Abby Robyn

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, along with researchers from RAND and the American Institutes for Research, speculated that there were lessons to be learned from variation among schools within the Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative sites because some schools had improved more than others. They conducted a qualitative study and a survey study to investigate factors that might be associated with positive student outcomes.

To improve the U.S. education system through more-effective classroom teaching, in school year 2009 2010, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced its Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching. Researchers from the RAND Corporation and the American Institutes for Research evaluated implementation of key reform elements of the program in three public school districts and four charter management organizations."

Since 1987, the Air Force has used the Strength Aptitude Test (SAT), a test of physical strength, to screen and classify enlisted personnel into career specialties. In this study, RAND evaluated the usefulness, validity, and fairness of the SAT, focusing on implementation of the SAT at military entrance processing stations and the process for setting strength requirements for career fields.

The Implementing Standards-Based Accountability (ISBA) study was designed to examine the strategies that states, districts, and schools are using to implement standards-based accountability under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and how these strategies are associated with classroom practices and student achievement in mathematics and science. This monograph presents the final results of the ISBA project. It contains descriptive information regarding the implementation of NCLB in California, Georgia, and Pennsylvania from 2003a2004 through 2005a2006. It is a companion to MG-589-NSF, Standards-Based Accountability Under No Child Left Behind (2007), and updates those findings with an additional year of data, permitting further analyses of state-to-state differences and longer-term trends. This study suggests that school improvement efforts might be more effective if they were responsive to local conditions and customized to address the specific causes of failure and the capacity of the schools in question.

In our increasingly technological society, improving student performance in mathematics and science has become a challenge. This study investigates the relationship between student achievement in mathematics and science and the use of practices as funded by the National Science Foundation.