The best educational measurement strategy is the one that fits your specific circumstance, not the hottest method of the day. And not necessarily the ones that pols believe are singularly able to deliver “real, hard data.” The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) at the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), for example, reserves its highest rating of…
We take capacity building seriously with our clients, but now its our turn! We are so happy to welcome three new members of the Arroyo Research Services team: Ariana Vasquez, Michelle Kennedy, and Martha Chavez. Together they not only increase our ability to meet the needs of our clients and partners, but they are bringing…
When asked publicly or privately about high stakes assessments for teachers and schools, we always say the same thing: don’t go there. Using value-added models based of student test scores to reward or punish teachers misdiagnoses educator motivation, guides educators away from good assessment practices, and unnecessarily exposes them to technical and human testing uncertainties….
We are pleased to deepen our work of evaluating educational programs serving highly mobile students through three new Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) MCASP grants: to Hillsborough County Public Schools, Socorro Independent School District and Fairfax County Public Schools. These new projects extend our prior work on behalf of highly mobile students through the evaluation…
Our clients are by and large genuine change-makers, motivated to measure and achieve the positive outcomes they seek. And one of our most important jobs is helping them develop and use appropriate data to enhance discovery, analysis, insight and direction. But client commitment and our professional responsibility don’t always avoid some common data collection pitfalls….
As educators, we talk about data, collect data, wade through data, analyze data, and draw conclusions from data that hopefully demonstrate how and why our interventions led to the achievement of our goals. But sometimes there seems to be so much data, so many things we could measure, that it’s difficult to know where to…
Our past two posts covered both the “why” of measuring implementation and some of the common challenges to doing so. In this third and final post, we’ll look at what is most useful to measure. Implementation measures are particular to each program and should take into account the specific actions expected of program participants: who…
In our last post, we shared four reasons why educators should be measuring implementation: here we’ll look at four common challenges to strong implementation measurement. 1. Differential definitions. What happens when different units of your program operate with different working definitions of a measure? Take tutoring, for example, in a multi-site program, where each site…
Understanding implementation is critical to both program improvement and program evaluation. But measuring implementation is typically undervalued and often overlooked. This post is one of three in a series that focuses on measuring implementation when evaluating educational programs. “Fidelity of implementation” ranks next to “scientifically based research” on our list of terms thrown about casually,…
U.S. school systems are crafting new approaches to desegregation in response to increasing evidence of growing racial isolation and strong evidence of the value of integration. Assuring the success of these initiatives, including creating and sustaining community support, requires clear thinking about measurement and evaluation. And while translating the rich body of integration-related social science…