Supovitz, Jonathan A
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Publication The Linking Study: An Experiment to Strengthen Teachers' Engagement With Data on Teaching and Learning(2013-04-01) Supovitz, Jonathan AIn this AERA 2013 paper, Dr. Jonathan Supovitz investigates what it means for teachers to fruitfully use data to enhance the teaching and learning process. Informed by research on the challenges teachers face to use data meaningfully, and clues from the rich literature on formative assessment, this paper reports on the design and effects of an intervention designed to help teachers connect data on their teaching with data on the learning of their students for the purpose of informing subsequent instruction which leads to better student outcomes. The hypothesis of this study, therefore, is that while examining data may be useful, the real value of data use is to examine the connection between data points – in this case the instructional choices that teachers make and the learning outcomes of students. Thus, ‘data use’ in this study means encouraging and facilitating teachers’ analytical experiences of linking data on teaching to data on the learning of their students.Publication TASK: A Measure of Learning Trajectory-Oriented Formative Assessment(2013-06-01) Supovitz, Jonathan A; Sirinides, Philip M; Ebby, Caroline BrayerThis interactive electronic report provides an overview of an innovative new instrument developed by CPRE researchers to authentically measure teachers’ formative assessment practices in mathematics. The Teacher Analysis of Student Knowledge, or TASK, instrument assesses mathematics teachers’ knowledge of formative assessment and learning trajectories, important components of the instructional knowledge necessary to teach to the high expectations of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Researchers found that the majority of teachers of mathematics in grades K-10 in urban and urban fringe districts focused on their students' procedural skills rather than their conceptual understandings, indicating that there is significant room for growth in teacher capacity to identify, interpret, and respond to students' conceptual understanding.Publication Instructional Leadership in a Standards-Based Reform(2001-12-01) Supovitz, Jonathan A; Poglinco, Susan MThe spotlight of educational leadership is on instructional leadership. As pressure for improving student performance in the current standards-based accountability environment swells and test results are increasingly scrutinized, school principals are being urged to focus their efforts on the core business of schooling--teaching and learning. But what does it mean to be an instructional leader? What do principals that are instructional leaders do differently than other principals? How do they spend their time? How do they shape the cultures of their schools? How knowledgeable are they of subject-matter content? How do they work with, and develop, other leaders in their schools? In this study we sought to find answers to these questions by exploring the collective wisdom of several effective instructional leaders. Instructional leadership, not just by the principal but by a wider cast of individuals in both formal and informal leadership roles, can play a central role in shifting the emphasis of school activity more directly onto instructional improvements that lead to enhanced student learning and performance. By contrast, the status quo in most schools is diffuse attention to instruction scattered amidst a variety of environmental, social, and organizational distracters that lead to fragmented and uneven instructional focus. Principals are typically engrossed in organizational care-taking and the responsibility for instructional decisions falls to individual teachers. When individual teachers independently determine the kind and type of instruction in their classrooms, three things tend to occur. First, the instructional culture of the school tends to splinter, as there is no overriding instructional guidance and no coherent glue to tie instruction to a larger whole. Second, the quality of instruction varies widely, as teachers bring different experiences and have different notions of what is good teaching. Third, the content that students receive, even in the same grade, differs from classroom to classroom, as each teacher prioritizes what students ought to know.Publication In Search of Leading Indicators in Education(2012-07-10) Supovitz, Jonathan A; Foley, Ellen; Mishook, JacobData have long been considered a key factor in organizational decision-making (Simon, 1955; Lindblom & Cohen, 1979). Data offer perspective, guidance, and insights that inform policy and practice (Newell & Simon, 1972; Kennedy, 1984). Recently, education policymakers have invested in the use of data for organizational improvement in states and districts with such initiatives as Race to The Top (United States Department of Education, 2010) and the development of statewide longitudinal data systems (Institute for Education Sciences, 2010). These and other initiatives focus attention on how data can be used to foster learning and improvement. In other fields, including economics and business, much work has been done to identify leading indicators that predict organizational outcomes. In this paper, we conceptualize how leading indicators might be used in education, using examples from a small sample of school districts with reputations as strong users of data. We define leading indicators as systematically collected data on an activity or condition that is related to a subsequent and valued outcome, as well as the processes surrounding the investigation of those data and the associated responses. Identifying leading indicators often prompts improvements in a district’s system of supports. To develop this concept, we describe four examples of how districts identified and used key indicators to anticipate learning problems and improve student outcomes. We also describe the infrastructure and other supports that districts need to sustain this ambitious form of data use. We conclude by discussing how leading indicators can bring about more intelligent use of data in education.Publication Dashboard Lights: Monitoring Implementation of District