On March 8–10, EPIC researchers Ross Anderson, Michael Thier, and Paul Beach presented at the 41st annual conference of the Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP) in Denver, Colorado. The conference drew a strong contingent from the University of Oregon where Ross, Michael, and Paul are PhD students in the Department of Educational Methodology,…
This policy brief from EPIC discusses the United State’s bias toward college-going as the gold standard and how to counteract that singular mode of thinking. EPIC outlines why definitions of K–12 success should balance an emphasis on each C (college and career). EPIC also shows the related pitfalls of districts failing to attend to the issues that are most salient for their communities. To avoid those dangers, EPIC recommends democratizing postsecondary pathway access to ensure equity, localizing districts’ definitions of success to suit community needs, and personalizing educational experiences so students can become ready on their own terms.
This set of developmental frameworks was created to facilitate discussion within communities of practice and to enhance a shared understanding of the dynamic nature of four essential skills—collaboration, communication, creativity, and self-direction in learning. The frameworks define components inherent to each skill and describe performance across a beginner to emerging expert progression, informed by research on the development of expertise. Unlike discipline-specific learning progressions and rubrics, the developmental progressions reflect components essential to the skill itself and describe growth dependent on many years of active exploration, experimentation, setbacks, and reflection.
This policy brief reviews promising practices from California districts as well as insights from research on multiple measures to provide recommendations that improve how California districts generate, present, and use data in their Local Control Accountability Plans (LCAPs).
In this policy brief, EPIC recommends that college and career readiness serve as the “North Star” in California’s recently reformed accountability system. A district seeking to use its Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP) to promote a college- and career-going culture should take the following steps:
• Adopt, modify, or generate a consistent and shared definition of college and career readiness.
• Evaluate the current LCAP for alignment to that definition.
• Revise the LCAP to align with college and career readiness as its new North Star.
By following these steps, district leaders will help ensure that the goals and actions outlined in their LCAP describe a coherent system instead of a collection of eight competing priorities.
The goal of this paper is to present a vision for a new system of educational assessment, one designed to support the kinds of ambitious teaching and learning that parents say they want for their children. Thankfully, the public schools do not have to create such a system from scratch—many schools already exhibit effective practices upon which others can build. For that to happen though, educators, policymakers, and other stakeholders must be willing to adopt new ways of thinking about the role of assessment in education.
This paper highlights the conceptual soundness of explicitly acknowledging and developing metacognitive factors in the learning process. It also demonstrates the feasibility of measuring these skills and of the ways in which schools, districts, and states can incorporate them into practice, first on a limited, experimental basis, with the commitment to scaling them up when they demonstrate success.
This report authored by David Conley, founder of the Educational Policy Improvement Center, and Linda Darling-Hammond of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education describes how state policymakers and education leaders can strategically design systems of assessment and accountability in ways that support learning for students, educators, and systems, alike.
The Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) conducted an analysis of deeper learning skills on behalf of the Hewlett Foundation to create a crosswalk between the Deeper Learning Skills (DLS) and the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The purpose of the crosswalk was to understand the ways in which strategies for deeper learning relate to the CCSS.
This report describes the background, methods, and findings of a “deep dive” evaluation of Roadtrip Nation’s (RTN) high school program, the Roadtrip Nation Experience. The primary focus of the evaluation was RTN pilot implementation in three San Jose Unified School District PLUS Academies during the 2011–2012 academic year, supported by analysis of program curriculum and instructional materials.