University of Washington

The Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington integrates original research, policy, education, and outreach to resist strategic misinformation, promote an informed society, and strengthen democratic discourse.

The District Leadership Design Lab, located in the College of Education, University of Washington, partners with school districts to redesign their central offices to tackle inequality in education. They do so by providing access to the latest knowledge about what central offices do to support improvement at scale and by leveraging this knowledge to design new policies and practices. Studies of these design efforts provide guidance to the field. This grant supports the Design Lab’s efforts to transform the central operations of a new cohort of districts as they seek to create systemic improvements in teaching and learning. (Substrategy: District Deep Dives and Networks)

The University of Washington requests funding to develop a next-generation formative assessment and evaluation system for teaching and learning. The university has already developed a first-of-its-kind system of math games to assess K-7 student learning of the Common Core standards in math and deeper learning. With this grant, it would build a teacher portal able to capture and evaluate the efficacy of a teacher’s practice by using learning data from the games to indicate the impact of his or her instruction.