The education sector has been quick to recognize the power of predictive analytics to enhance student success rates. However, there are challenges to widespread adoption, including the lack of accessibility and the potential perpetuation of inequalities. These challenges present in different stages of modeling, including data preparation, model…

Existing research on "school effectiveness" indicates that differences at the school level contribute significantly towards variation in student outcomes; however, less is known about the effectiveness of schooling in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). This paper addresses this gap using quantitative analysis of data from two…

One of the many impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the increasing prevalence and accessibility of online education. This trend has also introduced challenges for students, instructors, and institutions. This study examines factors affecting online course satisfaction, focusing on individual, instructor, and institutional level…

School value-added models are widely applied to study, monitor, and hold schools to account for school differences in student learning. The traditional model is a mixed-effects linear regression of student current achievement on student prior achievement, background characteristics, and a school random intercept effect. The latter is referred to…

Student satisfaction is a key performance indicator in evaluating any degree program's performance. In light of the vast difference between online and traditional degree programs, factors that may significantly affect student satisfaction and thus contribute to the success of online degree programs still need to be explored. Previous literature on…

Student success and drop-out predictions have gained increased attention in recent years, connected to the hope that by identifying struggling students, it is possible to intervene and provide early help and design programs based on patterns discovered by the models. Though by now many models exist achieving remarkable accuracy-values, models…

This study introduces the signal weighted teacher value-added model (SW VAM), a value-added model that weights student-level observations based on each student's capacity to signal their assigned teacher's quality. Specifically, the model leverages the repeated appearance of a given student to estimate student reliability and sensitivity…

How have changes in the costs of enrolling for full-time study at public 2-year and 4-year colleges have affected the decisions about whether and where to enroll in college? We exploit local differences in the growth of tuition at community colleges and public 4-year colleges to study the impact of public higher education costs on the…

Because the pandemic exacerbated chronic absenteeism in many parts of the country, the need to understand how schools can improve student attendance has never been greater. Accordingly, this study breaks new ground by examining high schools' contributions to attendance after accounting for individual students' prior absenteeism and other…

The majority of states include value-added models (VAMs) or some other measure of student academic growth as a component of their teacher evaluation systems. However, there is considerable disagreement among researchers about whether states and school districts should use student growth measures to make high-stakes personnel decisions. Many…

DE programming in higher education should be designed to increase student success, and well-designed corequisite models have shown great potential as an accelerated option for completion of the first college-level course in math. With the support of a Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board grant, Tarleton State University, a member institution…

The assessment of psychosocial strengths in children and adolescents has predominately focused on the measurement of single traits and constructs, such as grit (Christopoulou, Lakioti, Pezirkianidis, Karakasidou, & Stalikas, 2018), optimism (Oberle, Guhn, Gadermann, Thomson, & Schonert-Reichl, 2018), hope (Pedrotti, 2018), and gratitude…

Measures of student disadvantage--or risk--are critical components of equity-focused education policies. However, the risk measures used in contemporary policies have significant limitations, and despite continued advances in data infrastructure and analytic capacity, there has been little innovation in these measures for decades. We develop a new…

We outline the options available to policymakers for addressing co-teaching in a value-added model. Building on earlier work, we propose an improvement to a method of accounting for co-teaching that treats co-teachers as teams, with each teacher receiving equal credit for co-taught students. Hock and Isenberg (2012) described a method known as the…

Policymakers appear increasingly inclined to utilize measures of student achievement, often state assessment results, to inform high-stakes teacher personnel decisions. This has been spurred on by the federal government's Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) and Race to the Top (RttT) grant programs, each of which urge states and localities to tie teacher…