It may seem obvious, but learning should never be implied or assumed. Learning must be explicit, evaluated and monitored; the impact of teaching on student learning should be visible. But how can we be sure? Armed with years of research that includes more than 2,100 meta-analyses, and 130,000 studies that include more than 300 million…

Monitoring, evaluation, and research activities generate important data, but they often fail to change policies or programs. In addition, local program staff and partners often feel disconnected from these activities, which undermines their ownership of data and results. To bridge the gaps between monitoring, evaluation, and research and to give…

National governments use evidence selectively to argue that a successful policy intervention in one local area should be emulated in others ("evidence-based best practice"). However, the value of such evidence is always limited because there is: disagreement on the best way to gather evidence of policy success, uncertainty regarding the…

The national education reform agenda has rapidly expanded to include attention to continuous improvement research in education. The purpose of this analysis is to propose a new approach to "developmental evaluation" aimed at building a foundation for continuous improvement in large-scale school improvement networks, on the argument that…

A reproducibility crisis afflicts a wide range of scientific and social-scientific disciplines, from epidemiology to social psychology. Improper research techniques, lack of accountability, disciplinary and political groupthink, and a scientific culture biased toward producing positive results together have produced a critical state of affairs.…

Recent studies continue to shine light on high-performing charter schools. While Boston-area charter schools--a concentrated group of high-performers--garner more attention than others, many excellent schools outside of Boston have been quietly chipping away at the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students. One of these schools…

This study focused on the federal and Illinois State the reform legislation titled the Performance Evaluation Reform Act and Senate Bill 7. The Performance Evaluation Reform Act or "PERA" was created from collaboration between stakeholders as Illinois competed in a federal competition titled "Race to the Top." The legislation…