Making Common Measures More Common

Institute of Education Sciences

To encourage the use of common measures, we must begin by identifying the best measures already in wide use. We are pursuing this in several ways. First, we are searching the What Works Clearinghouse to identify the measures most often found in studies catalogued in its large library. Second, we are identifying the measures that are widely used across the close to 2,000 research grants we have funded over the years. Third, we are forming a panel of experts to help identify a set of common metrics defined by grade/subject band (for example, early reading, middle school algebra). Fourth, we are closely following Susanna Loeb's work at EdInstruments.com and looking for other compendia similar to her growing library of metrics. Finally, we will be soliciting input from the field (including your responses to this post) about how to proceed.