Engaging High School Students: The Student-Centered Assessment Network

From the fall of 2017 to the winter of 2020, the Student-Centered Assessment Network (SCAN) aimed to transform high school teaching in Rhode Island. Researchers and teachers worked together to make high school classes more student centered by increasing teachers' use of student-centered formative assessment. Network leaders (the hub) organized SCAN as an improvement network to address a shared problem of practice using improvement science. By joining the network, SCAN teachers committed to working collaboratively to make their formative assessment practice more student centered, using iterative testing cycles--Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles--to hone their instructional practices. SCAN was launched with a group of 23 high school teachers during the 2017-2018 school year. New teachers joined in the fall of 2018 and in the fall of 2019. The network was made up of educators from three public high schools that served a wide range of student demographics. In all, a total of 59 teachers representing seven content areas participated in SCAN. They engaged collaboratively to continuously improve their teaching, enhancing learning for thousands of Rhode Island high school students. This developmental evaluation of SCAN aims to: (1) infuse an evidence-based critical friend/thought partner perspective into the network development process; (2) track growth and the development of the Networked Improvement Community (NIC) as a learning organization; (3) produce useable knowledge for the education field and specifically for other educators, policymakers, funders, and researchers interested in the NIC model as a way to organize for improvement and address high-leverage practical problems; and (4) advance the evaluation field by testing and refining models for evaluating improvement processes and NICs in education contexts.