This post is one in a series highlighting MDRC's methodological work. Contributors discuss the refinement and practical use of research methods being employed across the organization. Across policy domains, practitioners and researchers are benefiting from a trend of greater access to both more detailed and frequent data and the increased…

According to the few quasi-experimental studies examining course outcomes for community college (Xu & Jaggars, 2011a, 2011b, 2013, 2014) and for-profit students (Bettinger, Fox, Loeb, & Taylor, 2014), there is a significant penalty for online students. No comparable research has been conducted on public four-year university students to…

In the last three decades, there has been a significant growth in the number of undergraduate students taking introductory statistics. As a result, there is a need by universities and community colleges to find well-qualified instructors and graduate teaching assistants to teach the growing number of statistics courses. Unfortunately, research has…

Compression, estimation, and prediction are basic problems in Information theory, statistics and machine learning. These problems have been extensively studied in all these fields, though the primary focus in a large portion of the work has been on understanding and solving the problems in the asymptotic regime, "i.e." the alphabet size…

Fully updated to reflect the most recent changes in the field, the Second Edition of "Propensity Score Analysis" provides an accessible, systematic review of the origins, history, and statistical foundations of propensity score analysis, illustrating how it can be used for solving evaluation and causal-inference problems. With a strong…

Community college is a gateway to postsecondary education for millions of college students in the United States yet only 13% of those intending to earn a bachelor's degree do so within six years of enrolling (Shapiro et al., 2017). The process of transferring from one postsecondary institution to another is fraught with structural, financial, and…

The goal of the proposed working group is to create a space for those interested in researching issues around the teaching and learning of statistics to meet, discuss, synthesize past research, and begin to strategize ways of leveraging multiple perspectives and expertise to identify and address current challenges in statistics education. The…

The a priori determination of a proper sample size necessary to achieve some specified power is an important problem encountered frequently in practical studies. To establish the needed sample size for a two-sample "t" test, researchers may conduct the power analysis by specifying scientifically important values as the underlying population means…

Although the relationships between family income and student identification for gifted programming are well documented, less is known about how school and district wealth are related to student identification. To examine the effects of institutional and individual poverty on student identification, we conducted a series of three-level regression…

In the UK, students who want to progress to higher education have a number of possible pathways at age 16. The most common of these is traditional, academic focussed, 'A' levels, but increasingly students are taking alternative qualifications (e.g. BTECs, IB, Pre-U). The focus of this research is to infer which (if any) of these qualifications are…

This study was conducted to propose a framework of professional development tasks (PDTs) that may be used to enhance mathematics coaches' content knowledge and understanding of student work, as well as to help them conceptualize their role in facilitating a professional learning community in school. In this qualitative design experiment,…

PhD graduates play an important role in the national innovation system. However, only a few studies have explored Chinese PhD graduates' employment and development prospects because of limited data. To fill in this gap, this study conducted a survey of doctoral recipients in 13 Chinese universities. The authors drew on the national survey data and…

Over the past few decades, many studies conducted in the field of learning science have described that scaffolding plays an important role in human learning. To scaffold a learner efficiently, a teacher should predict how much support a learner must have to complete tasks and then decide the optimal degree of assistance to support the learner's…

Although the relationships between family income and student identification for gifted programming are well documented, less is known about how school and district wealth are related to student identification. To examine the effects of institutional and individual poverty on student identification, we conducted a series of three-level regression…

We investigated how struggling adult readers make use of sentence context to facilitate word processing when comprehending spoken language, conditions under which print decoding is not a barrier to comprehension. Stimuli were strongly and weakly constraining sentences (as measured by cloze probability), which ended with the most expected word…