This topic brief is one in a series on personalized learning prepared for Conversations with Innovators, 2018. Historically, the configuration of public education has been antithetical to variation for and across learners. The structure and process of today's educational system, having cut its teeth during the industrial revolution, emphasizes…

States are grappling with policy strategies to determine attendance in the era of COVID-19 school closures and remote learning. Allowing districts and schools to develop an attendance policy using a combination of options to determine attendance can offer maximum flexibility. These options include, but are not limited to: (1) time on task (task…

COVID-19 exacerbated and brought attention to inequities long present in public education. Facing inconsistent access to learning over distance, students will leave this period with months of what's been called "lost learning." Short of repeating a full year, addressing these gaps presents a grave challenge for traditionally structured…

Personalized learning refers to a collection of practices designed to place student interests and needs at the heart of schooling. Schools that implement personalized learning need leaders that support educators and students in redesigning the core practices of teaching and learning in K-12 schools. To answer the question of how leaders support…

U.S. public university system policies were examined to learn how credit hours were determined for asynchronous online education. Findings indicated that (a) credit hour meaning and use are not consistent, (b) primary responsibility for credit hour decisions was at the local level, and (c) no policies exist to guide credit hour application for…

This study investigated the effectiveness of a web-based assessment training program and whether explicitly guiding the participants toward the recommended learning sequence would improve their performance on assessing the underhand roll compared to participants that were given free choice of their learning sequence. Participants were 48 volunteer…

This paper presents ideas relating to curriculum organization from the Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development publication, "Excellence in Our Schools: Making It Happen," which attempted to synthesize nine reports written in response to the National Commission on Excellence in Education report, "A Nation at…

Tests alternative performance-based instructional models of growth in students' academic achievement in elementary schools. Models tested viewed growth in academic achievement as function of exposure to academic subject matter, task quality, and student engagement. Results indicate best fit was achieved by a structural model that includes student…

Developers of high stakes criterion-referenced tests are urged to formulate test tasks so that efficient instruction can promote student mastery of the domain. Time-on-task has been promoted by instructional psychologists as preferable to test teaching. (DWH)