CEPA Undergraduate Research Program 2013

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The Center for Education Policy Analysis (CEPA) will be seeking undergraduate research assistants (RAs) to work directly with CEPA faculty on active research projects during the 2013 Winter, Spring, and Summer quarters. Applications will be reviewed as received and the interview process will begin on January 17th, 2013. Once decisions have been made, applicants will be notified and work will begin immediately.

Eligibility: The CEPA URP program is open to all Stanford University undergraduates. Selection of RAs will be based on the student’s expressed interest in education policy and the fit between faculty needs and student skill sets. Experience working with quantitative data using STATA statistical software is preferred but not required.

Financial Support: RAs will earn $15/hour. During academic quarters students will work up to 10 hours per week for 10 weeks and during the summer students will work up to 40 hours per week for 10 weeks.

Application Process: Students should provide a resume, an unofficial Stanford transcript, and a one-page cover letter describing the applicant’s interest in education policy, previous research experience including any experience with quantitative analyses, and indicate the particular research project/s the student is interested in working on.

Specific Projects:

Faculty Mentor: Eric Bettinger
Project Description: This project includes two college access experimental studies in Texas with the goal of improving college enrollment among low-income and first-generation high school students. One experiment randomly assigned students to receive extra college counseling from a recent college graduate working full time in the high school. In the other experiment, we randomly assigned high schools to receive a full time recent college graduate to work as a college counselor across the school. Both experiments are ongoing, but we are currently gathering survey and administrative outcome data.

The RAs will be integrated into both of the ongoing research projects. The work will revolve around quantitative data collection and analysis. Data analysis will incorporate regression and propensity score matching techniques. Assistance with survey design will also be useful. We also are considering several additional experimental studies, and we expect the RA to contribute to future research design. The RA would participate in weekly meetings and phone calls with the intervention team. The student will meet with Professor Bettinger on a weekly basis both on these phone calls and in person. The undergraduate student and professor would jointly work on developing their work tasks for the week. Graduate students and Professor Bettinger would work with the undergraduate to make sure that they have the skills necessary to succeed on the task. The RA should be able to attend weekly meetings with one of the professors or graduate students leading the project, and should be willing to travel once to Texas for data collection.

The project focuses on helping students attend college, and undergraduates are particularly suited to give advice on the process of admissions and attendance. As such, the undergraduate will be a full participant during our team meetings.

Faculty Mentor: Tom Dee
Project Description: The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) requires that all students achieve proficiency by the 2013-14 school year. The anticipation that this will not occur has led to the expectation that Congress will reauthorize and redesign NCLB. However, because it has been slow in doing so, the U.S. Department of Education has established a waiver process under which states can be exempted from NCLB’s proficiency requirement if they agree to implement an array of fairly prescriptive reforms. These requirements include whole-school reforms targeted to schools that are “persistently lowest achieving.”

This research study will focus on understanding the school reforms being implemented in “waiver” states and examining their effects on school practices and student outcomes. Under the direction of Professor Dee and a graduate student, the RA would assist in collecting a variety of quantitative school-level data and also “process” documents that characterize how states are implementing these reforms and assigning schools to them.
The research team expects to meet on a weekly basis to review progress and discuss next steps. The RA would also be able to participate in team discussions about the analytical strategies that leverage these data. Apart from some interest in the broad topic, a successful RA will be highly organized and have an eye for detail. Computer skills (e.g., Excel, STATA) are helpful but can be developed as part of this experience.

Faculty Mentor: Tom Dee
Project Description: Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the federal government requires schools to provide programs and services to support students with learning disabilities. IDEA also mandates that special-education referrals should be unrelated to socioeconomic or cultural disadvantage. However, minority students and boys are dramatically overrepresented in special education. This is particularly important since special-education placements are an important cost driver in school districts.

In the 2004 reauthorization of IDEA, the federal government encouraged states to allow school districts to use an alternative procedure – Response to Intervention (RTI) – to identify and treat students struggling to meet performance standards.

This research project seeks to examine the effects of this dramatic change in special-education referral procedures on school practices and student outcomes. Does the movement to RTI appear to influence the overall level of special education referrals? Has it influenced the overrepresentation of boys and minorities in special education? Has it influenced measures of student performance?

Under the direction of Professor Dee and a graduate student, the RA would assist in collecting a variety of quantitative data (i.e., “panel” data at the state-by-year and school-by-year level). The RA will also participate in acquiring and synthesizing archival documents that allow us to characterize how and when different states shifted to RTI procedures.
The research team expects to meet on a weekly basis to review progress and discuss next steps. The RA would also be able to participate in team discussions about the analytical strategies that leverage these data. Apart from some interest in the broad topic, a successful RA will be highly organized and have an eye for detail. Computer skills (e.g., Excel, STATA) are helpful but can be developed as part of this experience.

Faculty Mentor: Sean Reardon
Project Description: This ongoing project started in 2011 and will continue through 2013. With 2011 and 2012 support from VPUE, we have collected and compiled a comprehensive database of state test score data for all 50 states, for grades 3-8, for years 2001-2010 (and sometimes earlier), in multiple subjects (math, reading, and sometimes science and history). These data are now ready to analyze.

These data provide a better source for examining trends and patterns in academic achievement gaps (by race/ethnicity, gender, English proficiency status, and family income) than other existing data, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Because NAEP only tests math and reading, is administered to only samples of students (roughly 2000 per state) in each state, is given only in grades 4 and 8, and is administered only every few years, the NAEP data are limited in many ways in their ability to illuminate trends, patterns, and causes of achievement gaps.

As this project continues we will use these data to compute test score gaps by race, gender, and free/reduced-price lunch eligibility status and to investigate the patterns of these gaps and their relationship to state policies. Additionally, we will begin to collect additional data on education policies at the state and district level that may alleviate or exacerbate these gaps.

The RA will be responsible for assisting in remaining data collection, compilation, and documentation. This may involve contacting state departments of education, searching and downloading data from multiple websites, and/or writing automated “web-scraping” programs to systematically download data from websites when full data files are unavailable. He/she will also assist in generating state-level reports describing the trends in achievement gaps over time and across grades. Assist in collecting data on state education policies that may affect achievement gaps will also be part of the RA’s responsibility. The RA will participate in weekly meetings of the research team including Professor Reardon and several PhD research assistants. Undergraduate RAs will have opportunities to learn to use STATA statistical software and to conduct basic descriptive statistical analyses.

Faculty Mentor: Michelle Reininger
Project Description: In this project we will characterize the organizational landscape of teacher preparation programs, variation in institutional characteristics, and the ways in which these new organizational forms have reshaped the supply of novice teachers. Understanding the relationship between the changes that have taken place in teacher preparation and the organizational form these programs embody will inform a variety of audiences including those who study teacher labor supply, organizational behavior, and teacher preparation. States, universities, and school districts have responded to labor market demands for accelerated routes for entry into the teaching profession. These responses have included changes in state level teacher licensure requirements, increases in the number of alternative preparation programs (such as Teach for America), and the restructuring of university teacher education programs.

The RA will be responsible for assisting in remaining data collection, compilation, and documentation. This may involve contacting state departments of education, searching and downloading data from multiple websites, and data entry. He/she will also assist in generating descriptive analyses of the organization trends present (or not) in the data. The RA will participate in weekly meetings with Professor Reininger. Undergraduate RAs will have opportunities to learn to use STATA statistical software and to conduct basic descriptive statistical analyses.

Contact Information: If you have questions please contact Michelle Reininger, Executive Director of CEPA at reininger@stanford.edu or Caprie Davenport, Program Administrator at capried@stanford.edu or 650-723-6255.