We consider estimating the effect of a treatment on a given outcome measured on subjects tested both before and after treatment assignment in observational studies. A vast literature compares the competing approaches of modelling the post-test score conditionally on the pre-test score versus modelling the difference, namely, the gain score. Our…

Well-designed academic interventions can give students the targeted support they need to build confidence, improve specific skills, and reach their full academic potential. This Spotlight will help you measure the connection between tutoring, attendance, and better test scores; identify effective practices for tutoring; learn how to simultaneously…

In a 1984 essay, Benjamin Bloom, an educational psychologist at the University of Chicago, asserted that tutoring offered "the best learning conditions we can devise" and that tutors could raise student achievement by two full standard deviations--or, in statistical parlance, two "sigmas." The influence of Bloom's two-sigma…

In this randomized controlled trial with controls for student characteristics, the authors used a loss-aversion strategy to test whether students achieve greater learning gains from combining research-based instructional strategies with loss aversion. Students in the control group began the class with no grades and built their course average by…

The problem addressed in this study was approximately 50% of adult learners enrolled in adult basic education (ABE) classes do not have an educational learning gain in mathematics and numeracy from ABE coursework (National Reporting System, 2022) and were often not promoted to the next level (Smith, 2022). The purpose of this quantitative ex post…

The Hearts and Flowers (H&F) task is a computerized executive functioning (EF) assessment that has been used to measure EF from early childhood to adulthood. It provides data on accuracy and reaction time (RT) across three different task blocks (hearts, flowers, and mixed). However, there is a lack of consensus in the field on how to score the…

Within the last 100 years, the number of school districts in America has dropped by as much as 90% (Murdock, 2012), from 117,108 in 1939 to 13,452 in 2019 (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2020). Funding and how to provide educational equity, equality, and justice for all is a critical conversation. According to the North Dakota…

This study explored the impact of the 95 Phonics Core Program® (95 PCP) on student literacy achievement across third graders who started the school year at different ability levels. The primary focus of this report was to investigate the relationship between changes in phonics scores with the beginning and end-of-year i-Ready® assessments and…

Growing evidence warns about the detrimental effects of the stress induced by natural disasters on learning outcomes. Yet less is known about how political leadership could mitigate the adverse exposure to these events. Exploiting a natural experiment--the massive 2010 earthquake in Chile--as an exogenous shock and using fine-grained student data,…

Many districts and states have implemented incentives to recruit teachers to low-performing schools, and previous research has found evidence that these incentives are effective at attracting teachers. However, effects on the schools and students these teachers leave behind have not been examined. This study focuses on the spillover effects of…

Does relaxing strict school discipline improve student achievement, or lead to classroom disorder? We study a 2012 reform in New York City public middle schools that eliminated suspensions for non-violent, disorderly behavior, replacing them with less disruptive interventions. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we exploit the sharp…

Preparing for exams in introductory biology classrooms is a complex metacognitive task. Focusing on lower achieving students (those with entering ACT scores below the median at our institution), we compared the effect of two different assignments distributed ahead of exams by dividing classes in half to receive either terms to define or open-ended…

The importance of having a highly qualified teacher in every classroom is an educational necessity. Determining which teacher characteristics define teacher quality and measuring their impact on student outcomes has offered mixed results. This study explored the effect of teachers' knowledge of language and literacy on their students' reading…

There is growing concern that some public service providers may be nonprofit in name but not in fact. We consider this issue in the context of nonprofit charter schools, which sometimes subcontract their daily operations to for-profit management organizations. We use unique data from Ohio to study how nonprofit charters' reliance on for-profit…

In organizations, teams are ubiquitous. "Weakest Link" and "Best Shot" are incentive schemes that tie a group member's compensation to the output of their group's least and most productive member, respectively. In this paper, we test the impact of these incentive schemes by conducting two pilot RCTs (one in-person, one online),…