Pilots & Findings
From Ideas to Classrooms
The real test of an idea is what happens when it meets teaching and learning. The SchoolWorks Lab works with educators and schools to investigate our research questions in authentic learning environment.
The real test of an idea is what happens when it meets teaching and learning. The SchoolWorks Lab works with educators and schools to investigate our research questions in authentic learning environment.
Teachers help us investigate what learning evidence is useful, what is burdensome, what becomes visible over time, and whether better-organized evidence can improve instructional decision-making.
Our pilots bring together different ages, subjects, educational approaches, technologies, and cultural contexts.
That diversity is intentional.
Because if we want to understand learning, we need to study it where it actually happens.
Our current pilot program brings SchoolWorks research into schools in the United States, Australia, and India. Each setting allows us to investigate different dimensions of the same larger question: Can better evidence help us understand learning as it develops?
Investigating learning evidence within a Reggio Emilia-inspired environment
Our Australian partnership provides an especially important research setting because teaching and learning at St. James already emphasize observation, inquiry, student thinking, documentation, and multiple forms of evidence.
Teachers routinely encounter evidence that conventional assessments may not fully capture: conversations, student questions, creative work, collaboration, problem-solving, photographs, projects, reflections, and changes in thinking.”
What We Are Investigating:
Research Focus: Learning Patterns • Teacher Professional Judgment • Student Portfolios • Teacher Workload
Investigating learning evidence in the everyday work of middle school classrooms
Middle school provides a very different research environment. Students encounter multiple subjects, assignments, assessments, digital resources, classroom conversations, and learning experiences — often within relatively short instructional periods.
Our work at Seabrook focuses on sixth-grade English Language Arts and Social Studies, where teachers can investigate learning through student writing, discussion, revision, analysis, projects, and other classroom evidence.
What We Are Investigating:
Research Focus: Teacher Workload • Learning Patterns • Student Portfolios • Professional Judgment
Investigating a teacher-centered model for evidence-informed instruction
The Winnacunnet pilot allows us to investigate whether Pathfinder can support teachers without requiring students to adopt another digital platform.
This creates an important research question: How little technology is actually necessary to make learning evidence more useful?
The model emphasizes the teacher’s ability to capture and examine meaningful evidence while maintaining existing classroom practices and systems.
The high-school context also allows us to explore the relationship between rich learning evidence and existing requirements for curriculum, assessment, and accountability.
What We Are Investigating:
Research Focus: Teacher Workload • Professional Judgment • Interoperability • Learning Patterns
Investigating learning evidence across educational and cultural contexts
Our India work extends the research into another educational setting and gives SchoolWorks an opportunity to examine one of the most important questions facing any proposed model of learning:
Does it travel?
Ideas about intelligence, evidence, teaching, assessment, and student development cannot simply be assumed to operate identically across cultures.
The India pilot therefore provides an important opportunity to test our assumptions rather than merely export them.”
What We Are Investigating:
Research Focus: Cross-Cultural Validity • Learning Patterns • Professional Judgment • Adaptability
Although each pilot is different, the sites contribute to a common research agenda.
Research Question | Australia | Seabrook | Winnacunnet | India |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Teacher Workload | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Learning Patterns | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Professional Judgment | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Student Portfolios | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Interoperability | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Cross-Cultural Validity | ✓ | ✓ |
Together, the pilots allow us to compare what happens across settings rather than drawing conclusions from a single implementation.
Feasibility
Can educators actually use the approach during normal teaching?
Evidence Quality
Does the information collected provide meaningful evidence of student learning?
Teacher Usefulness
Does the evidence help teachers understand students or make instructional decisions?
Student Participation
Can students meaningfully contribute to documenting and reflecting on their learning?
Teacher Workload
Does the approach reduce, redistribute, or unintentionally increase teacher work?
Longitudinal Value
Does evidence become more useful when examined across time?
Technology
Can Pathfinder help organize and surface evidence without becoming another burden?
Transferability
Which elements work across subjects, grade levels, schools, and countries — and which must change?
This section of the SchoolWorks website will evolve as the pilots progress. For each pilot, we intend to document:
The Research Question
What are we trying to understand?
The Context
Where and with whom are we studying it?
The Approach
What are teachers and researchers doing?
The Evidence
What information are we examining?
What We Are Observing
What patterns appear to be emerging?
Findings
What conclusions does the evidence ultimately support?
Questions Raised
What do we need to investigate next?
This creates a public record not simply of our successes, but of our learning.
We believe this distinction matters.
SchoolWorks will distinguish experience, observation, emerging evidence, and research findings. That discipline is essential if our goal is to contribute trustworthy knowledge about learning.
Evidence from the pilots returns to the SchoolWorks research cycle.
Progression graphic: Research Question → Pilot Investigation → Learning Evidence → Analysis → Findings → Refined Theory → Improved Pathfinder Model → New Research Questions
The purpose of the pilots is not to prove that we were right. It is to help us discover what is true.
The SchoolWorks Lab will share pilot updates, emerging observations, research reports, and findings as this work develops.