REL Midwest Ask A REL Response

February 2020

Achieve, Inc. (2014). Toolkit for evaluating alignment of instructional and assessment materials to the Common Core State Standards. Washington, DC: Author. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED554588

From the ERIC abstract: “In joint partnership, Achieve, The Council of Chief State School Officers, and Student Achievement Partners have developed a Toolkit for Evaluating the Alignment of Instructional and Assessment Materials to the Common Core State Standards. The Toolkit is a set of interrelated, freely available instruments for evaluating alignment to the CCSS; each tool in the Toolkit supports the expectations in the CCSS and derives from the Publishers’ Criteria for the Common Core State Standards.”

Council of Chief State School Officers. (2014). State of the states: Open educational resources (OER) in K–12 education. Washington, DC: Author. Retrieved from https://ccsso.org/resource-library/state-states-open-educational-resources-k-12-education

From the executive summary: “Several states expressed an interest to the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) in exploring the development and dissemination of this digital content in the form of open educational resources (OER), which are teaching materials licensed for free use and repurposing. In response to that interest, CCSSO conducted a survey of states in May 2014 to collect information about the current ‘state of the states’ as it relates to OER. This report highlights those results and provides examples of ongoing work related to OER. This report also strives to inform and connect those chiefs and senior level state education agency (SEA) staff interested in OER to encourage cross-state understanding and collaboration with the potential to both share content and resources in this space.”

Council of Chief State School Officers. (2018). Navigating the new curriculum landscape: How states are using and sharing open educational resources. Washington, DC: Author. Retrieved from https://ccsso.org/resource-library/navigating-new-curriculum-landscape

From the description: “Navigating the New Curriculum Landscape: How States are Using and Sharing Open Educational Resources provides a deeper look into how states are supporting OER implementation, and what lessons can be learned from the progress they are making. This CCSSO and New America report spotlights examples of new and different approaches for promoting and sustaining open, relevant, and high-quality instructional materials. It concludes with five key takeaways for state leaders to consider as they improve the quality and affordability of the materials teachers are using every day. While there is wide variation in approaches, states are deeply integrating OER within their broader efforts to ensure teachers and school leaders have access to high-quality curriculum and instructional materials. State strategies range from including OER within existing state reviews of curricular materials to developing and curating new openly-licensed resources from which schools or districts can choose. Across all states, CCSSO and New America we found evidence that frequent collaboration, communities of practice, and intentional communication have been key levers to spread and build upon this work.”

Hilton, J., III, Larsen, R., Wiley, D., & Fischer, L. (2019). Substituting open educational resources for commercial curriculum materials: Effects on student mathematics achievement in elementary schools. Research in Mathematics Education, 21(1), 60–76. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1214104

From the ERIC abstract: “Open Educational Resources (OER) have the potential to replace commercial learning materials in education. An empirical examination of this potential was conducted, comparing the end-of-year mathematics test results of 12,110 elementary school students clustered within 95 schools from five school districts in the state of Washington in the United States of America. Of this group, 6796 students used open learning materials, and 5314 used commercial educational resources. When three years of test scores were considered, there were no statistically significant differences in the exam scores of students who used open versus commercial curriculum materials. The lack of statistical significance may have practical significance, demonstrating that OER can replace conventional materials without impacting student performance, while potentially reducing costs and allowing for local modification.”

Kimmons, R. (2015). OER quality and adaptation in K-12: Comparing teacher evaluations of copyright-restricted, open, and open/adapted textbooks. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 16(5), 39–57. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1077783

From the ERIC abstract: “Conducted in conjunction with an institute on open textbook adaptation, this study compares textbook evaluations from practicing K-12 classroom teachers (n = 30) on three different types of textbooks utilized in their contexts: copyright-restricted, open, and open/adapted. Copyright-restricted textbooks consisted of those textbooks already in use by the teachers in their classrooms prior to the institute, open textbooks included alternatives from CK-12 and OpenStax, and open/adapted consisted of open textbooks that the teachers devoted time to adapting to their individual needs. Results indicate that open/adapted textbooks were evaluated as having the highest quality, and that open textbooks were of higher quality than copyright-restricted textbooks. Though some factors of quality might be influenced by cost differences (e.g., timeliness and the ability to adopt updated textbooks), results reveal that open and open/adapted textbooks may do a better job of meeting the needs of K-12 teachers in a variety of ways that may not be captured through traditional approaches to quality assurance. This study marks an early step in exploring the quality of K-12 open educational resources (OER) and the use of practicing teachers as authentic evaluators of textbooks for their local contexts.”

