The gold-standard for evaluating the effect of an educational intervention on student outcomes is running a randomized controlled trial (RCT). However, RCTs may often be small due to logistical considerations, and resulting treatment effect estimates may lack precision. Recent methods improve experimental precision by incorporating information…

Recent methods have sought to improve precision in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) by utilizing data from large observational datasets for covariate adjustment. For example, consider an RCT aimed at evaluating a new algebra curriculum, in which a few dozen schools are randomly assigned to treatment (new curriculum) or control (standard…

Recent research has demonstrated an intersectional approach to the study of differential item functioning (DIF). This approach expands DIF to account for the interactions between what have traditionally been treated as separate grouping variables. In this paper, we compare traditional and intersectional DIF analyses using data from a state testing…

State education departments find themselves pressured to reduce costs while improving student performance. To do so, state education departments must measure the performance of each school district in an objective, data-informed manner. We present a benchmarking methodology and illustrate its application in New York State school districts. We…

Despite many calls, there is little research addressing teachers' knowledge of reading assessments and how they utilize assessments for reading instruction. Therefore, the current research developed and validated a reliable measure of teachers' perceptions and knowledge of reading assessments, called the "Perceptions and Knowledge of…

The Conover Solution is a nonparametric method used to analyze relative growth in students' achievement on state tests administered on two or more occasions. However, there has been very little research assessing the robustness of this method in the presence of missing data. Using vertically scaled and non-vertically scaled data from the math…

The purpose of this ethnographic study was to examine the relationship between focused keyboarding instruction and the required standardized assessments mandated by Federal and State authorities. Initial mandates required that the first assessment to be administered online would be the Writing Assessment by year 2014. The assessment given in…

Many school systems ask teachers to assess and report upon aspects of student performance beyond academic achievement. In Ontario, K-12 teachers assess a common set of six Learning Skills and Work Habits. How well teachers are able to undertake these assessments is not well studied. This study examines Grade 9 and 12 report card data from two…

An administrative rule allowed students who failed an exam to retake it shortly after, triggering strong `teach to the test' incentives to raise these students' test scores for the retake. We develop a model that accounts for truncation and find that these students score 0.14 standard deviations higher on the retest. Using a regression…

Credit recovery in public education has become an intervention used widely in the United States to address the rising number of students who are not meeting with success in the completion of required courses in the traditional education setting. With the passing of the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, public schools sought a method to motivate…

Although the number of countries conducting large-scale assessments has increased significantly over the past two decades, this has not necessarily led to the effective use of learning assessment data in policy-making and planning. To better understand the reasons for this, the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP)…

Is public housing bad for children? Critics charge that public housing projects concentrate poverty and create neighborhoods with limited opportunities, including low-quality schools. However, whether the net effect is positive or negative is theoretically ambiguous and likely to depend on the characteristics of the neighborhood and schools…

In 2006, the BBVA Foundation in Mexico designed a scholarship and mentoring program that targeted vulnerable lower secondary education students in municipalities with high-intensity migration rates. We follow applicants who started lower secondary education in 2009 to estimate the impact of the Program on the probability of graduating from the…

In light of the emergence of statistical analysis techniques based on data mining in education sciences, and the potential they offer to detect non-trivial information in large databases, this paper presents a procedure used to detect factors linked to academic achievement in large-scale assessments. The study is based on a non-experimental,…

Large-scale learning assessments can be used to generate performance and contextual data on student learning outcomes. They can be national, regional, or international; school based or household based. The UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP-UNESCO) has conducted a qualitative study to explore both how and why learning…