Tiffany H. Berry, Ph.D. - US grants

Claremont Graduate University is building a Networked Improvement Community (NIC) of evaluators, education researchers, and principal investigators working to develop a common framework for measuring the effectiveness of high school teacher professional development (PD) within the CS for All Initiative. The work focuses on the measurement and reporting of two critical, yet elusive, data points within the computer science education community: classroom implementation and student success. The effort will work with a community of investigators from CS10K, STEM+C, and CS for All projects in order to articulate national targets for and supporting evaluations of their classroom implementations and student outcomes. The effort addresses a gap between the information that evaluators and educational researchers typically provide and the information required to determine the merit and worth of teacher professional learning innovations, to provide critical formative feedback to funded programs, and to achieve generalizable research results.

The community-based approach will incorporate the tenets of Bryk's Networked Improvement Communities (NICs) (Bryk, Gomez, and Grunow, 2011) and Kania and Kramer's Collective Impact (Kania & Kramer, 2011). In keeping with the Collective Impact approach, the project will conduct an initial needs analysis of practicing evaluators, build a central infrastructure, employ experienced and dedicated Staff, and strive towards establishing common targets, shared tools and approaches to measurement, continuous communication, and mutually reinforcing activities within the community. Various communication structures and resources (e.g., webinars, conference-based face-to-face meetings, an online community meeting site, an instrument repository), as well as encouragement and acknowledgement of the contributions of community members (e.g., their discourse, shared resources, shared successes) will support community norms. These norms include adopting classroom implementation and student success as outcomes of evaluation work, sharing resources, sharing concerns and successes, and "paying it forward" (i.e., contributing to newer community members). The community interactions will create the conditions that challenge and extend current ways of doing evaluation, and encourage new ways of thinking about and conducting classroom implementation and student success evaluations