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Empirical Education to Design a Multi-Year Evaluation of New GreatSchools Initiative
May 13, 2009
GreatSchools, a nonprofit provider of web-based resources for parents, has contracted with Empirical Education to design a multi-year evaluation of its initiative to empower parents to participate in their children's development and educational success.
The initiative is funded by the Gates Foundation, the Robertson Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation. Bill Jackson, Founder and President of GreatSchools, wrote in his blog: “More than a year ago, we began to consider: What more could we at GreatSchools do to improve education? How could we do more for our large audience of parents? And what could we do for low-income parents whose children face the steepest climb to college? Our answer: We should leverage the technology of our times to create a comprehensive parent-training program and support group that inspires and guides parents — especially low-income parents — to raise children who are ready for college.”
Our evaluation will feature both formative and summative components and our planning will draw on experts from Public/Private Ventures, the Harvard Family Research Project, Stanford University, and the University of Arizona. During the evaluation’s initial year, our plan is to focus on understanding how families, community organizations, and school systems can leverage the web environment and resources being built as part of the initiative. On the basis of this theory of action, our team of researchers will operationalize the measurement of impact at the school, family, and student level, leveraging web technologies to conduct formative and summative experiments.
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Maui Community College Hires Empirical Education for an Evaluation of NSF-Funded Project
August 22, 2008
In Hawaii, Ho’okahua means “to lay a foundation”. Focusing on Hawaiian students over multiple years, the Ho’okahua Project aims to increase the number of Maui Community College (MCC) students entering, persisting, and succeeding in college level science, mathematics, and other STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) degree programs. Several strategies have already been implemented, including a bridge program with the high schools from which the MCC student community is largely drawn.
The Maui Educational Consortium provides leadership for this work and has been instrumental in a number of other initiatives for increasing the capacity to achieve their goals. For example, the implementation of Cognitive Tutor for Algebra 1 was the subject of a related Empirical Education randomized experiment. Another important capacity fostered by the Educational Consortium, working with the University of Hawai’i Office of the State Director for Career and Technical Education, is an initiative called HI-PASS, which aggregates student data across high school and community college. Initially in its evaluation, Empirical Education will be using information on math courses developed through the HI-PASS project to follow the success of students from the earlier study.
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Development Grant Awarded to Empirical Education
May 22, 2008
The US Department of Education awarded Empirical Education a research grant to develop web-based software tools to support school administrators in conducting their own program evaluations. The two-and-a-half year project was awarded through the Small Business Innovative Research program administered and funded by the Institute of Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education. The proposal received excellent reviews in this competitive program. One reviewer remarked: “This software system is in the spirit of NCLB and IES to make curriculum, professional development, and other policy decisions based on rigorous research. This would be an improvement over other systems that districts and schools use that mostly generate tables.” While current data-driven decision making systems provide tabular information or comparisons in terms of bar graphs, the software to be developed—an enhancement of our current MeasureResults™ program—helps school personnel create appropriate research designs following a decision process. It then provides access to a web-based service that uses sophisticated statistical software to test whether there is a difference in the results for a new program compared to the school‘s existing programs. The reviewer added that the web-based system instantiates a “very good idea to provide [a] user-friendly and cost-effective software system to districts and schools to insert data for evaluating their own programs.” Another reviewer agreed, noting that: “The theory behind the tool is sound and would provide analyses appropriate to the questions being asked.” The reviewer also remarked that “...this would be a highly valuable tool. It is likely that the tool would be widely disseminated and utilized.” The company will begin deploying early versions of the software in school systems this coming fall.
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Empirical Education Joins the What Works Clearinghouse Research Team
January 29, 2008
Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. has subcontracted with Empirical Education to serve as one of the research partners on the new What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) team. This week, Empirical research staff joined a seminar to talk through the latest policies and criteria for judging the quality and rigor of effectiveness research.
Last summer, the Department of Education granted leadership of the WWC to Mathematica, (formerly led by AIR), which put together a team consisting of Empirical, RAND, SRI, and a number of other research organizations. This round of work is expected to have a greater emphasis on outreach to schools, industry, and other stakeholders.
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