Procurement of high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) is an essential but challenging component of district decision-making. District leaders face numerous pressures, including resource limitations, competing stakeholder priorities, and the need to balance quality with contextual fit. Despite the increasing availability of third-party evaluations and quality ratings of instructional materials, this evidence of quality rarely reaches decision-makers in a form that is actionable, interpretable, and timely. As a result, HQIM are not always selected or implemented with fidelity, impacting student outcomes and widening inequities across districts (Koedell and Polikoff, 2017; Polikoff, 2018; Steiner, 2017).
In response to these challenges, The Decision Lab (TDL) has established a long-term initiative, the EdSignals Studio, to generate research on the behavioral dynamics of procurement and to build the capacity of market actors and district leaders to enact more informed adoption decisions. The EdSignals Studio takes a dual approach: strengthening the supply side of the market by improving how organizations communicate evidence around instructional materials, and supporting the demand side by equipping intermediaries who work closely with district leaders with tools that reduce cognitive and organizational biases during procurement cycles (“About the Studio”, 2025).
This paper presents an overview of the research foundation, behavioral framework, practical applications, and emerging future directions of this work, demonstrating how the initiative serves as a bridge between behavioral science research and actionable tools that meet practitioners at the point of decision-making.
Over several years, with ongoing support from the Gates Foundation, the EdSignals Studio has investigated the barriers to the effective adoption of HQIM and related products across U.S. school districts. While traditional approaches to understanding procurement challenges have focused primarily on structural constraints—such as limited time, staff, financial resources, and data literacy—the EdSignals Studio’s behavioral lens also studies psychological factors that shape how district leaders search for, interpret, and act on evidence (“Buyers Insights”, 2025). These behavioral barriers (such as cognitive overload, the false consensus effect, and ambiguity aversion) reveal actionable intervention points that do not require high levels of political will or financing, while also bringing to light more implicit or nuanced barriers to effective procurement (Rae, Montenegro, & Collet, 2020). This work spans core curriculum, educational technology (edtech), and curriculum-aligned professional learning ecosystems.
The EdSignals Studio’s theory of change emphasizes mobilizing the entire instructional-materials ecosystem and shifting the burden of change away from educators and district leaders. By conducting research on the behavior, needs, and pain points of district leaders and mobilizing that knowledge to build the capacity of market actors, the ecosystem becomes better able to produce aligned, accessible signals about the quality of instructional materials. As these actors improve their resources, processes, and outreach strategies, districts face reduced friction when evaluating options and gain improved access to trusted, actionable information. Collectively, this ecosystem-level strengthening increases the likelihood that high-quality instructional materials ultimately reach classrooms in a more equitable and consistent manner.
Initial research examined how districts search for, interpret, evaluate, and ultimately apply evidence when selecting edtech, core curriculum, or professional learning materials. Through over 85 interviews and three different surveys of over 700 total district leaders, the EdSignals Studio examined purchasing behavior across multiple ecosystems using inferential statistics, machine learning, and inductive analysis. This research culminated in a series of journey maps depicting the typical stages of procurement within each ecosystem, including need identification, evaluation, piloting, and final decision-making. The resources, activities, and stakeholders involved in each phase were also documented, along with the barriers and drivers to evidence use. Segmentation revealed substantial variation across districts in both structure and process, reflecting differences in role configurations, team maturity, evidence literacy, and time constraints. These journey maps provided a detailed understanding of where, when, and why evidence either supported or failed to influence decision-making.
In addition to mapping procurement journeys, the EdSignals Studio conducted buyer segmentation research to better understand the decision-making tendencies of different district types. This segmentation distinguished among districts based on their resource levels, evaluation sophistication, risk tolerance, and preferences for evidence format. For example, some districts prioritized simplified, high-level signals to quickly narrow down options, while others engaged deeply with methodological detail. These findings helped the EdSignals Studio contextualize the behavioral constraints at play and identify opportunities for supporting district leaders more effectively (“Buyers Insights”, 2025).
Findings from the initial research informed the development of the Evidence Uptake Framework, a behavioral model designed to clarify the drivers of effective evidence use in procurement decisions. The framework synthesizes insights from behavioral science and user research to articulate how evidence must be structured and communicated to support informed procurement decisions among district leaders, bridging research and practical application (Grimshaw et al., 2012; Wallace, Nwosu, & Clarke, 2012). The EdSignals Studio also uses other behavioral frameworks, such as COM-B, as tools in analyzing what drives or inhibits specific behaviors by breaking the behavior down into its component parts (Michie, Atkins, & West, 2014).
The core principles of the framework are rooted in five behavioral drivers. Evidence must be available so that it is easy to locate at the relevant stage of procurement; accessible so that users can interpret it with minimal cognitive strain; actionable so that implications are clearly connected to decisions; desirable so that it resonates with district priorities and social norms; and pragmatic so that evidence aligns with district workflows and time constraints. These drivers, illustrated in the innermost circle of the figure, represent conditions under which evidence is more likely to be used rather than overlooked or misunderstood during procurement (Figure 1). The middle ring of the circle depicts the change principles that make up each driver, and the outer ring shows behavior change techniques to guide market actors in applying the drivers and principles of change (“Uptake Framework”, 2025).
Figure 1
Evidence Uptake Framework
The Evidence Uptake Framework was subsequently translated into a capacity-building toolkit for market actors to generate evidence on the quality of the core curriculum, edtech, and curriculum-aligned professional learning. This translation from framework to toolkit further enables empirically derived principles to become implementable guidance for practitioners. The toolkit is divided thematically into three categories: planning (e.g., creating and testing a value proposition), organizational processes (e.g., fostering collaboration across silos within an organization), and promoting resources (e.g., building audience trust and simplifying communication) to holistically support organizations seeking to improve uptake of their quality signals (“Toolkit”, 2025).
The toolkit served as the foundation for capacity-building work with non-profit ecosystem actors, helping them align the evidence they create around HQIM with district needs and behaviors. These applications generated meaningful improvements across a range of indicators, including a 92% increase in net promoter score, a 35% increase in click rates, and a 10-fold increase in outreach capacity (NB: these figures come from client-commissioned research that is not publicly available).
Simultaneously, the EdSignals Studio worked with the demand side of HQIM adoption by developing de-biasing tools for district decision-makers. These tools were designed to counteract the biases that most frequently influence procurement outcomes: confirmation bias (Pilat & Krastev, n.d.-a), groupthink (Pilat & Krastev, n.d.-b), halo effect (Pilat & Krastev, n.d.-c), illusory correlation (Pilat & Krastev, n.d.-d), sunk cost fallacy (Pilat & Krastev, n.d.-e), zero risk bias (Pilat & Krastev, n.d.-f), and selection bias (Nunan, Bankhead, & Aronson, 2017). Through workshops and individual exercises, district leaders reported improved clarity in articulating their reasoning, greater transparency in evaluating trade-offs, and increased confidence in navigating complex decisions with efficiency. These de-biasing tools helped formalize discussions, introduce overlooked perspectives, and strengthen the rigor of evaluations.
Collectively, these tools demonstrate how research-based improvements in evidence communication and decision-making support can successfully bridge to practice, meaningfully influencing district procurement.
The EdSignals Studio currently operates as a cohort-based initiative that convenes evaluators of instructional materials, vendors, district leaders, researchers, and other stakeholders to share insights, test interventions, and collaborate on long-term improvements to the instructional materials marketplace. As a living research-to-practice bridge, the Studio enables continuous translation: new research insights are rapidly converted into practical applications, while practitioner feedback informs ongoing research priorities. Overall, the Studio aims to continue creating knowledge, fostering collaboration across the ecosystem, and amplifying signals of quality related to HQIM. Through these efforts, the Studio seeks to support a more informed, equitable, and transparent procurement environment that better aligns instructional materials with the needs of students and teachers.
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