Research and Evaluation

The Enhanced Assessment project is a federally funded 18-month project that supports New England states in their development of large-scale assessments that address the needs of students with disabilities and English-language learners.

CSE is conducting an evaluation of the Educational Outreach program at the Broad Institute. The outreach programs are targeted at Greater Boston high school students and include summer internships, semester-long projects, and class field trips to the Broad Institute. Evaluation activities include surveys and interviews with students, mentors, and other program staff and has both formative and summative components.

EDC is developing and testing a middle-grades literacy curriculum that focuses on helping middle school students to develop and apply skills needed for research project. These skills focus on understanding, extracting, and synthesizing information—all key skills needed for carrying out a research project in middle school. The curriculum includes specific teacher-led activities that explicitly teach students these skills and meaningfully takes advantage of key features of the software program, SOLO.

Project Reentry expands and supplements services offered through the Department of Justice Affairs to recently released youth offenders. Services include academic, employability, life, and occupational skills training. EDC provides technical assistance to the project that focuses on program design issues. EDC assesses curriculum provided by partnering institutions, researches and reports on best practices of similar projects, and provides recommendations for program modification based upon surveys of participants and community stakeholders.

At a time when young adolescents need to read complex texts in all content areas, many students continue to have difficulty with the reading process. Yet, although good models of elementary reading instruction are available, middle schools have few models or resources to meet the needs of their growing numbers of struggling readers.

In its second round of funding from The Wallace Foundation, a major priority for this new project is to expand the technical assistance it provides to The Wallace Foundation and its funded network of states and districts as part of its national initiative to transform education leadership in urban school districts.

This project addresses gaps in the current state assessment system and explores the following questions: Where are the gaps in the assessment system? Who are the students affected by these gaps? What are the appropriate assessment systems for students in the gaps? After answering these questions, the project will develop and pilot an assessment prototype to address the problem and meet student needs.

The MathScape: Seeing and Thinking Mathematically Curriculum Center provides support to school districts using the MathScape curriculum. The center offers training institutes and workshops, hosts a Web site offering online support, develops implementation materials, and disseminates information about the curriculum’s effectiveness.

This research project investigates the effectiveness of online professional development programs for teachers. Specifically, it addresses three questions: (1) How effective are online programs in improving teachers’ content knowledge and classroom practices as compared with other models of professional development? (2) How do interactions among participants and facilitators differ across online models, and how do these interactions contribute to learning? and (3) What factors make for successful online professional development programs?

The FunWorks is a digital library of career exploration resources for youth ages 11 to 15. The FunWorks provides “real world” experiences and uses children’s current interests and passions, such as music and sports, to help them explore exciting future careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). The site was designed for and by children—over 300 young people have participated in the design and launch of this one-of-a-kind collection from the initial concept to design, usability testing, and launch.