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Efficacy
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 →
Timing in Early Childhood Education: How Cognitive and Achievement Program Impacts Vary by Starting Age, Program Duration, and Time Since the End of the Program
Topics: Student LearningThis paper uses meta-analytic techniques to estimate the separate effects of the starting age, program duration, and persistence of impacts of early childhood education programs on children’s cognitive and achievement outcomes. It concentrates on studies published before the wide scale… more →
Interpreting Effect Sizes of Education Interventions
Topics: MethodsTags: Assessment, EfficacyResearchers commonly interpret effect sizes by applying benchmarks proposed by Cohen over a half century ago. However, effects that are small by Cohen’s standards are large relative to the impacts of most field-based interventions. These benchmarks also fail to consider important differences in… more →