Harvard Graduate School of Education
The Reliability of Classroom Observations and Student Surveys in Non-Research Settings: Evidence from a Middle-Income Country
We present one of the first Generalizability studies of non-test measures of teaching effectiveness administered by practitioners in a middle-income country. The reliability of observations varies widely (from 0 to 0.75 on a 0-1 scale) and depends upon their context (whether they are conducted… more →
Does Civic Education Impact Primary-School Students’ Civic Outcomes? Experimental Evidence from Liberia
We present experimental evidence on a civic education program in Liberia's public primary schools across 140 schools serving grades 3 and 4. The program provided new civic textbooks, teacher training, bi-weekly instruction, and regular classroom monitoring. After one school year, treatment… more →
A Framework for Building High-Quality Education Data for R&D in the Age of AI: The EDSI Dataset and Expert Insights
The Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative have launched a series of collaborative investments in building large-scale datasets that can support and accelerate data infrastructure for AI R&D efforts in education. In partnership with researchers… more →
Can Automated Feedback Improve Teachers’ Uptake of Student Ideas? Evidence From a Randomized Controlled Trial In a Large-Scale Online Course
Providing 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 →
Lottery-Based Evaluations of Early Education Programs: Opportunities and Challenges for Building the Next Generation of Evidence
Lottery-based identification strategies offer potential for generating the next generation of evidence on U.S.
Ordinal Approaches to Decomposing Between-group Test Score Disparities
The estimation of test score “gaps” and gap trends plays an important role in monitoring educational inequality. Researchers decompose gaps and gap changes into within- and between-school portions to generate evidence on the role schools play in shaping these inequalities. However, existing… more →
Strengthening the Research Base that Informs STEM Instructional Improvement Efforts: A Meta-Analysis
We present results from a meta-analysis of 95 experimental and quasi-experimental preK-12 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professional development and curriculum programs, seeking to understand what content, activities and formats relate to stronger student outcomes.… more →