 districts in five states. The DLP expanded in the second year of implementation (2018-2019) with more than 100 schools reached across 23 districts in seven states. Digital Promise’s surveys of participating teachers have documented teachers’ belief in the DLP’s ability to improve instruction and increase impactful technology use (see Digital Promise’s extensive postings on the DLP). Our rapid cycle evaluations will work with data from the same cohorts, while adding district administrative data and data on technology use.
Empirical’s studies will establish valuable links between instructional coaching, technology use, and student achievement, all while helping to improve future iterations of the DLP coaching model. As described in our design memo, the study is guided by Digital Promise’s logic model. In this model, coaching is expected to affect an intermediate outcome, measured in Empirical’s research in terms of patterns of usage of edtech applications, as they implicate instructional practices. These patterns and practices are then expected to impact measurable student outcomes. The Empirical team will evaluate the impact of coaching on both the mediator (patterns and practices) and the student test outcomes. We will examine student-level outcomes by subgroup. The data are currently in the collection process. To view the final report, visit our Digital Promise page.
We are excited to release the findings of a new round of work conducted to continue our investigation of AMSTI. Alabama’s specialized training program for math and science teachers began over 20 years ago and now reaches over 900 schools across the state. As the program is constantly evolving to meet the demands of new standards and new assessment systems, the AMSTI team and the Alabama State Department of Education continue to support research to evaluate the program’s impact. Our new report builds on the work undertaken last year to answer three new research questions.
All research Empirical Education has conducted on AMSTI can be found on our AMSTI webpage.
Empirical Education began conducting the evaluation of Collaboration and Reflection to Enhance Atlanta Teacher Effectiveness (CREATE) in 2015 under a subcontract with Atlanta Neighborhood Charter Schools (ANCS) as part of their Investing in Innovation (i3) Development grant. Since our last CREATE update, we’ve extended this work through the Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED) Grant Program. The SEED grant provides continued funding for three more cohorts of participants and expands the research to include experienced educators (those not in the CREATE residency program) in CREATE schools. The grant was awarded to Georgia State University and includes partnerships with ANCS, Empirical Education (as the external evaluator), and local schools and districts.
Similar to the i3 work, we’re following a treatment and comparison group over the course of the three-year CREATE residency program and looking at impacts on teacher effectiveness, teacher retention, and student achievement. With the SEED project, we will also be able to follow Cohort 3 and 4 for an additional 1-2 years following residency. Surveys will measure perceived levels of social capital, school climate and community, collaboration, resilience, and mindfulness, in addition to other topics. Recruitment for Cohort 4 began this past spring and continued through the summer, resulting in approximately 70 new participants.
One of the goals of the expanded CREATE programming is to support the effectiveness and social capital of experienced educators in CREATE schools. Any experienced educator in a CREATE school who attends CREATE professional learning activities will be invited to participate in the research study. Surveys will measure similar topics to those measured in the quasi-experiment and we conduct individual interviews with a sample of participants to gain an in-depth understanding of the participant experience.
We have completed our first year of experienced educator research and continue to recruit participants, on an ongoing basis, into the second year of the study. We currently have 88 participants and counting.
You may have heard of APPAM, but do you really know what they do? They organize an annual conference? They publish a journal? Yes, they do all that and more!
APPAM stands for the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. APPAM is dedicated to improving public policy and management by fostering excellence in research, analysis, and education. The first APPAM Fall Research Conference occurred in 1979 in Chicago. The first issue of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management appeared in 1981.
Why are we talking about APPAM now? While we’ve attended the APPAM conference multiple years in the past, the upcoming conference poses a unique opportunity for us. This year, our chief scientist, Andrew Jaciw, is acting as guest editor of a special issue of Evaluation Review on multi-armed randomized experiments. As part of this effort, to encourage discussion of the topic, he proposed three panels that were accepted at APPAM.
Andrew will chair the first panel titled Information Benefits and Statistical Challenges of Complex Multi-Armed Trials: Innovative Designs for Nuanced Questions.
