Research

Learning from the “failure” of polling

The tie between [Progressive-era] administrative authority and the discourse of special education lay in three connected features: the objects of study in the field, the evangelism of experts embedded in personal and professional networks, and the technical tools that experts and their public partners used in practice. We can call this set a triangle of […]

International Reason like a Pirate Day

My friend Tom Smith wrote the official Talk like a Pirate Day anthem: The closest attitudes I’ve seen in education research ARRRRRRRRRR from econometric specialists, such as those trained by MIT’s Joshua Angrist. If you have Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke’s Mostly Harmless Econometrics, like me, matey, you may have read a certain swashbuckling tone between the lines: Let’s grab that data, […]

Steal my job (or part of it)

This semester I am serving as interim associate dean for the Office of Scholarship at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. This is in addition to my more persistent role as a division director, and my interim role is to start implementing the recommendations of a task force — creating a more connected structure to support […]

“Weeks/days of learning” is well-intended bad interpretative factoid

The Institute of Education Sciences has released a new Evaluation of the Teacher Incentive Fund, or TIF, (after two years), which is generally solid research by Mathematica Policy Research, at least at a quick first read today. The main findings: Most of the experimental part of TIF was implemented by the schools. Some parts of the program […]

Causation cadge

Note: this post is a sort of mental marker, as I am partway thinking through a particular issue and do not want to lose my place. One of my colleagues, Micki Chi, has divided causal modeling into two sorts, the type with narrative structures and the type without, which she calls emergent and has some evidence […]