Background: Teacher quality matters for student achievement (Coleman, 1968; Rivkin et al., 2005; Rockoff, 2004; Aaronson et al., 2007) and later career success (Chetty et al., 2014). States use licensure exams as a quality screen believing that they are predictive of teaching effectiveness (Council et al., 2001). However, the evidence on the…

Background: The generalizability of a study's results continues to be at the forefront of concerns in evaluation research in education (Tipton & Olsen, 2018). Over the past decade, statisticians have developed methods, mainly based on propensity scores, to improve generalizations in the absence of random sampling (Stuart et al., 2011; Tipton,…

Background/Context: Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) model is a commonly adopted framework to estimate and test a measurement model. Once a well-fitting final CFA model is selected, the selected model may be used to test structural relationships of the latent constructs with other variables, to construct a test with desired reliability and…

Background: Evidence from education randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) demonstrates how interventions can improve children's educational achievement [1, 2, 3, 4]. RCTs assess the impact of an intervention by comparing outcomes--aggregate test scores--between treatment and control groups. A review of…

Background/Context: In order to stimulate national and regional economic growth, policymakers and businesses have expressed great interest in growing the supply of workers with skills in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). At the same time, considerable efforts are being devoted to narrowing race and gender gaps in the STEM training…

Background/Context: Staff turnover is a critical issue for practitioners and policymakers alike. Especially since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, significant attention has been dedicated to developing policy interventions to address high staff shortages. Intervention around staffing instability may be particularly pertinent for special…

Background: A growing number of surveys are conducted online where respondents can choose to complete the questionnaire (Lehdonvirta et al., 2020). As respondents are self-selected, there is potential that the respondents will not be an accurate representation of the population. For example, white people are disproportionately more likely to…

Background: The past half-century has resulted in a substantial expansion of early childhood center-based care in the United States. Today, over 74% of American children aged 3-5 attend center-based care (U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2021). Although public pre-k is considered socially favorable,…

Background: Regression Discontinuous Design (RDD) is widely used in educational studies. Through RDD, researchers can obtain unbiased results when Randomized Experimental Design (RED) is inaccessible. Compared to RED, the RDD only requires a cut score variable (continuous) and a cutoff value to assign students to the treatment or control groups.…

In a randomized controlled trial (RCT), some subjects assigned to the treatment condition may not fully comply. Often there is interest in the effect of the treatment within the "principal stratum" of subjects who would comply if assigned to treatment. However, it is unknown which control subjects would have complied if treated and which…

Advocates for the use of a multi-measure system of performance evaluation argue that multiple measures may better capture meaningful differences in employee effectiveness and help align effort with organizational objectives. This may be particularly important in organizations such as schools that produce multiple outcomes. In this paper I use a…

Background/Context: Students classified as Long-Term English Learners (LTELs) are those who have not gained fluency in the English language, even after being enrolled in the U.S. K-12 educational system for five to seven years (Olsen, 2014). Although LTELs are not consistently tracked across states, we know they constitute a sizeable portion of…

Background: Early-grade reading proficiency is well documented as in important factor for later academic success. Researchers and educators consider the achievement of reading proficiency by the end of grade three to be crucial to future academic success and financial independence (Hein et al., 2013; La Paro & Pianta, 2000; Singh, 2013). As…

Background/Context: Regression discontinuity (RD) designs are used for policy and program evaluation where subjects' eligibility into a program or policy is determined by whether an assignment variable (i.e., running variable) exceeds a pre-defined cutoff. Under a standard RD design with a continuous assignment variable, the average treatment…

Background/Context: The landscape of college remediation programs experienced significant shifts from prerequisite models to corequisite models in the past few years across the nation. The traditional prerequisite models required students placed below college level to pass a sequence of remedial courses before they could enroll in college-level…