Descriptive analysis in education: A guide for researchers
Whether the goal is to identify and describe trends and variation in populations, create new measures of key phenomena, or describe samples in studies aimed at identifying causal effects, description plays a critical role in the scientific process in general and education research in particular. Descriptive analysis identifies patterns in data to answer questions about who, what, where, when, and to what extent. This guide describes how to more effectively approach, conduct, and communicate quantitative descriptive analysis. The primary audience for this guide includes members of the research community who conduct and publish both descriptive and causal studies, although it could also be useful for policymakers and practitioners who are consumers of research findings. The guide contains chapters that discuss the important role descriptive analysis plays; how to approach descriptive analysis; how to conduct descriptive analysis; and how to communicate descriptive analysis findings.
AERA Announces Most Read Education Research Articles of 2016
Research on school climate; shifts in race, income and gender-based achievement gaps; learning tools and approaches; and more appeared in the 20 most popular journal articles published by the American Educational Research Association in 2016. Based on the number of times they were accessed online, the following were the most popular AERA research articles published in 2016.
Integration Works. Can It Survive the Trump Era?
The strongest correlates of achievement gaps are local racial/ethnic differences in parental income, local average parental education levels, and patterns of racial/ethnic segregation, consistent with a theoretical model in which family socioeconomic factors affect educational opportunity partly though residential and school segregation patterns.
CEPA faculty and alumni score high marks on the 2017 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings
The 2017 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, Michael W. Kirst, Sean Reardon, Martin Carnoy, Susanna Loeb, Caroline Hoxby, Thomas Dee, Katharine Strunk*, Edward H. Haertel, Daphna Bassok*, Jason Grissom*, Eric Bettinger.
The Geography of Middle Class Decline
The decline of the middle class is the key factor in America’s deepening divide between rich and poor. The share of American families living in middle class neighborhoods fell from nearly two-thirds (65 percent) in 1970 to 40 percent in 2012, according to a recent study by Sean Reardon and Kendra Bischoff. At the same time, the share of American families living in either all-poor or all-affluent neighborhoods more than doubled, increasing from roughly 15 percent to nearly 34 percent.
At talk at UVa, a 'disturbing picture of racial inequality in education'
Socioeconomic status and academic achievement are less correlated in Virginia than in most other states, according to recent study by a Stanford University researcher.
Sean Reardon, Stanford’s endowed Professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education, gave a lecture Friday at the University of Virginia. The talk was sponsored by EdPolicyWorks, a collaboration between UVa’s Curry School of Education and Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy.
Researchers from Stanford, Brown and University of Michigan receive $4.9 million to examine Common Core
Sean Reardon and colleagues will study the Common Core's impact on classroom instruction, social disparities and achievement.
The Spencer Foundation and the William T. Grant Foundation have awarded a team of researchers from the University of Michigan, Brown University and Stanford University nearly $5 million for the first phase of a five-year analysis of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, a controversial initiative to overhaul academic achievement standards for K-12 students nationwide.
Kindergarten readiness gap between low-income and higher-income students shrinking
It is an intellectual puzzle — what is going on that leads to this counterintuitive finding. Something is working in the face of rising income inequality, said Sean Reardon, professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford University