This presentation was made by SRI's Tori Gorges at the American Evaluation Association's 2009 annual conference in Orlando, FL. It focused on the evaluation of the Innovative Schools Program's pilot years. The pilot of Microsoft’s Innovative Schools Program aimed to support 12 diverse schools around the globe--secondary schools and primary schools, private and public--that share a desire to prepare students for the 21st century. Evaluating such a locally-determined and contextually-dependent program presents unique research challenges; what can we say about the program as a whole that will take into account each school’s unique goals? This presentation describes SRI International's ground-up process of determining evaluation benchmarks, which involved discussion with all the schools, and our distributed model of evaluation, which allowed for collection of data that were at once local and global.

This memo describes, for more technical readers or researchers, the procedures used to analyze the ITL Research data from the pilot year of the project. This memo covers the analysis methods used for each of the different research methods used in ITL.

This paper describes the design of Innovative Teaching and Learning (ITL) Research, a new multi-year program to investigate the factors that promote technology-supported educational reform within and across diverse country contexts. The research uses mixed methods to collect data across all levels in the system, but focuses in particular on teaching and learning in the classroom. A method of analyzing artifacts of actual classroom practice in the form of samples of learning activities and student work is used to characterize the degree to which 21st century skills are being encouraged and learned. The study will make use of parallel case studies in 4 countries in its pilot year (2009-10), and will look across them to investigate global research questions.