Competency-based education makes student mastery of learning goals—rather than seat time—the metric to determine student credit and progression. Take a closer look at how schools implement competency-based education, and how it is related to what students need to learn effectively.
Teachers are the number-one factor in student learning, so preparing and supporting high-quality teachers of computer science is critical. AIR is working with states, districts, and teachers to implement and test three promising strategies to strengthen teacher preparation and development:
In a longitudinal, quasi-experimental study that spanned more than a decade, AIR found that attending a high school with an explicit focus on deeper learning resulted in positive short-term outcomes, but few longer-term outcomes. In this Q&A, AIR Principal Researcher Kristina Zeiser and Senior Researcher Catherine Bitter share insights about ...
For years, the job of drawing high quality teachers to struggling schools has relied mostly on incentives: money, prestige or better professional development. In this blog post, Kelly Hallberg and Glenance Green describe another option: teacher residency programs, which provide a reliable pipeline of high-quality teachers committed to hard-to-staff schools ...
A new book, edited and authored by experts from AIR and their colleagues, presents comprehensive strategies and tools to help create strong conditions for learning in schools that can lead to excellent and equitable student outcomes.
This CALDER Center paper examines the value of strategically assigning disproportionately larger classes to the strongest teachers in order to optimize student learning in the face of differential teacher effectiveness. The rationale is straightforward: Larger classes for the best teachers benefit the pupils who are reassigned to them; they also ...
Parents, teachers, schools, districts, states, and especially students all want schools that prepare graduates to thrive in the 21st century. In this blog post, Anne Mishkind asks what it means to be "college and career ready."
Exclusionary school discipline policies once instituted to prevent serious infractions have crept into discipline practices for minor issues. Youth who participated in a roundtable on the subject contend that it limits opportunities to learn and compromises academic achievement; is applied disproportionately and subjectively; and deprives students of the ...
The final report of a study of teacher preparation in early reading instruction describes pre-service teachers' perceptions about the content of their training programs and summarizes their scores on an assessment of their knowledge of the essential components of reading instruction, as defined in the Reading First legislation. ...
AIR recently analyzed 45 teacher evaluation rubrics to see if they aligned with the messages teachers are receiving about improving instruction to support students in achieving higher and deeper standards. Spoiler-alert: as many teachers likely already know—they don’t align and they are often too generic to provide useful guidance for ...