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….
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…
Data mapping is about more than key points; it’s about the many sources of data that can help predict future outcomes. For a project in Clark County Public Schools, we sought a way to show how various data sources across the district could be useful in informing progress toward their strategic objective of producing graduates who are “Ready by Exit.”…
To celebrate the re-opening of our blog, I am republishing our most popular piece, originally published in 2005 – long before the movie version. Enjoy! Asked at a conference what I thought was the best book on education research I’d read recently, I was quick to answer, “Moneyball.” Moneyball? But that’s a baseball book! Well,…