Bill Tally leads education research and development that deepens our understanding of how digital tools can make learning more rigorous, meaningful, and engaging in and across the disciplines. He brings expertise in interdisciplinary learning, the digital humanities, formative research, historical studies, and the sociology of education—as well as experience configuring digital archives to enable students, teachers, and the public to do authentic historical and scientific inquiry.

Tally is Project Director for Zoom In!, a free, research-based online tool that helps students and teachers do authentic inquiry in U.S. history and high school science, using data in ways that are key to each domain. Using Zoom In! to U.S. History, students explore 18 critical episodes in America’s past through both primary and secondary documents, building historical thinking and literacy skills such as close reading, writing, and arguing with evidence. Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, it includes extensive embedded professional development for teachers and addresses their need for instructional resources that enhance students’ content knowledge and skills in evidence-based writing. Zoom In! Learning Science with Data is a National Science Foundation-funded curriculum tool that helps high school science students manipulate, analyze, and write about real and complex data sets as they study key topics in biology and Earth science.

Tally also leads formative and summative evaluation studies that help program developers assess and refine a wide array of digital media initiatives focused on social studies, digital games and storytelling, math and literacy, the needs of diverse learners, and teacher professional development. 

Clients and partners of the CCT projects to which Tally has contributed include the Library of Congress, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, The New York Times, National Geographic, WNET, City University of New York, the Smithsonian Institution, MIT, Carnegie Hall, The New York Philharmonic, the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Chicago History Museum, and Bank Street College of Education.