Digital Promise aims to embed quality research across all of our activities and partnerships. We connect the strengths of our researchers with the experience and expertise of our broader organization and networks of external researchers, educators, and innovators.
The Center for Integrative Research in Learning and Computing Sciences (CIRCLS), in partnership with Digital Promise, launched a mentoring series for participants of our Emerging Scholar program to create a support system that addresses the unique professional needs of early-career scholars.
At the CIRCLS’23 Convening, the Emerging Scholar community had opportunities to connect and learn from the broader education research community.
The convening addressed topics such as:
At Digital Promise, we believe in combining the expertise of practitioners and researchers—two traditionally separate communities—to create useful and meaningful education resources.
Educators actively collaborate with our researchers to co-lead, co-research, and co-design research from its earliest stages. To foster collective ownership, these collaborations center educators’ voices throughout all phases of a project, including the development of research plans, professional learning resources, classroom materials, and more.
By working as partners, researchers and practitioners can co-design relevant, meaningful, high-quality, and sustainable innovations for teaching and learning.
In 2024, the Center for Inclusive Innovation published two papers that continue to explore the emerging impacts of its groundbreaking education research and development (R&D) process. One paper explores the empowerment and ownership experienced by district-community teams when they co-create solutions using the Inclusive Innovation process. The second paper identifies factors that support the sustainability of work, such as lasting shifts in mindsets and practices.
Throughout 2023, Center for Inclusive Innovation researchers supported the Verizon Innovative Learning Schools Cohorts 9 and 10 and Verizon STEM Achievers projects through evaluation partnerships to generate lessons learned directly from the schools and college campuses implementing the programs. Our approach intentionally amplifies student and practitioner voices to understand and improve the programs’ efforts to increase exposure, learning, and belonging in STEM for students from historically and systematically excluded communities.
For the Educators Leading the Profession project, the Center for Inclusive Innovation leveraged its evaluation findings to facilitate the co-design of professional development by instructional coaches for instructional coaches to develop and retain new teachers, and in doing so, built the leadership of the current teachers serving as coaches. Deeper Discussions in World History—an Institute of Education Sciences (IES)-funded collaboration between Digital Promise’s Learning Sciences Research and Center for Inclusive Innovation teams—has engaged a dynamic teacher co-design team in creating teacher-facing, standards-based open education resources (OERs) to foster powerful discussions in world history classes, and is piloting the resources to assess their promise.
2023 Annual Report