Beginning with the 2020/21 school year, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) began an ongoing effort to collect and analyze literacy screening assessment data from schools and districts participating in certain state grants to inform improvement efforts. Grantee schools and districts that provide literacy…

This issue brief describes the programs and systems of the MDRC Center for Data Insights. Ranging from simple descriptive summaries to advanced machine learning algorithms, the Center's eight current projects aim to use institutions' increasingly rich data to provide new insights that can help refine and target their client's services: (1)…

This article is designed to help teachers interpret reading assessment data from DIBELS beyond individual subtests to better support their students' needs. While it is important to understand the individual subtest measures, it is more vital to understand how each fits into the larger picture of reading development. The underlying construct of…

In today's educational environment, schools struggle to meet the academic needs of every student. Many schools are challenged by the use of a response-to-intervention framework in which too many students need strong interventions. This article details a data-driven, decision-making response-to-intervention reading team model in which teachers,…

In this article, the authors clarify the role of the leadership team, providing a rationale for one integrated team to examine academic, social, and behavioral programming, with careful attention to including all key stakeholders. Next, the authors discuss the procedures for teaching all key stakeholders the comprehensive, integrated, three-tiered…

The National Association of State Directors of Special Education (NASDSE, 2005) defines response to intervention (RTI) as the practice of providing high-quality instruction and intervention based on a student's needs, changing instruction and/or goals through frequent monitoring of progress, and applying the student response data to important…

The federal No Child Left Behind Act and its mandate for adequate yearly progress has placed unprecedented demands on districts to use evidence to support their school improvement efforts. Research has not yet determined if data-driven decision making leads to improvements in teaching and learning since most outcomes reported to date are based on…