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…

McMillan-Dorman, Stephanie Michelle. Examining the Relationship Between Middle School Students' Participation on i-Ready Computer Adaptive Tests and Math Achievement Scores (Under the direction of Theodore Kaniuka, Ed.D.) Despite over 50 years of effort, educators have witnessed a multiplicity of educational reforms make little to no effect on…

The expectation for classroom educators to engage in evidence-based decision-making is standard protocol in most K-12 classrooms, yet translating educational research into effective practice is mired with implementation challenges. The research-practice partnership (RPP) model has emerged as a promising framework to support stakeholders as they…

Experience-based cues, such as perceptual fluency, have long been thought to influence metacognitive judgments (Kelley & Jacoby, 1996; Koriat, 1997). Studies found that manipulations of perceptual fluency via changes in font and volume alter Judgments of Learning (JOLs) without influencing memory performance (Rhodes & Castel, 2008, 2009).…

Although memory retrieval often enhances subsequent memory, Peterson and Mulligan (2013) reported conditions under which retrieval produces poorer subsequent recall--the negative testing effect. The item-specific--relational account proposes that the effect occurs when retrieval disrupts interitem organizational processing relative to the restudy…

This chapter considers the case of placement tests, examining students who enter community college gateway math and English courses.

The National Guard Youth ChalleNGe program is a residential, quasi-military program for youth ages 16 to 18 who are experiencing difficulty in traditional high school. This report covers the program years 2018-2019 and is the fourth in a series of annual reports that RAND Corporation researchers have issued over the course of a research project…

The typical pattern of results in divided attention experiments is that subjects in a full attention (FA) condition perform markedly better on tests of memory than subjects in a divided attention (DA) condition which forces subjects to split their attention between studying to-be-remembered stimuli and completing some peripheral task.…

One in five schools loses its principal each year. Despite the prevalence of principal turnover, little empirical research has examined its effects on school outcomes. Because principal turnover may occur in response to or contemporaneous with a downturn in student achievement, the effect of a turnover is confounded with unobserved school-level…

A defining characteristic of charter schools is that they introduce a strong market element into public education. In this paper, we examine through the lens of a market model the evolution of the charter school sector in North Carolina between 1999 and 2012. We examine trends in the mix of students enrolled in charter schools, the racial…

A defining characteristic of charter schools is that they introduce a strong market element into public education. In this paper, we examine the evolution of the charter school sector in North Carolina between 1999 and 2012 through the lens of a market model. We examine trends in the mix of students enrolled in charter schools, the racial…

Background: Explore associations between nutrition, science, and mathematics knowledge to provide evidence that integrating food/nutrition education in the fourth-grade curriculum may support gains in academic knowledge. Methods: Secondary analysis of a quasi-experimental study. Sample included 438 students in 34 fourth-grade classrooms across…

This dissertation consists of three separate essays on the economics of education. In the first chapter, co-authored with Esteban Aucejo, studies the relative effectiveness of reducing absences to extending the school calendar on test score performance. Using administrative data for North Carolina public schools, we exploit a state policy that…

Online flipped professional development allows direct instruction to take place through an interactive learning setting and allows the face-to-face contact to provide guidance and apply the concept. As technology advances, education needs instruments and tools used for effectively teaching using the enhanced technology to increase student…

We use rich longitudinally matched administrative data on students and teachers in North Carolina to examine the patterns of differential effectiveness by teachers' years of experience. The paper contributes to the literature by focusing on middle school teachers and by extending the analysis to student outcomes beyond test scores. Once we control…