State Education Technology Directors Association. (2015). Ensuring the quality of digital content for learning: Recommendations for K12 education. Burnie, MD: Author. Retrieved from https://dmaps.setda.org/resources/

From the overview: “This paper complements SETDA’s prior digital transition policy briefs by examining strategies for ensuring digital content quality, including exploration of the specific quality-control challenges and opportunities associated with open educational resources (OER). Specifically, this paper describes: 1) digital content’s unique characteristics; 2) traditional state/district instructional materials quality-review practices; and 3) recommendations to inform/strengthen state strategies for ensuring digital resource quality.”

State Educational Technology Directors Association. (2019). State K12 instructional materials leadership trends snapshot. Burnie, MD: Author. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED599469

From the ERIC abstract: “This report summarizes current state policies and practices in the selection and implementation of digital instructional materials. It is based on the 2019 updates to the Digital Instructional Materials Acquisition Policies for States (DMAPS) online portal. Since its inception in 2015, DMAPS has been updated annually and expanded to include new topic areas. This trends snapshot includes details regarding: (1) digital learning policies and practices including state digital learning plans and standards; (2) state definitions for personalized learning; (3) policies and practices related to instructional materials acquisition, procurement and implementation; (4) professional learning opportunities states are providing teachers around the selection, creation and implementation of digital instructional materials; and (5) accessibility policies and practices.”

Southern Regional Education Board. (2017). Alignment of instructional materials: Trends in state efforts. Atlanta, GA: Author. Retrieved from https://www.sreb.org/publication/alignment-instructional-materials

From the description: “High-quality instructional materials that are aligned to state standards can help boost student achievement and reduce variability in the quality of instruction across classrooms. In Alignment of Instructional Materials, SREB examines the level of support and leadership SREB states provided in 2014-15 and 2015-16 to help educators identify and use high-quality textbooks, lesson plans and other materials aligned to state K-12 standards.”

U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology. (2016). #GoOpen district launch packet. Washington, DC: Author. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED571883

From the ERIC abstract: “Across the country, districts are choosing to #GoOpen and transitioning to the use of openly licensed educational resources to improve student learning in their schools. Openly licensed educational resources enable districts to reallocate significant funds currently spent on inflexible, static learning materials to resources and activities that accelerate the transition to digital learning. These include implementing new professional learning programs for teachers, developing a robust technology infrastructure to support digital learning, and funding new leadership roles for educators who curate and create openly licensed educational materials. The #GoOpen District Launch Packet is designed for districts that have decided to implement a systematic approach to incorporating openly licensed educational resources into their curriculum by becoming a #GoOpen District.”

Whitehill, J., Aguerrebere, C., & Hylak, B. (2019, July). Do learners know what’s good for them? Crowdsourcing subjective ratings of OERs to predict learning gains. Paper presented at the International Conference on Educational Data Mining, Montreal, Canada. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED599196

From the ERIC abstract: “We explored how learners’ ‘subjective ratings’ of open educational resources (OERs) in terms of how much they find them ‘helpful’ can predict the actual ‘learning gains’ associated with those resources as measured with pre- and post-tests. To this end, we developed a probabilistic model called GRAM (Gaussian Rating Aggregation Model) that combines subjective ratings from multiple learners into an aggregate quality score of each resource. Based on an experiment we conducted on Mechanical Turk (n = 304 participants with m = 17 math tutorial videos as resources), we found that aggregated subjective ratings are highly (and stat. sig.) predictive of the resources’ average learning gains, with Pearson correlation of 0.78. Moreover, when predicting average learning gains of ‘new’ learners, subjective scores were still predictive (Pearson correlation of 0.49) and attained higher prediction accuracy than a model that directly uses pre- and post-test data to estimate learning gains for each resource. These results have potential implications for large-scale learning platforms (e.g., MOOCs, Khan Academy) that assign resources (tutorials, explanations, hints, etc.) to learners based on the expected learning gains.”