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TeachingWorks: Product Features Guideline Development

PERIOD:

Aug 15, 2024

TO

Jun 30, 2026
Funding Agency
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

This project aims to produce specific guidance for instructional materials on how they can be designed to best prompt and complement teaching practices that have evidence of resulting in improved student motivation, engagement and persistence (MEP), leading to improved outcomes in math. 

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Today, the current offerings for math instructional materials are insufficient to offer high quality learning experiences for Black students, Latino students, and all students from low-income backgrounds (“priority students''). Students and teachers need more materials that are academically rigorous and motivating and engaging to priority students so that they persist into higher level math. Accordingly, there are three key problems that this project aims to address. The first problem is that it is too difficult to conduct research on what product features work for priority students. As a result, the pace and scale of innovation is inadequate and fails to address gaps for priority students. The second problem is that there is insufficient evidence on what product features foster MEP with priority students. This leaves developers in the dark about how to better design their products and thus, too few products are developed that embed features that effectively improve MEP. The third problem is that the instructional material market does not adequately highlight what works when it comes to effectively motivating and engaging priority students, and does not reward products that foster MEP that evidence shows leads to increased learning. This failure means product developers have little guidance on and motivation to build and sustain products that foster student MEP while leaving buyers unaware of how to pick higher quality instructional materials. The Instructional Materials R&D BOW’s approach to address these problems is to make investments that: (1) lower the barriers to entry to conduct R&D on the drivers of MEP in priority student context, (2) generate repeatable evidence on product features that foster MEP and math learning in digital platforms, and (3) drive market uptake of product guidelines that support MEP.

Primary Investigator(s)

Jessie Jean Storey-Fry Distinguished University Professor of Education and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, Marsal Family School of Education; Research Professor, Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research

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