Our Blog
Our foundation has invested in formative assessments since 2022, aligned with our hypothesis that they are critical tools for delivering on the promise of truly personalized learning. In this spotlight, Meghan McCormick outlines the body of evidence behind high-quality formative assessments and what we know about their impact on student learning.
As an impact-focused education funder, we’re committed to studying programs, interventions, and approaches that show promise in supporting students and educators. In 2025, we’re continuing to make targeted investments in rigorous evaluations, field-building research, and large-scale data projects that can help guide the field.
Here, we highlight stories of how our funding helped unlock evidence in 2024 to advance field knowledge or validate program models in the areas of high-impact tutoring and curriculum-based professional learning.
We take evidence seriously at Overdeck Family Foundation: our grantmaking focuses explicitly on helping to scale evidence-based approaches, and we use the latest research to inform our investment strategies and the field at large. As we reflect on 2024, Meghan McCormick highlights five studies from the past year that significantly impacted our team’s vision for the future and influenced our thinking.
Our funding will support five studies designed to produce data and research that collectively inform the work of policymakers and practitioners in the hope of increasing student attendance from Pre-K to high school.
In our interview series, “Spotlight On,” Innovative Schools portfolio manager Pete Lavorini sits down with research and impact officer Meghan McCormick. Together, they discuss the current evidence base on the potential of high-impact tutoring to support student achievement and what school and district leaders need to know as they consider tutoring investments ahead of the new school year.
Research points to the potential value of high-impact tutoring for supporting learning recovery at scale, but key challenges remain. Meghan McCormick examines the current body of evidence on the impact of hybrid, virtual, and AI-fueled tutoring models, and how these models are poised to reduce costs, strengthen the tutoring workforce, and more effectively allocate tutoring supports.
Play is a critical component of healthy cognitive and social-emotional development. However, young children’s opportunities for play are declining. Carly Roberts and Katelyn Fletcher outline the benefits of incorporating a research-based Playful Learning approach into the school day.
Overdeck Family Foundation has granted the Research Partnership for Professional Learning (RPPL) $900,000 to manage three studies focused on identifying the features and traits of genAI tools that show potential to improve teacher quality and student learning, and disseminate those results to the education community at large.
Teachers and students are increasingly experimenting with generative AI tools, both in and out of the classroom. But, rapid changes in technology and the speed of adoption are far outpacing the field’s understanding of impacts on teaching and learning. Meghan McCormick examines what we know about the impact of genAI on education, calling for rigorous, evidence-based evaluation of what’s being used in schools.