Methods
Connected Networks in Principal Value-Added Models
A growing literature uses value-added (VA) models to quantify principals' contributions to improving student outcomes. Principal VA is typically estimated using a connected networks model that includes both principal and school fixed effects (FE) to isolate principal effectiveness from fixed… more →
Intersecting Inequalities: Racial/Ethnic and Socioeconomic Differences in Math Achievement and School Contexts in California
Past research extensively documents inequalities in educational opportunity and achievement by students’ race/ethnicity or socioeconomic status (SES). Less scholarship focuses on how race/ethnicity and SES interact and jointly contribute to educational inequalities. We advance this burgeoning… more →
Measuring Teaching Practices at Scale: A Novel Application of Text-as-Data Methods
Valid 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 →
The Dynamics and Measurement of High School Homelessness and Achievement Disparities
There is no national consensus on how school districts calculate high school achievement disparities between students who experience homelessness and those who do not. Using administrative student-level data from a mid-sized public school district in the Southern United States, we show that… more →
Improving Average Treatment Effect Estimates in Small-Scale Randomized Controlled Trials
Researchers 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 →
How Much Does Teacher Quality Vary Across Teacher Preparation Programs? Reanalyses from Six States
At 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 →
Using Semantic Similarity to Assess Adherence and Replicability of Intervention Delivery
Researchers 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 →
Design-Based Approaches to Causal Replication Studies
Recent interest to promote and support replication efforts assume that there is well-established methodological guidance for designing and implementing these studies. However, no such consensus exists in the methodology literature. This article addresses these challenges by describing design-… more →
Ordinal Approaches to Decomposing Between-group Test Score Disparities
The 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 →
Effectiveness Research for Teacher Education
Despite calls for more evidence regarding the effectiveness of teacher education practices, causal research in the field remains rare. One reason is that we lack designs and measurement approaches that appropriately meet the challenges of causal inference in the context of teacher education… more →
Measuring Teaching Practices at Scale: A Novel Application of Text-as-Data Methods
Valid 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 →
Matching Methods for Clustered Observational Studies in Education
Many interventions in education occur in settings where treatments are applied to groups. For example, a reading intervention may be implemented for all students in some schools and withheld from students in other schools. When such treatments are non-randomly allocated, outcomes across the… more →
The Design of Clustered Observational Studies in Education
Clustered 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 →
Do Response Styles Affect Estimates of Growth on Social-emotional Constructs? Evidence from Four Years of Longitudinal Survey Scores
Survey respondents use different response styles when they use the categories of the Likert scale differently despite having the same true score on the construct of interest. For example, respondents may be more likely to use the extremes of the response scale independent of their true… more →
Estimating Student Growth on Psychological and Social-emotional Constructs: A Comparison of Multiple Scoring Approaches
A huge portion of what we know about how humans develop, learn, behave, and interact is based on survey data. Researchers use longitudinal growth modeling to understand the development of students on psychological and social-emotional learning constructs across elementary and middle school. In… more →
Teacher Effects on Student Achievement and Height: A Cautionary Tale
Estimates of teacher “value-added” suggest teachers vary substantially in their ability to promote student learning. Prompted by this finding, many states and school districts have adopted value-added measures as indicators of teacher job performance. In this paper, we conduct a new test of the… more →
Are Schools Deemed Effective Based on Overall Student Growth Also Closing Achievement Gaps? Examining the Black-White Gap in Schools
Research has begun to investigate whether teachers and schools are as effective with certain student subgroups as they are with the overall student population. Most of this research has examined the issue by trying to produce causal estimates of school contributions to short-term student… more →
Using a Text-as-Data Approach to Understand Reform Processes: A Deep Exploration of School Improvement Strategies
Although program evaluations using rigorous quasi-experimental or experimental designs can inform decisions about whether to continue or terminate a given program, they often have limited ability to reveal the mechanisms by which complex interventions achieve their effects. To illuminate these… more →
Effect Sizes for Measuring Student and School Growth in Achievement: In Search of Practical Significance
Effect sizes in the Cohen’s d family are often used in education to compare estimates across studies, measures, and sample sizes. For example, effect sizes are used to compare gains in achievement students make over time, either in pre- and post-treatment studies or in the absence… more →
Quasi-Experimental Evaluation of Alternative Sample Selection Corrections
We use a natural experiment to evaluate sample selection correction methods' performance. In 2007, Michigan began requiring that all students take a college entrance exam, increasing the exam-taking rate from 64 to 99%. We apply different selection correction methods, using different sets of… more →