In the second panel, Andrew will be presenting a paper that he co-wrote with Senior Research Manager Thanh Nguyen titled Using Multi-Armed Experiments to Test “Improvement Versions” of Programs: When Beneficence Matters. This presentation will take place on Friday, November 9, 2018 at 9:30am (in Marriott Wardman Park, Marriott Balcony B - Mezz Level).
In the third panel he submitted, Larry Orr, Joe Newhouse, and Judith Gueron (with Becca Maynard as discussant) should provide an important retrospective. As pioneers of social science experiments, the contributors will share experiences and important lessons learned.
Some of these panelists will also be submitting their papers to the special edition of the Evaluation Review. We will update this blog with a link to that journal issue once it has been published.
It’s been a busy month for Empirical CEO Denis Newman, who’s been in absentia at our Palo Alto office as he jet-sets around the country to spread the good word of rigorous evidence in education research.
His first stop was Washington, DC and the conference of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE). This was an opportunity to get together with collaborators, as well as plot proposal writing, blog postings, webinars, and revisions to our research guidelines for edtech impact studies. Andrew Jaciw, Empirical’s Chief Scientist, kept up the company’s methodological reputation with a paper presentation on “Leveraging Fidelity Data to Make Sense of Impact Results.” For Denis, a highlight was dinner with Peg Griffin, a longtime friend and his co-author on The Construction Zone. Then it was on to Austin, TX, for a very different kind of meeting—more of a festival, really.
At this year’s SXSWEDU, Denis was one of three speakers on the panel, “Can Evidence Even Keep Up with Edtech?” The problem presented by the panel was that edtech, as a rapidly moving field, seems to be outpacing the rate of research that stakeholders may want to use to evaluate these products. How, then, could education stakeholders make informed decisions about whether to use edtech products?
According to Denis, the most important thing is for a district to have enough information to know whether a given edtech product may or may not work for that district’s unique population and context. Therefore, researchers may need to adapt their methods both to be able to differentiate a product’s impact between subgroups, as well as to meet the faster timelines of edtech product development. Empirical’s own solution to this quandry, Evidence as a ServiceTM, offers quick-turnaround research reports that can examine impact and outcomes for specific student subgroups, with methodology that is flexible but rigorous enough to meet ESSA standards.
Denis praised the panel, stating, “In the festival’s spirit of invention, our moderator, Mitch Weisberg, masterfully engaged the audience from the beginning to pose the questions for the panel. Great questions, too. I got to cover all of my prepared talking points!”
You can read more coverage of our SXSWEDU panel on EdSurge.
After the panel, a string of meetings and parties kept the energy high and continued to show the growing interest in efficacy. The ISTE meetup was particularly important following this theme. The concern raised by the ISTE leadership and its members—which are school-based technology users—was that traditional research doesn’t tell the practitioners whether a product is likely to work in their school, given its resources and student demographics. Users are faced with hundreds of choices in any product category and have little information for narrowing down the choice to a few that are worth piloting.
Following SXSWEDU, it was back to DC for the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) conference. Denis participated in the annual Feedback Forum hosted by CoSN and the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), where SIIA—representing edtech developers—looked for feedback from the CIOs and other school district leaders. This year, SIIA was looking for feedback that would help the Empirical team improve the edtech research guidelines, which are sponsored by SIIA’s Education Technology Industry Network (ETIN). Linda Winter moderated and ran the session like a focus group, asking questions such as:
The CoSN members were brutally honest, pointing out that as the leaders responsible for the infrastructure, they were concerned with implementability, bandwidth requirements, and standards such as single sign-on. Whether the software improved learning was secondary—if teachers couldn’t get the program to work, it hardly mattered how effective it may be in other districts.
Now, Denis is preparing for the rest of the spring conference season. Next stop will be New York City and the American Education Research Association (AERA) conference, which attracts over 20,000 researchers annually. The Empirical team will be presenting four studies, as well as co-hosting a cocktail reception with AERA’s school research division. Then, it’s back on the plane for ASU-GSV in San Diego.
Find more information about Evidence as a Service and the edtech research guidelines.
