Workshops

July 15 and 16, 2019

As a quantitative researcher, it’s not always obvious what the best approach should be when it comes to writing for a general audience—or why it should matter. In this session, Education Week Commentary Editor Elizabeth Rich will explain how to get your work noticed by journalists, write for general publications, and exploit the power of social-media influencers. You will also have the opportunity to pitch—and write—an op-ed for publication.

Elizabeth Rich is Education Week’s Commentary Editor, overseeing opinion content across the website and the print publication in the form of opinion essays, blogs, video, and public conversations. Her focus is on meditating news, research, and opinions to broker discussions among practitioners and policymakers. She is also the Executive Project Editor of “Big Ideas”—which publishes EdWeek’s annual predictions for the K12 field. She joined EPE in 2007 as an assistant editor and writer for Education Week Teacher, where she was the developmental and line editor of the best-seller, The Book Whisperer. Previously, she was an award-winning documentary filmmaker, public radio producer, and an educator in the Washington, D.C., public schools (from which she graduated) and at a Tribal Even Start program in White Eagle, Oklahoma. She has a B.A. in English from Barnard College and a M.A. in cultural reporting and criticism from New York University.

July 18-21, 2016

Featuring: Lindsay Page, Stephen Raudenbush, Guanglei Hong, Xu Qin, Michael Weiss, Howard Bloom, Sean Reardon

August 3-7, 2015
Scott Long, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Statistics, Indiana University

This workshop teaches you how to plan, organize, document, and execute sophisticated quantitative analyses with any type of statistical methods. The goal is to help you create a workflow that is efficient and accurate while generating reproducible results.

June 15 – 16, 2015
Sarah Reber, Professor of Public Policy, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs

This mini-course provides a practical introduction to data visualization (or, more prosaically, “making graphs”). Students will learn how to use data visualization to conduct research and to communicate findings accurately and effectively. Instruction is conveyed primarily through examples. Students will also learn how to implement (some of) these techniques in Stata and have opportunities to complete in-class and out-of-class exercises to practice the techniques.

June 30, 2011
Spiro Maroulis and Paulo Blikstein

When we observe economic and social systems, gather information, draw inferences, and attempt to predict future outcomes, we are engaged in a process of informal modeling. The workshop introduced IES students to the process of converting such informal models and intuitions into more tangible, formal computational models that users can run, explore, and use to try to change and refine theoretical ideas. The theoretical and methodological basis for this workshop comes from the emerging field of complex systems – a field that studies the dynamics of systems, such as organizations, whose behavior is the consequence of many different interdependent agents, and can be difficult to research using traditional analytical and empirical methods. To investigate the behavior of a natural or social system over time, complex systems research often makes use of computational agent-based models. In particular, agent-based models are used to discover the emergence of macro-level properties from the individual-level actions of the agents, as well as identify leverage points in a social systems – points where a small, local change can have a disproportionate system-level impact.