Using District Data to Make Your Products More Attractive to School Districts Spending Stimulus Funds
School district decision-makers need to feel confident that spending the one-time funds that are now flowing from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) will show measurable results.
How We Can Help
Empirical Education has developed a low cost data analysis solution called MeasureResults™ through which educators can measure the impact of your product, program, or service using rigorous, scientific methods. MeasureResults provides secure web-based technologies for efficient data collection and sophisticated analytics for use directly by central office decision-makers.
“We are excited to be offering Empirical Education’s evaluation services to our customers as part of our MathForward program. Their collaborative approach to working with the districts makes
it attractive and keeps the costs low.”
— Rob Foshay
Director of Research
Texas Instruments
We are now offering MeasureResults to publishers to include as part of a comprehensive package of materials, professional development, and support targeting the ARRA market. By including MeasureResults as part of your overall package, the school district can measure the impact of your program, obtaining evidence to garner and maintain support once the ARRA funds have been expended.
What We Offer
We work with each publisher to define a research design appropriate for the particular product or service. As a result of our extensive engineering, costs are kept very low, while the value of the evidence to the school district (as well as for publication by you) is very high.
We offer four research designs that produce timely and usable evidence. Each design uses student test scores to determine average student performance throughout the school year as well as the reduction of the achievement gap between student groups of particular interest.
- Teacher-level comparison. In this study, we compare achievement of students whose teachers are using the new program to the achievement of other students in the district whose teachers are not using it.
- School-level comparison study. Where whole schools have adopted the new program, we compare student achievement in schools that have adopted the program to achievement in other district schools that have not.
- School-level comparison study with schools outside the district. Where all the schools in the district have adopted the program, we compare schools in the district to schools in neighboring districts with comparable populations and resources.
- Pre- to Post- program comparison. Where longitudinal data are available, we can look back at achievement for the same grades in prior years and we calculate whether achievement is greater with the new program than would be predicted by the previous trends.
How We Work
Rather than serving as an external evaluator, Empirical Education is committed to building research and evaluation capacity within school districts. This approach is attractive to districts, and also qualifies for many of the ARRA funding streams.
Empirical Education partners with each publisher to develop a specific plan, identify appropriate measures including surveys to determine implementation success, and set out a specific timeline. In most cases, the cost per district will be less than $10,000. We believe that the perceived value to the school district of knowing the results at the end of a school year is far greater and will increase the value of your products and services as being research-proven.