Instructional Reform Strategies(2004-12-01) Supovitz, Jonathan A; Weathers, John MIn this report, the authors describe the system implemented in Duval County Public Schools (Florida) to monitor the district’s instructional reform efforts and the influences of the system on teachers and school and district leaders. The system, called the Standards Implementation Snapshot System, was implemented by John Fryer, Superintendent of Duval Public Schools, in 2002. The snapshot system seeks to take a "snapshot" at a point in time of the depth of implementation of the district’s standards-based reform initiatives. This report is the story of the development and influence of the snapshot system.Publication America's Choice Comprehensive School Reform Design: First-Year Implementation Evaluation Summary(2000-02-01) Corcoran, Thomas B.; Hoppe, Margaret; Supovitz, Jonathan A; Luhm, TheresaIn the fall of 1998, the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) contracted with the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) to conduct the evaluation of the America’s Choice School Design. This is a summary of CPRE’s first report of a three-year evaluation of the design. The evaluation of America’s Choice seeks to answer four basic questions: Are schools successfully implementing the America’s Choice program design? What environmental characteristics are facilitating or impeding implementation? How effective is America Choice’s implementation strategy? And what are the impacts of the program on teachers and students? As America’s Choice is still in the early stages of implementation, most evaluation efforts are directed toward the questions about the implementation of the program and the conditions surrounding its implementation. In subsequent years, CPRE increasingly will emphasize its evaluation of the impacts of the program on students. This report describes the first year of the implementation of America’s Choice. Following this introduction, section two provides a description of America’s Choice and the theory behind the America’s Choice school design. Section two concludes with a set of reasonable expectations for the progress of America’s Choice in its first year. Section three describes CPRE’s findings concerning the implementation of America’s Choice, including many of the specific design components. Section four analyzes the role of the school district in the implementation of America’s Choice. The report concludes with a summary of the findings of the first year’s evaluation.Publication The Impact of America's Choice on Student Performance in Duval County, Florida(2002-10-01) Supovitz, Jonathan A; May, Henry; Snyder Taylor, BrookeThe America's Choice School Design is a K-12 comprehensive school reform model designed by the National Center on Education and the Economy. America's Choice focuses on raising academic achievement by providing a rigorous standards-based curriculum and safety net for all students. The goal of America's Choice is to make sure that all but the most severely handicapped students reach an internationally benchmarked standard of achievement in English/language arts and mathematics by the time that they graduate.Publication #commoncore Project: How Social Media Is Changing the Politics of Education(2015-02-23) Supovitz, Jonathan A; Daly, Alan J; del Fresno, MiguelThe Common Core has become a flashpoint at the nexus of education politics and policy, fueled by ardent social media activists. To explore this phenomenon, this innovative and interactive website examines the Common Core debate through the lens of the influential social media site Twitter. Using a social network perspective that examines the relationships among actors, we focus on the most highly used Twitter hashtag about the Common Core: #commoncore. The central question of our investigation is: How are social media-enabled social networks changing the discourse in American politics that produces and sustains social policy? To join a conversation about this research in an open forum, tweet using #htagcommoncore.Publication TASK Technical Report(2013-10-01) Ebby, Caroline Brayer; Sirinides, Philip M; Supovitz, Jonathan A; Oettinger, AndreaThis report reviews the development, piloting, and preliminary results from the large-scale field trial of the TASK Instrument (see cpre.org/task). In the first section, we review the need for an assessment of teachers’ capacity for learning trajectory-oriented instruction and the theoretical foundations that inform our work. We then describe the instrument and its development. Next, we detail the scoring process and the training of raters. The final section contains the analysis of the large-scale field trial conducted in 2012–13. We conclude with some directions for future work with this instrument.Publication The Relationship Between Teacher Implementation of America's Choice and Student Learning in Plainfield, New Jersey(2003-01-01) Supovitz, Jonathan A; May, HenryRarely in educational research do we have access to data that allow us to empirically explore the relationships between the practices of individual teachers and the learning of their students. This report is one of those exceptional cases. In this report, we use data from Plainfield, New Jersey in which individual teachers' survey responses about America's Choice were linked to the test gains of the students who were taught by those teachers. By working closely with district administrators, we were able to link individual survey responses to the district's student achievement databases while retaining the confidentiality of both teachers and students. The result is an uncommon piece of evidence that empirically links teachers' implementation of America's Choice to student learning. The pattern from these results seems clear and persistent: the students of teachers who more deeply implemented the America's Choice model, particularly the writers workshop component of the design, learned more than did the students of teachers who had lower levels of implementation. Even after statistically controlling for the background characteristics of teachers and students and for students' prior test performance, teachers' implementation of America's Choice was associated with significantly higher learning gains for students.