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Assessment
Using Implementation Fidelity to Aid in Interpreting Program Impacts: A Brief Review
Topics: MethodsTags: Assessment, CurriculumPoor program implementation constitutes one explanation for null results in trials of educational interventions. For this reason, researchers often collect data about implementation fidelity when conducting such trials. In this article, we document whether and how researchers report and measure… more →
New Schools and New Classmates: The Disruption and Peer Group Effects of School Reassignment
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernancePolicy makers periodically consider using student assignment policies to improve educational outcomes by altering the socio-economic and academic skill composition of schools. We exploit the quasi-random reassignment of students across schools in the Wake County Public School System to estimate… more →
Understanding Performance in Test Taking: The Role of Question Difficulty Order
Tags: AssessmentStandardized assessments are widely used to determine access to educational resources with important consequences for later economic outcomes in life. However, many design features of the tests themselves may lead to psychological reactions influencing performance. In particular, the level of… 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 →
A Half Century of Progress in U. S. Student Achievement: Agency and Flynn Effects; Ethnic and SES Differences
Topics: Student LearningPrincipals (policymakers) disagree as to whether U. S. student performance has changed over the past half century. To inform conversations, agents administered seven million psychometrically linked tests in math (m) and reading (rd) in 160 survey waves to national probability samples of cohorts… more →
The Distribution of School Spending Impacts
Tags: Efficacy, AssessmentWe examine all known "credibly causal" studies to explore the distribution of the causal effects of public K-12 school spending on student outcomes in the United States. For each of the 31 included studies, we compute the same marginal spending effect parameter estimate. Precision-weighted… more →
Achievement Gaps in the Wake of COVID-19
Topics: Student LearningA survey targeting education researchers conducted in November, 2020 provides both short- and longer-term predictions of how much achievement gaps between low- and high-income students in U.S elementary schools will change as a result of COVID-related disruptions to schooling and family life.… more →
How Much Does Teacher Quality Vary Across Teacher Preparation Programs? Reanalyses from Six States
Topics: MethodsAt least sixteen US states have taken steps toward holding teacher preparation programs (TPPs) accountable for teacher value-added to student test scores. Yet it is unclear whether teacher quality differences between TPPs are large enough to make an accountability system worthwhile. Several… more →
Higher-Quality Elementary Schools Sustain the Prekindergarten Boost: Evidence from an Exploration of Variation in the Boston Prekindergarten Program’s Impacts
Topics: Student LearningWhile there is a consensus that attending preschool better prepares children for kindergarten, evidence on the factors that sustain the preschool boost into the early elementary years is still emerging. To add to this literature, we use lottery data from applicants to oversubscribed… more →
The Effects of Financial Aid Loss on Persistence and Graduation: A Multi-Dimensional Regression Discontinuity Approach
Tags: Higher education, AssessmentFor years Georgia's HOPE Scholarship program provided full tuition scholarships to high achieving students. State budgetary shortfalls reduced its generosity in 2011. Under the new rules, only students meeting more rigorous merit-based criteria would retain the original scholarship covering full… more →
An Evaluation of Credit Recovery as an Intervention for High School Students Who Fail Courses
Credit recovery (CR) refers to online courses that high school students take after previously failing the course. Many have suggested that CR courses are helping students to graduate from high school without corresponding increases in academic skills. This study analyzes administrative data from… more →
Education Leaders’ Knowledge of Causal Research Design: A Measurement Challenge
Federal policy has both incentivized and supported better use of research evidence by educational leaders. However, the extent to which these leaders are well-positioned to understand foundational principles from research design and statistics, including those that underlie the What Works… more →
The role of student effort on performance in PISA: Revisiting the gender gap in achievement
International assessments are important to benchmark the quality of education across countries. However, on low-stakes tests, students’ incentives to invest their maximum effort may be minimal. Research stresses that ignoring students’ effort when interpreting results from low-stakes assessments… more →
How Can Released State Test Items Support Interim Assessment Purposes in an Educational Crisis?
Tags: Covid-19 recovery, AssessmentState testing programs regularly release previously administered test items to the public. We provide an open-source recipe for state, district, and school assessment coordinators to combine these items flexibly to produce scores linked to established state score scales. These would enable… more →
Test-Based Accountability and the Effectiveness of School Finance Reforms
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceTags: School reform, AssessmentA recent literature provides new evidence that school resources are important for student outcomes. In this paper, we show that school finance reform-induced increases in student performance are driven by those states that had test-based accountability policies in place at the time. By… more →
Sibling Effects on High School Exam Taking and Performance
Tags: High schools, AssessmentYounger siblings take more advanced high school course end of year exams when their older siblings perform better in those same exams. Using a regression discontinuity and data from millions of siblings who take Advanced Placement (AP) exams, we show that younger siblings with older siblings who… more →
Ordinal Approaches to Decomposing Between-group Test Score Disparities
Topics: MethodsTags: Assessment, EquityThe 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 →
Coal Use and Student Performance
Topics: Student Well-BeingTags: Neighborhoods, AssessmentWe examine the effect of air pollution from power production on students' cognitive outcomes by leveraging year-to-year production variation, wind patterns, and plant closures. We find that every one million megawatt hours of coal-fired power production decreases student performance in schools… more →
Experimental Effects of “Achievement Gap” News Reporting on Viewers’ Racial Stereotypes, Inequality Explanations, and Inequality Prioritization
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceThe “achievement gap” has long dominated mainstream conversations about race and education.
The Design of Clustered Observational Studies in Education
Topics: MethodsTags: Assessment, EfficacyClustered observational studies (COSs) are a critical analytic tool for educational effectiveness research. We present a design framework for the development and critique of COSs. The framework is built on the counterfactual model for causal inference and promotes the concept of… more →