Assessment
Distance to Degrees: How College Proximity Shapes Students’ Enrollment Choices and Attainment Across Race-Ethnicity and Socioeconomic Status
Leveraging rich data on the universe of Texas high school graduates, we estimate how the relationship between geographic access to public two- and four-year postsecondary institutions and postsecondary outcomes varies across race-ethnicity and socioeconomic status. We find that students are… more →
More Money for Less Time? Examining the Relative and Heterogenous Financial Returns to Non-Degree Credentials and Degree Programs
There is a large and growing number of non-degree credential offerings between a high school diploma and a bachelor's degree, as well as degree programs beyond a bachelor’s degree. Nevertheless, research on the financial returns to non-degree credentials and degree-granting programs is often… more →
What Impacts Should We Expect from Tutoring at Scale? Exploring Meta-Analytic Generalizability
Topics: MethodsU.S. public schools are engaged in an unprecedented effort to expand tutoring in the wake of the pandemic. Broad-based support for scaling tutoring emerged, in part, because of the large effects on student achievement found in prior meta-analyses. We conduct an expanded meta-analysis of 282… more →
Failing to Learn from Failure: The Facade of Online Credit Recovery Assessments
Tags: Curriculum, AssessmentOnline credit recovery (OCR) courses are the most common means through which students retake courses required for high school graduation. Yet a growing body of research has raised concerns regarding student learning in these courses, with low quality assessments posited as one contributing… more →
A Matter of Time? Measuring Effects of Public Schooling Expansions on Families’ Constraints
Topics: Families and CommunitiesAs women increasingly entered the labor force throughout the late 20th century, the challenges of balancing work and family came to the forefront. We leverage pronounced changes in the availability of public schooling for young children—through duration expansions to the kindergarten day—to… 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 →
Teacher Licensure and Workforce Quality: Insights from Covid-Era Emergency Licenses in Massachusetts
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentMuch recent debate among policymakers and policy advocates focuses on whether states should reduce teacher licensure requirements to ease the burdens of recruiting high quality teachers to the workforce. We examine the effectiveness of individuals who entered the teacher workforce in… more →
Does Corequisite Remediation Work for Everyone? An Exploration of Heterogeneous Effects and Mechanisms
The landscape of developmental education has experienced significant shifts over the last decade nationwide, as more than 20 states and higher education systems have transitioned from the traditional prerequisite model to corequisite remediation. Drawing on administrative data from Tennessee… more →
The Notorious SBG: Administrators’ Perceptions of Standards-Based Grading Practices
Tags: AssessmentThis mixed-methods study synthesizes Standards-Based Grading (SBG) literature, analyzes 249 Arkansas administrators' survey responses using OLS regressions, and identifies themes through in-vivo coding of qualitative feedback. Results show more SBG support among liberal, elementary-level… more →
Does One Plus One Always Equal Two? Examining Complementarities in Educational Interventions
Topics: MethodsTags: Assessment, EfficacyPublic policies targeting individuals based on need often impose disproportionate burden on communities that lack the resources to implement these policies effectively. In an elementary school setting, I examine whether community-level interventions focusing on similar needs and providing… more →
GED® College Readiness Benchmarks and Post-Secondary Success
Tags: College readiness, AssessmentIn 2016, the GED® introduced college readiness benchmarks designed to identify testers who are academically prepared for credit-bearing college coursework. The benchmarks are promoted as awarding college credits or exempting “college-ready” GED® graduates from remedial coursework. I show… more →
Are Students On Track?: Comparing the Predictive Validity of Administrative and Survey Measures of Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills for Long-Term Outcomes
Tags: AssessmentEducation leaders must identify valid metrics to predict student long-term success. We exploit a unique dataset containing data on cognitive skills, self-regulation, behavior, course performance, and test scores for 8th-grade students. We link these data to data on students' high school outcomes… more →
HBCU Enrollment and Longer-Term Outcomes
Using data from nearly 1.2 million Black SAT takers, we estimate the impacts of initially enrolling in an Historically Black College and University (HBCU) on educational, economic, and financial outcomes. We control for the college application portfolio and compare students with similar… more →
Disentangling Person-Dependent and Item-Dependent Causal Effects: Applications of Item Response Theory to the Estimation of Treatment Effect Heterogeneity
Topics: MethodsAnalyzing heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) plays a crucial role in understanding the impacts of educational interventions.
Practice-Based Teacher Education Pedagogies Improve Responsiveness: Evidence from a Lab Experiment
Zid Mancenido, Heather C. Hill, Jeannette Garcia Coppersmith, Hannah Carter, Cynthia Pollard, Chris Monschauer.Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentPractice-based teacher education has increasingly been adopted as an alternative to more traditional, conceptually-focused pedagogies, yet the field lacks causal evidence regarding the relative efficacy of these approaches. To address this issue, we randomly assigned 185 college students to one… more →
Leveraging Item Parameter Drift to Assess Transfer Effects in Vocabulary Learning
Topics: MethodsLongitudinal models of individual growth typically emphasize between-person predictors of change but ignore how growth may vary within persons because each person contributes only one point at each time to the model. In contrast, modeling growth with multi-item assessments allows evaluation of… more →
Estimating Learning When Test Scores Are Missing: The Problem and Two Solutions
Topics: MethodsTags: Assessment, Learning environmentsLongitudinal studies can produce biased estimates of learning if children miss tests. In an application to summer learning, we illustrate how missing test scores can create an illusion of large summer learning gaps when true gaps are close to zero. We demonstrate two methods that reduce bias by… more →
Different methods for assessing pre-service teachers’ instruction: Why measures matter
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentTeacher preparation programs are increasingly expected to use data on pre-service teacher (PST) skills to drive program improvement and provide targeted supports. Observational ratings are especially vital, but also prone to measurement issues. Scores may be influenced by factors unrelated to… more →
Strategic Disclosure of Test Scores: Evidence from US College Admissions
The impact of test-optional college admissions policies depends on whether applicants act strategically in disclosing test scores. We analyze individual applicants’ standardized test scores and disclosure behavior to 50 major US colleges for entry in fall 2021, when Covid-19 prompted widespread… more →
The Unintended Consequences of Academic Leniency
In response to widening achievement gaps and increased demand for post-secondary education, local and federal governments across the US have enacted policies that have boosted high school graduation rates without an equivalent rise in student achievement, suggesting a decline in academic… more →