In this playbook we’ve gathered resources that we found helpful as we’ve engaged in Advanced Inclusive R&D. We also share example work by the AFG community—learners, researchers, educators, developers, organizers, activists, caregivers, leaders, and school administrators who are collaborating on community-based educational innovation.
Seeding scientific discovery and research and development (R&D) for the future of education… I think people get excited about that. They want a better system,” shares Sasha Rabkin, AERDF’s Chief of Program Strategy and Innovation, in a recent conversation with Micah Ward and Matt Zalaznick of District Administration.
An enthusiasm for innovation and research connects education and philanthropy, and Advanced Inclusive R&D can transform that enthusiasm into teaching and learning breakthroughs. “The R&D process is really about filling in the scientific discovery gaps. It offers the opportunity for innovation and incubation,” explains Sasha.
By investing in R&D within education, philanthropy can support educators and learners in meaningfully participating in ideation, iteration, and innovation.
Together with educators, learners, researchers, and developers, we can create a thriving education ecosystem where we advance accelerated solutions backed by evidence. Our programs—Reading Reimagined, Assessment for Good, and EF+Math—are proof of this.
Listen to Sasha, Micah, and Matt discuss philanthropy’s place in education research and development.
The New York Times interviewed Rebecca Kockler, who leads Reading Reimagined, an Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF) program, about how the national movement to rethink reading has largely left out a generation of older students who are behind in literacy — and who will not recover without extra help.
If a child’s ability to decode words never reaches a certain level, it becomes extremely unlikely that their reading comprehension will advance, this recent ETS Research Institute landmark study found.
About 40 percent of children in America could fall below that level, says Rebecca Kockler, whose team is studying the issue with Stanford University Graduate School of Education researchers. She called the statistic “jaw dropping.”
Some students never received robust phonics instruction in elementary school. But even those who did may be able to break down a word like “cat,” while struggling with more complex ones like “education.”
RAND and AERDF released a new report examining teachers’ perspectives on what is needed to help older K-12 students with reading. The data in this report is a nationally representative sample of U.S. grade 3–8 teachers across all subjects.
Key findings include:
- Almost three-quarters of teachers in grades 3–8 say that they need access to more resources to identify and support students with reading difficulties.
- According to teachers across all subjects, students spend more than half of their class time reading and writing.
- These grade 3–8 teachers estimate that 44% of their students always or nearly always experience difficulty reading the written content within their instructional materials.
- Among teachers in grades 3–8, 40% hold misconceptions about how students develop word reading skills, and nearly half of teachers in these grades report that their primary source of knowledge about reading instruction comes from their personal experiences in the classroom.
The full report is available here: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA3358-1.html
About the Report:
This study was supported by the Reading Reimagined program of the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF) through funds provided to RAND. AERDF is a national nonprofit dedicated to advancing research and development in PreK-12 education. Founded in 2021, AERDF pursues positive, multigenerational change by unlocking scientific discoveries and creating innovative solutions that improve teaching, learning, and assessment systems within education. For more information on Reading Reimagined please visit https://aerdf.org/programs/readingreimagined.
The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent views of Reading Reimagined or AERDF.
We know that every kid can learn to read. The burden is on our system to figure out why 70 percent of kids aren’t reading on grade level. Are our teachers being trained to succeed in kindergarten through 2nd and 3rd grade? Are school systems using instructional resources based on research? asks Rebecca Kockler, Executive Director of Reading Reimagined, one of our Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF) programs, in this Education Week article.
Read more here.
Used in 18 southern California schools, the program has led to improvements in students’ rational number understanding and executive functioning skills.
Lourdes Acevedo-Farag helped create Fraction Ball in 2018, when, through lucky timing, the charter school where she taught middle school math — El Sol Science and Arts Academy of Santa Ana — had not yet painted lines on the school’s outdoor basketball court.
Working with researchers at University of California, Irvine’s School of Education, as well as other teachers at the school, Acevedo-Farag began developing Fraction Ball as a way to help her students better understand fractions and decimals in relation to whole numbers.″We know that rational numbers are really like the gatekeeper to algebra,” said Acevedo-Farag, who has since left the classroom to pursue a Ph.D in education at UC Irvine.
