News
- March 12, 2018
Sean Reardon of Stanford compared changes in national test scores between third and eighth grade. He found that Chicago students were improving faster than students in any other major school district in the country. Chicago schools are cramming six years’ worth of education into five years of actual schooling.
- March 08, 2018
Study finds instructors are much more likely to respond to comments from white male students than from others.
Many proponents of online education have speculated that the digital learning environment might be a meritocracy, where students are judged not on their race or gender, but on the comments they post.
A study being released today by the Center for Education Policy Analysis at Stanford University, however, finds that bias appears to be strong in online course discussions.
- March 07, 2018
Setting out to determine whether there was racial or gender bias in online learning environments, researchers drew from several hundred actual student comments in massive open online courses and came up with a list of 32 generic comments that they could post in discussion forums. The comments were assigned names that suggested a gender and race or nationality — white, black, Indian, or Chinese — and then randomly placed in the discussion boards of 124 MOOCs. The courses were offered by an unnamed "major provider" in 2014, and the subjects included accounting, calculus, epidemiology, teaching, and computer programming.
- February 21, 2018
sean reardon selected as 2018 AERA Fellow.
The American Educational Research Association (AERA) has announced the selection of 11 prominent scholars as 2018 AERA Fellows. AERA Fellows are selected on the basis of their notable and sustained research achievements. The 2018 Fellows were nominated by their peers, selected by the AERA Fellows Committee, and approved by the AERA Council, the association’s elected governing body. They will be inducted on Saturday, April 14, during the 2018 AERA Annual Meeting in New York City. They join 644 current AERA Fellows.
- February 21, 2018
In a new book, Stanford scholar Susanna Loeb encourages education policy-makers to consider the many different values of an education, beyond test scores, alongside available research evidence when crafting their decisions.
Loeb says both the supporters and opponents of charter schools – and the decision-makers who set educational policy – might not have the data they need to fully weigh the pros and cons, in part because most research has focused on test scores rather than other measures.
- February 21, 2018, EdSource
We’ve had a lot of changes during the past 10 years so it’s good to know which are working and if they’re not working as well, are there barriers that we could take down to help them work better, said Susanna Loeb, a professor of education at Stanford University who is coordinating the project. This seems like a really good time to do it. A new administration can come in with some facts on the ground.
- January 24, 2018
The texts come from a team of researchers at Stanford University’s Center for Education Policy Analysis (CEPA) Labs. Each message goes out to parents or other caregivers and reminds them of the skills young children will eventually need for school and how to help kids build them. The approach is inspired in part by “nudge” techniques, that is, behavioral interventions that push a person during decision-making towards a certain goal. For example, many employers nudge you to save for retirement by contributing a portion of your paycheck to a 401k.
- January 16, 2018
A study by Sean F. Reardon, professor of poverty and inequality in education at the Graduate School of Education, found that socioeconomic status in U.S. public school districts only weakly correlated with growth in students’ average test scores over time.
Reardon told Business Insider that students’ rate of test score improvement over time is a better measure of a given school’s effectiveness.
- January 12, 2018, Time
You may have more in common with your friends than you think, according to a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Your genes may be similar, too.
Overall, the researchers found that friends were more genetically similar than random pairs of people, and about two-thirds as similar as the average married couple. Study author Benjamin Domingue, an assistant professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, says this similarity is strong enough to detect, but not nearly on the same level as siblings, for example.
- January 10, 2018
The 2018 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings were released this week and CEPA faculty and alumni* scores high marks on the list. Of the 200 education scholars ranked, 12 faculty and alumni* made the list: Eric Hanushek, Martin Carnoy, Michael W. Kirst , Sean Reardon, Susanna Loeb, Thomas Dee, Caroline Hoxby, Rob Reich, Jason Grissom*, Eric Bettinger, Daphna Bassok*, Katharine Strunk*
- January 08, 2018
"There are many relatively high-poverty school districts where students appear to be learning at a faster rate than kids in other, less poor districts," Reardon said in a statement. "Poverty clearly does not determine the quality of a school system."
- December 08, 2017
- December 08, 2017
- December 05, 2017
- December 05, 2017
In the Chicago Public Schools system, enrollment has been declining, the budget is seldom enough, and three in four children come from low-income homes, a profile that would seemingly consign the district to low expectations. But students here appear to be learning faster than those in almost every other school system in the country, according to new data from researchers at Stanford.
- December 05, 2017
There are many relatively high-poverty school districts where students appear to be learning at a faster rate than kids in other, less poor districts,” said Reardon, who holds an endowed professorship in Poverty and Inequality in Education. “Poverty clearly does not determine the quality of a school system.