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Efficacy
Experimental education research: clarifying why, how and when to use random assignment
Topics: MethodsTags: Efficacy, School reformOver the last twenty years, education researchers have increasingly conducted randomised experiments with the goal of informing the decisions of educators and policymakers. Such experiments have generally employed broad, consequential, standardised outcome measures in the hope that this would… more →
College Counseling in the Classroom: Randomized Evaluation of a Teacher-Based Approach to College Advising
Tags: College readiness, EfficacyGuidance counselors provide the main source of college advising for low-income high school students, but are woefully understaffed in high-need schools. This paper evaluates an approach to school-based college advising that relies on teachers rather than counselors. Using a randomized control… more →
Integrated Student Support Intervention Mitigates the Adverse Impact of School Mobility on Middle School Students' Achievement and Behavior
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceSchool mobility, compounding socioeconomic inequities, can undermine academic achievement and behavior, particularly during middle school years. This study investigates the effect of a school-based integrated student support intervention – City Connects – on the achievement and behavior of… more →
Out of Sight, Out of Mind? The Gap between Students’ Test Performance and Teachers’ Estimations in India and Bangladesh
This is one of the first studies of the mismatch between students’ test scores and teachers’ estimations of those scores in low- and middle-income countries. Prior studies in high-income countries have found strong correlations between these metrics. We leverage data on actual and estimated… more →
Employee evaluation and skill investments: Evidence from public school teachers
When employees expect evaluation and performance incentives will continue (or begin) in the future, the potential future rewards create an incentive to invest in relevant skills today. Because skills benefit job performance, the effects of evaluation can persist after the rewards end or even… more →
The Stubborn Unresponsiveness of Youth Voter Turnout to Civic Education: Quasi-experimental Evidence from State-Mandated Civics Tests
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceYouth voter turnout remains stubbornly low and unresponsive to civic education. Rigorous evaluations of the adoption of civic tests for high school graduation by some states on youth voter turnout remain limited. We estimate the impact of a recent, state-mandated civics test policy—the Civics… more →
Mandating Multiple Measures and Encouraging Student Supports: Evaluating a New Approach to Developmental Education in California’s Community Colleges
Tags: Higher education, EfficacyAB705 is a landmark higher education policy that has changed approaches to developmental/remedial education in the California Community College system. We study one district that implemented reforms by placing most students in transfer-level math/English courses and encouraging enrollment in… more →
At What Cost?: Is Technical Education Worth the Investment?
Career and technical education (CTE) has existed in the United States for over a century, and only in recent years have there been opportunities to assess the causal impact of participating in these programs while in high school. To date, no work has assessed whether the relative costs of these… more →
The Long-Run Impacts of Universal Pre-K with Equilibrium Considerations
Topics: Student LearningSince 1995, publicly funded pre-K with universal eligibility has proliferated across the U.S. Universal pre-K (UPK) operates at great scale and serves children with a wide range of alternative childcare options. Because these programs are relatively young, very little is known about their long-… more →
How Much Do Early Teachers Matter?
Topics: Student LearningTags: EfficacyWe present new estimates of the importance of teachers in early grades for later grade outcomes, but unlike the existing literature that examines teacher “fade-out,” we directly compare the contribution of early-grade teachers to later year outcomes against the contributions of later year… more →
Correspondence Measures for Assessing Replication Success
Topics: MethodsTags: EfficacyGiven recent evidence challenging the replicability of results in the social and behavioral sciences, critical questions have been raised about appropriate measures for determining replication success in comparing effect estimates across studies. At issue is the fact that… more →
Crossing the Finish Line but Losing the Race? Socioeconomic Inequalities in the Labor Market Trajectories of Community College Graduates
Despite decades and hundreds of billions of dollars of federal and state investment in policies to promote postsecondary educational attainment as a key lever for increasing the economic mobility of lower-income populations, research continues to show large and meaningful differences in the mid-… more →
Signal Weighted Value-Added Models
Topics: MethodsTags: Assessment, EfficacyThis study introduces the signal weighted teacher value-added model (SW VAM), a value-added model that weights student-level observations based on each student’s capacity to signal their assigned teacher’s quality. Specifically, the model leverages the repeated appearance of a given student to… more →
The Effects of Middle School Remediation on Postsecondary Success: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Florida
Topics: Student LearningHigh school graduation rates in the United States are at an all-time high, yet many of these graduates are deemed not ready for postsecondary coursework when they enter college. This study examines the short-, medium-, and long-term effects of remedial courses in middle school using a regression… 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 →
Improving Average Treatment Effect Estimates in Small-Scale Randomized Controlled Trials
Topics: MethodsTags: EfficacyResearchers often include covariates when they analyze the results of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), valuing the increased precision of the estimates over the potential of inducing small-sample bias when doing so. In this paper, we develop a sufficient condition which ensures that the… more →
Understanding Teacher Perceptions of Efficacy in Social and Emotional Learning: Toward Equity-Based Approaches to SEL in Urban Schools
Topics: Student Well-BeingResearchers have noted the importance of equity-based approaches to social and emotional learning (SEL), which emphasize the role of school environment, including adult beliefs, in student well-being. This article builds on this work by examining 129 teachers’ perceptions of efficacy in SEL.… more →
Using Semantic Similarity to Assess Adherence and Replicability of Intervention Delivery
Topics: MethodsTags: Instructional coaching, EfficacyResearchers are rarely satisfied to learn only whether an intervention works, they also want to understand why and under what circumstances interventions produce their intended effects. These questions have led to increasing calls for implementation research to be… more →
The Impressive Effects of Tutoring on PreK-12 Learning: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence
Topics: Student LearningTutoring—defined here as one-on-one or small-group instructional programming by teachers, paraprofessionals, volunteers, or parents—is one of the most versatile and potentially transformative educational tools in use today. Within the past decade, dozens of preK-12 tutoring experiments have been… more →
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 →