Megan Brunner, associate director of research and learning at Advanced Education Research and Development Fund’s EF+Math Program, said there is research showing that when students have stronger executive functioning skills, achievement gaps decrease for historically underserved students.
The work to understand equity-centered educational experiences through math instruction and executive functioning skill-building is “really about helping students be agents over their own learning… and moving away from some of the historically kind of deficit thinking around executive functions,” Brunner said.
Acevedo-Farag added that for Fraction Ball specifically, participating students can strengthen their cognitive, physical, executive functioning, listening and collaboration skills — all while playing a fun game.
“As a teacher of 12 years, I saw we either are teaching executive functioning skills, or we’re teaching math, and Fraction Ball is the first time I saw that we’re doing it together. And it’s working,” she said.
Read the rest of the story here.
Tom Vander Ark was recently at ISTE 2024 where he got the chance to sit down with Auditi Chakravarty, CEO of the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF). Auditi had just finished leading a session at ISTE, which focused on K-12 demand for evidence of the EdTech lifecycle, including evaluation, implementation, and outcomes.
This conversation came on the heels of writing Unfulfilled Promise: The Forty-Year Shift From Print to Digital and Why It Failed to Transform Learning for the Hoover Institute. This paper addressed many of the points mentioned in a recent study that found that school districts accessed an average of 2,591 edtech tools and students and educators both averaged about 42 tools in the 2022 to 2023 school year.
This number was then complicated by the fact that the number of unique digital solutions accessed by educators decreased by more than 14% over the year prior – highlighting that educators may be starting to feel “tech fatigue.”Tom sat down with Auditi live at ISTE to discuss what’s next for EdTech.
Read the article here.
The NWEA results show achievement gaps continuing to widen. For example, Asian students are showing some growth, but made fewer gains in math last year than during the pre-COVID years. White, Black and Hispanic students, however, continue to lose ground. In both elementary and middle school, Hispanic students need the most additional instruction to reach pre-COVID levels, the data shows.
In reading, the gap between pre-pandemic growth and current trends widened by an average of 36%, compared with 18% in math. It’s possible, Karyn Lewis, director of research and policy partnerships for NWEA added, that districts focused extra recovery efforts on math because initial data on learning loss showed those declines to be the most severe.
But that’s left many students without the reading skills to tackle harder books and vocabulary as they move into high school, said Rebecca Kockler, who leads Reading Reimagined, a project of the nonprofit Advanced Education Research and Development Fund. The organization is funding research to find which literacy strategies work with adolescents, who are easily turned off by books intended for young kids. The pandemic, she said, only exacerbated a longstanding literacy problem for older students.
“About 30% of American high schoolers for 30 years have been proficient readers, and that really hasn’t changed,” said Kockler, a former Louisiana assistant superintendent who oversaw a redesign of the state’s reading program. “It’s always the hardest to move middle school reading results, and even some of the success we would see in fourth grade didn’t always carry up into middle school.”
Read the article here.
We showcase specific results of two R&D projects – CueThinkEF+ and Our Mathematical World – and an analysis of six projects actively engaging students and educators in Inclusive R&D. The CueThinkEF+ team share the process and outcomes of deeply integrating teacher expertise as they sought to develop and improve a web-based learning system focused on rich mathematics problem solving and discourse. Then, the Our Mathematical World team share their journey in the development of a mathematics curriculum overlay in which 3rd-5th grade students design stories that center themselves as strong mathematical problem solvers.
After three years of Inclusive R&D, preliminary data suggest many of our approaches are improving mathematics learning. We are simultaneously increasing knowledge of the relationship between mathematics learning and EF skills. The attention to equity and educator voice in the R&D process is producing approaches that are aligned with classroom practice. This session engages participants in examining the findings from a portfolio thematic analysis, with perspectives from various teams, including both educators and researchers. We then discuss the implications and applications of this work with all session participants, focusing on promising opportunities for integrating EF and equity within math learning experiences, and ways researchers and educators can collaborate together to do so.