AIR supported the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction in convening seven PK–16 regional councils across the state to build regional partnerships. The goal of these regional partnerships was to develop successful educator career pathways by allowing multiple districts to work collaboratively with local educator preparation programs.

Researchers from AIR and the Regional Educational Laboratory Northeast & Islands, are working with the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE), Office of Postsecondary Commissioner, and others, to develop a work-based learning (WBL) rubric and facilitate a review of the PrepareRI data catalog, a statewide initiative to support young people in developing the skills they need to be successful and competitive for the high-demand jobs of the future. The goals of the project are to support RIDE in evaluating the quality of WBL experiences as well as reviewing its data catalog to identify measures of career readiness for use in future data collection efforts.

AIR’s Southeast Comprehensive Center supported state education agencies in strengthening their plans for implementing college- and career-ready standards and assessments. These supports addressed the lack of capacity for implementation and improvement of effective statewide assessment and accountability systems.

AIR developed and facilitated a training series for Rhode Island high schools that provided staff with data to inform conversations about how best to prepare their students for college and careers. Researchers worked with school leadership teams to examine student profile data and use the information to determine priority areas for focused improvement, inform strategic planning, and access resources to improve postsecondary outcomes.

Working with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and Gallup, AIR developed state-specific Web applications that allow students to learn more about programs of study in their state that provide preparation for growing, middle-class wage jobs. These Web applications connect prospective students to state longitudinal data related to wage outcomes of particular programs and help them calculate and understand the relationship between their desired standard of living and choices of occupations, programs, and schools.

AIR built a series of application program interfaces to allow non-college measures (CMs)-developed websites to access the underlying data and methods that power the CM tools within Country Music Television’s existing Empowering Education website. The goal of the project was to embed CM tools within several other non-CM websites.

AIR is supporting the implementation of the National Survey of Postsecondary Competency-Based Education, an annual Web-based survey of postsecondary institutions in the United States geared toward assessing the state of the competency-based education (CBE) field. The goals of this project are to grow the community of researchers within the National Research Collaborative on Postsecondary Competency-Based Education and Learning and build rigorous evidence for CBE’s efficacy to support responsible scaling. Click here for the latest infographic.

AIR, in partnership with the Competency-Based Education Network (CBEN) is administering the CBE Program Model Mapping Survey to gather information on a set of dimensions on which Competency Based Education (CBE) programs vary, and information on how CBE programs have implemented those dimensions. The aims of the survey are to develop a CBE Program Model Mapping resource to help facilitate conversations among practitioners, and support researchers’ ongoing work to look structures and practices that serve learners and support positive outcomes, including low-income learners, adult learners, and Black and Latino learners.

American Institutes for Research is supporting the Technical Assistance team at the Center for Innovation in Postsecondary Education at the University of South Alabama in building the capacity of five HBCUs in North Carolina to serve black adult learners. AIR is helping the TA team build content via webinars about data use and data driven decision making and facilitating conversations about strategic goals and needs of campus staff and faculty to understand capacity needs. The goals of the project is to change policy and practices that support removing barriers for black adult learners to complete a postsecondary credential. 

AIR developed a coaching series, administered biannually to Wisconsin Technical College System staff. The aims of the series were to support the colleges’ abilities to use research, research methods, and data collection and analysis strategies.