More than 20 policy experts from AIR will present at the 39th annual fall conference of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) taking place November 2-4 in Chicago, IL. This year’s theme, “Measurement Matters: Better Data for Better Decisions,” will focus on the importance of data and ...
Jessica Heppen, a nationally recognized expert in education research, policy, and practice, is the president & CEO of AIR. Dr. Heppen been with AIR for 20 years and, in that time, has held several key roles during her tenure.
This research brief, the second from the Back on Track study, describes the role of in-class mentors in the online classrooms and examines whether students benefited from additional instructional support from their in-class mentors.
Student achievement depends on an array of factors within and beyond the classroom environment. Even within classrooms, a complex interplay of factors affects achievement. These factors include not only the curriculum but also teaching practices. In this paper, we are interested in two associated pilot programs, consisting of professional development, ...
This Field Guide should be used by schools and districts to assist them in developing well-articulated and widely shared plans for creating middle schools where all students succeed.
What students are expected to learn in some states can vary greatly with what students are expected to learn in other states. This AIR study uses international benchmarking as a common metric to examine the variance in state performance standards, exposing a large gap in expectations between the states with ...
AIR researchers are analyzing the costs associated with a new professional development program as part of the Simulated Instruction in Mathematics Study (SIM PD) to capture systematically all personnel and non-personnel costs for implementing the intervention.
Mathematics is a foundation that is necessary for learning and employment in other technical disciplines, but U.S. student math achievement often falls behind many other industrialized nations. Researchers at AIR’s Methods for Synthesis and Integration Center (MOSAIC) conducted the largest-ever quantitative synthesis of these math interventions’ effects on U.S. preK-12 ...
Despite a widely held belief that U.S. students do well in mathematics in grade school but decline precipitously in high school, a new study comparing the math skills of students in industrialized nations finds that U.S. students in 4th and 8th grade perform consistently below most of their peers around ...
Typical approaches to professional learning are often driven by district or campus priorities, rather than by the individual needs of teachers. Adult learning and motivation theories emphasize the importance of allowing teachers autonomy over their own learning. Moreover, teachers may have the best understanding of what kind of learning would ...