Focus Areas

Proving Ground is committed to supporting partners in their efforts to deliver effective learning opportunities to all students. We determine our focus areas by working with partner districts, researchers, and other education agencies to identify the most urgent challenges facing school districts. As our network grows, and new challenges emerge, we continue to expand our work to include new topics—including remote learning and equity in education. 

Attendance and Absenteeism

We work with states and districts to implement and evaluate strategies to improve student attendance—in person, virtual, or hybrid—and decrease chronic absenteeism. Our partners have piloted, evaluated, and scaled up a range of interventions including outreach to parents, mentorships, student self-reflection, restorative practices and collaborative case management, with more in the pipeline.  

Post-secondary Readiness

Proving Ground partners will develop, pilot and evaluate a set of interventions aimed at improving students’ likelihood of post-secondary success beginning Spring 2021.  Potential interventions include early warning system, student success planning, ACT/SAT preparation course, or CTE course expansion.  

Teaching and Learning in Mathematics

Proving Ground partners are supporting mathematics teaching and learning in both Pre-Algebra and Algebra through a growing array of interventions, including one-on-one instructional coaching; tutoring to build pre-requisite skills; online learning modules in both developing a growth mindset and increasing students’ confidence in their math skills.  

Previous Work: Educational Software

We worked across 13 partner districts around the impact and implementation of the following educational software programs: Achieve3000, Lexia Core5, and ST Math. This focus area is no longer active.

Future Work

We will continue to expand our focus areas—such as literacy, social-emotional learning, and student voice—and the types of interventions and programs that we evaluate using the Proving Ground continuous improvement framework. It is important to us that our work be informed by the field, so please let us know what you think!

What's most important to you?