Improving the Implementation of Rigorous Instructional Materials in Middle-Grades Mathematics: Developing a System of Practical Measures and Routines (Collaborative Research: Cobb)

The goal of this project is to improve the implementation of rigorous instructional materials in middle-grades mathematics at scale through a system of practical measures and routines for collecting and using data that both assesses and supports implementation.

Full Description

The goal of this 5-year research project is to improve the implementation of rigorous instructional materials in middle-grades mathematics at scale. Many projects seek to improve mathematics instruction, but are not able to easily track their efforts at improvement. The primary product of this project will be a system of practical measures and routines for collecting and using data that both assesses and supports the implementation of rigorous instructional materials in middle-grades mathematics. In contrast to research and accountability measures, practical measures are assessments that require little time to administer and can thus be used frequently. The data can be analyzed rapidly so that teachers can receive prompt feedback on their progress, and instructional leaders can use the data to decide where to target resources to support improvement in the quality of instruction and student learning. The system of practical measures and routines will include 1) measures of high-leverage aspects of teachers' instructional practices that have been linked to student learning (e.g., rigor of tasks, quality of students' discourse) and attend to equitable student participation; and 2) measures of high-leverage aspects of key supports for improving the quality of teachers' practice (e.g., quality of professional development; coaching); and 3) a set of routines regarding how to use the resulting data to engage in rapid, improvement efforts. A key principle of the proposed project is that the system of measures and routines can be adapted to a wide range of school and district contexts. This project is supported by the Discovery Research preK-12 (DRK-12) program. The DRK-12 program supports research and development of STEM education innovations and approaches in assessment, learning, and teaching.

The project will establish three research-practice partnerships with five districts, in three different states, that are currently implementing rigorous instructional materials in middle-grades mathematics. Year 1 will focus on the development of a set of practical measures of classroom instruction. Year 2 will focus on testing the use of the classroom measures in the context of supports for teachers' learning, and the development of practical measures of key supports for teachers' learning. Years 3-4 will focus on how the project can "learn our way to scale" (Bryk et al., 2015), which requires strategically implementing measures and routines in increasingly diverse conditions. The project will engage in rapid improvement cycles in which researchers will work alongside district leaders and professional development (PD) facilitators to analyze the data from the measures of both classroom instruction and the quality of support for teacher learning to test the effectiveness of improvements in intended supports for teacher learning and to adjust the design of the support based on data. Across Years 1-4, the project will use recent developments in technology and information visualization to test and improve 1) the collection of practical measures in situ and 2) the design of data representations (or visualizations) that support teachers and leaders to make instructional improvement decisions. In Year 5, the project will conduct formal analyses of the relations between supports for teachers' learning; teachers' knowledge and classroom practices; and student learning.

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