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Jing Liu
The Effects of Daily Air Pollution on Students and Teachers
Recent empirical research shows that air pollution harms student test scores and attendance and increases office discipline referrals. However, the mechanism by which air pollution operates within schools to negatively affect student and teacher outcomes remains largely opaque. The existing… more →
Automated Feedback Improves Teachers’ Questioning Quality in Brick-and-Mortar Classrooms: Opportunities for Further Enhancement
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentAI-powered professional learning tools that provide teachers with individualized feedback on their instruction have proven effective at improving instruction and student engagement in virtual learning contexts. Despite the need for consistent, personalized professional learning in K-12 settings… more →
A Quantitative Study of Mathematical Language in Upper Elementary Classrooms
Topics: MethodsThis study provides the first large-scale quantitative exploration of mathematical language use in upper elementary U.S. classrooms. Our approach employs natural language processing techniques to describe variation in teachers’ and students’ use of mathematical language in 1,657 fourth and fifth… more →
The Promises and Pitfalls of Using Language Models to Measure Instruction Quality in Education
Topics: MethodsAssessing instruction quality is a fundamental component of any improvement efforts in the education system. However, traditional manual assessments are expensive, subjective, and heavily dependent on observers’ expertise and idiosyncratic factors, preventing teachers from getting timely and… more →
Computer Science for All? The Impact of High School Computer Science Courses on College Majors and Earnings
This study provides the first causal analysis of the impact of expanding Computer Science (CS) education in U.S. K-12 schools on students’ choice of college major and early career outcomes. Utilizing rich longitudinal data from Maryland, we exploit variation from the staggered rollout of CS… more →
Noncognitive Factors and Student Long-Run Success: Comparing the Predictive Validity of Observable Academic Behaviors and Social-Emotional Skills
Noncognitive constructs such as self-e cacy, social awareness, and academic engagement are widely acknowledged as critical components of human capital, but systematic data collection on such skills in school systems is complicated by conceptual ambiguities, measurement challenges and resource… more →
Can Automated Feedback Improve Teachers’ Uptake of Student Ideas? Evidence From a Randomized Controlled Trial In a Large-Scale Online Course
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentProviding consistent, individualized feedback to teachers is essential for improving instruction but can be prohibitively resource-intensive in most educational contexts. We develop M-Powering Teachers, an automated tool based on natural language processing to give teachers feedback on their… more →
M-Powering Teachers: Natural Language Processing Powered Feedback Improves 1:1 Instruction and Student Outcomes
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentAlthough learners are being connected 1:1 with instructors at an increasing scale, most of these instructors do not receive effective, consistent feedback to help them improved. We deployed M-Powering Teachers, an automated tool based on natural language processing to give instructors feedback… more →
Troublemakers? The Role of Frequent Teacher Referrers in Expanding Racial Disciplinary Disproportionalities
Topics: Student Well-BeingTeachers’ sense-making of student behavior determines whether students get in trouble and are formally disciplined.
Who refers whom? The effects of teacher characteristics on disciplinary office referrals
Topics: Student Well-BeingTeachers affect a wide range of students’ educational and social outcomes, but how they contribute to students’ involvement in school discipline is less understood. We estimate the impact of teacher demographics and other observed qualifications on students’ likelihood of receiving a… more →
Beyond Chronic Absenteeism: The Dynamics and Disparities of Class Absences in Secondary School
Topics: Student Well-BeingStudent absenteeism is often conceptualized and quantified in a static, uniform manner, providing an incomplete understanding of this important phenomenon. Applying growth curve models to detailed class-attendance data, we document that secondary school students' unexcused absences grow steadily… more →
Computationally Identifying Funneling and Focusing Questions in Classroom Discourse
Topics: Student LearningResponsive teaching is a highly effective strategy that promotes student learning. In math classrooms, teachers might funnel students towards a normative answer or focus students to reflect on their own thinking, deepening their understanding of math concepts. When teachers focus, they treat… more →
From Referrals to Suspensions: New Evidence on Racial Disparities in Exclusionary Discipline
Topics: Student Well-BeingWe use novel data on disciplinary referrals, including those that do not lead to suspensions, to better understand the origins of racial disparities in exclusionary discipline. We find significant differences between Black and white students in both referral rates and the rate at which referrals… more →
Measuring Conversational Uptake: A Case Study on Student-Teacher Interactions
Dorottya Demszky, Jing Liu, Zid Mancenido, Julie Cohen, Heather C. Hill, Dan Jurafsky, Tatsunori Hashimoto.Topics: MethodsTags: Instructional practicesIn conversation, uptake happens when a speaker builds on the contribution of their interlocutor by, for example, acknowledging, repeating or reformulating what they have said. In education, teachers' uptake of student contributions has been linked to higher student achievement. Yet measuring and… more →
The Short- and Long-Run Impacts of Secondary School Absences
Topics: Student LearningTags: AbsenteeismWe provide novel evidence on the causal impacts of student absences in middle and high school on state test scores, course grades, and educational attainment using a rich administrative dataset that tracks the date and class period of each absence. We use two similar but distinct identification… more →
Measuring Teaching Practices at Scale: A Novel Application of Text-as-Data Methods
Topics: MethodsValid and reliable measurements of teaching quality facilitate school-level decision-making and policies pertaining to teachers. Using nearly 1,000 word-to-word transcriptions of 4th- and 5th-grade English language arts classes, we apply novel text-as-data methods to develop automated measures… more →
More Than Shortages: The Unequal Distribution of Substitute Teaching
Classroom teachers in the US are absent on average approximately six percent of a school year. Despite the prevalence of teacher absences, surprisingly little research has assessed the key source of replacement instruction: substitute teachers. Using detailed administrative and survey data from… more →
Measuring Teaching Practices at Scale: A Novel Application of Text-as-Data Methods
Topics: MethodsTags: Instructional practicesValid and reliable measurements of teaching quality facilitate school-level decision-making and policies pertaining to teachers, but conventional classroom observations are costly, prone to rater bias, and hard to implement at scale. Using nearly 1,000 word-to-word transcriptions of 4th- and 5th… more →
Projecting the potential impacts of COVID-19 school closures on academic achievement
Topics: Student LearningWith 55 million students in the United States out of school due to the COVID-19 pandemic, education systems are scrambling to meet the needs of schools and families, including planning how best to approach instruction in the fall given students may be farther… more →
Using a Text-as-Data Approach to Understand Reform Processes: A Deep Exploration of School Improvement Strategies
Topics: MethodsTags: School reformAlthough program evaluations using rigorous quasi-experimental or experimental designs can inform decisions about whether to continue or terminate a given program, they often have limited ability to reveal the mechanisms by which complex interventions achieve their effects. To illuminate these… more →