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Instructional practices
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 →
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 →
Learning Lessons from Instruction: Descriptive Results from an Observational Study of Urban Elementary Classrooms
Background:
For nearly three decades, policy-makers and researchers in the United States have promoted more intellectually rigorous standards for mathematics teaching and learning. Yet, to date, we have limited descriptive evidence on the extent to which reform-oriented… more →Measuring Teaching Practices at Scale: A Novel Application of Text-as-Data Methods
Topics: MethodsTags: Instructional practicesValid and reliable measurements of teaching quality facilitate school-level decision-making and policies pertaining to teachers, but conventional classroom observations are costly, prone to rater bias, and hard to implement at scale. Using nearly 1,000 word-to-word transcriptions of 4th- and 5th… more →
Teacher Evaluation, Ambitious Mathematics Instruction, and Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching: Evidence from Early Career Teachers
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentWhile teacher evaluation policies have been central to efforts to enhance teaching quality over the past decade, little is known about how teachers change their instructional practices in response to such policies. To address this question, this paper drew on classroom observation and survey… more →
Collective Racial Bias and the Black-White Test Score Gap
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceThis study examines the relationship between county-level estimates of implicit racial bias and black-white test score gaps in U.S. schools. Data from over 1 million respondents from across the United States who completed an online version of the Race Implicit Association Test (IAT) were… more →
Deeper Learning Networks: Taking Student-Centered Learning and Equity to Scale
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceOne of the mysteries of education reform is how leaders and educators can successfully instantiate, sustain, and spread student-centered pedagogical practices from a few schools to many others. Advocates for deeper learning grapple with this mystery as they seek to transform teaching and… more →
Mitigating the Gender Gap in the Willingness to Compete: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment
Topics: Student LearningWe evaluate the impact on competitiveness of a randomized educational intervention that aims to foster grit, a skill that is highly predictive of achievement. The intervention is implemented in elementary schools, and we measure its impact using a dynamic competition task with interim… more →