Project Features and Case Studies

Learn how the Kingsbury Center is collaborating with leading educational organizations to advance student learning through research.

Vanderbilt University National Center on School Choice — Researchers at Vanderbilt have conducted extensive research using NWEA data, using longitudinal datasets from the Growth Research Database to investigate how school choice affects individuals, communities and systems.

The Center also collaborated with NCSC to administer multiple surveys to teachers and principals at select NWEA schools of choice and their matched control schools. The purpose of the surveys was to learn whether administrative practices within the schools have an effect on student performance, and how individual teacher curriculum matches with state standards. The teacher survey data was matched to the corresponding student test data. Please see the What Makes Schools Work website for more information on this project.

As part of the most recent study Vanderbilt and the Wisconsin Center for Education Research collaborated to link data from NWEA’s MAP test in mathematics to data gathered about teacher classroom-practice from the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum.

Clemson University’s Eugene T. Moore School of Education — A project with Clemson University researchers to evaluate the effect math and science professional development programs have on the student achievement. Results on the project have been promising; the programs show a significant positive impact on student growth.

Thomas B. Fordham Institute — A research partnership to explore how the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act varies from state to state. In the first collaboration, Kingsbury Center researchers and the Fordham Institute published a story of state achievement tests that examined the wide variations in the state proficiency cut scores. The follow up to that study was an analysis of how states’ definitions of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) result in wide variance of accountability results, was released in Fall 2008.

National Heritage Academies — Researchers at the National Heritage Academies (NHA) have conducted extensive research using NWEA data, for example, using longitudinal student achievement data from the GRD to compare the growth of its charter school students to comparable students in other public and charter school systems. Other research efforts have focused on the early identification of students at-risk for failing to meet state proficiency standards identifying clusters of students that would benefit from particular approaches to instruction, and the development of more individually tailored norms.

Notre Dame University and the Wisconsin Center for Educational Research — A proposed partnership to develop tools to discover how teacher instructional practices are linked to student performance and college readiness standards.

The Walton Family Foundation — A collaboration to investigate the feasibility of linking schools’ state assessment results across several states to the NWEA scale in order to permit cross-state comparisons of schools.