blog posts and news stories

Happy New Year from Empirical Education

To ring in the new year, we want to share this two-minute video with you. It comprises highlights from 2022 from each person on our team. We hope you like it. Cheers to a healthy and prosperous 2023!

My colleagues appear in this order in the video.

Happy New Year photo by Sincerely Media

2022-12-15

Carnegie Summit 2017 Recap

If you’ve never been to Carnegie Summit, we highly recommend it.

This was our first year attending Carnegie Foundation’s annual conference in San Francisco, and we only wish we had checked it out sooner. Chief Scientist Andrew Jaciw attended on behalf of Empirical Education, and he took over our twitter account for the duration of the event. Below is a recap of his live tweeting, interspersed with additional thoughts too verbose for twitter’s strict character limitations.

Day 1


Curious about what I will learn. On my mind: Tony Bryk’s distinction between evidence-based practice and practice-based evidence. I am also thinking of how the approaches to be discussed connect to ideas of Lee Cronbach - he was very interested in timeliness and relevance of research findings and the limited reach of internal validity.

I enjoyed T. Bryk’s talk. These points resonated.


Improvement Science involves a hands-on approach to identifying systemic sources of predictable failure. This is appealing because it puts problem solving at the core, while realizing the context-specificity of what will actually work!

Day 2

Jared Bolte - Great talk! Improvement Science contrasts with traditional efficacy research by jumping right in to solve problems, instead of waiting. This raises an important question: What is the cost of delaying action to wait for efficacy findings? I am reminded of Lee Cronbach’s point: the half-life of empirical propositions is short!



This was an excellent session with Tony Bryk and John Easton. There were three important questions posed.



Day 3

Excited to Learn about PDSA cycles





2017-04-27

SREE Spring 2017 Conference Recap

Several Empirical Education team members attended the annual SREE conference in Washington, DC from March 4th - 5th. This year’s conference theme, “Expanding the Toolkit: Maximizing Relevance, Effectiveness and Rigor in Education Research,” included a variety of sessions focused on partnerships between researchers and practitioners, classroom instruction, education policy, social and emotional learning, education and life cycle transitions, and research methods. Andrew Jaciw, Chief Scientist at Empirical Education, chaired a session about Advances in Quasi-Experimental Design. Jaciw also presented a poster on developing a “systems check” for efficacy studies under development. For more information on this diagnostic approach to evaluation, watch this Facebook Live video of Andrew’s discussion of the topic.

Other highlights of the conference included Sean Reardon’s keynote address highlighting uses of “big data” in creating context and generating hypotheses in education research. Based on data from the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), Sean shared several striking patterns of variation in achievement and achievement gaps among districts across the country, as well as correlations between achievement gaps and socioeconomic status. Sean challenged the audience to consider how to expand this work and use this kind of “big data” to address critical questions about inequality in academic performance and education attainment. The day prior to the lecture, our CEO, Denis Newman, attended a workshop lead by Sean and colleagues that provided a detailed overview of the SEDA data and how it can be used in education research. The psychometric work to generate equivalent scores for every district in the country, the basis for his findings, was impressive and we look forward to their solving the daunting problem of extending the database to encompass individual schools.

2017-03-24

Empirical Education Publication Productivity


Empirical Education’s research group, led by Chief Scientist Andrew Jaciw, has been busy publishing articles that address key concerns of educators and researchers.

Our article describing the efficacy trial of Math in Focus program that was accepted by JREE earlier this year just arrived in print to our Palo Alto office a couple of weeks ago. If you subscribe to JREE, it’s the very first article in the current issue (volume 9, number 4). If you don’t subscribe, we have a copy in our lobby if anyone would like to stop by and check it out.

Another article that the analysis team has been working on is called “An Empirical Study of Design Parameters for Assessing Differential Impacts for Students in Group Randomized Trials.” This one has recently been accepted for publication in the Evaluation Review in the issue that should be printed any day now. The paper grows out of our work on many cluster randomized trials and our interest in differential impacts of programs. We believe that the question of “what works” has limited meaning without systematic exploration of “for whom” and “under what conditions”. The common perception is that these latter concerns are secondary and our designs have too little power to assess them. We challenge these notions and provide guidelines for addressing these questions.

In another issue of Evaluation Review, we published two companion articles:

Assessing the Accuracy of Generalized Inferences From Comparison Group Studies Using a Within-Study Comparison Approach: The Methodology


Applications of a Within-Study Comparison Approach for Evaluating Bias in Generalized Causal Inferences from Comparison Groups Studies

This work further extends our interest in issues of external validity and equip researchers with a strategy for testing the limits of generalizations from randomized trials. Written for a technical audience, the work extends an approach commonly used to assess levels of selection bias in estimates from non-experimental studies to examine bias in generalized inferences from experiments and non-experiments.

It’s always exciting for our team to share the findings from our experiments, as well as the things we learn during the analysis that can help the evaluation community provide more productive evidence for educators. Much of our work is done in partnership with other organizations and if you’re interested in partnering with us on this kind of work, please email Robin Means.

2016-11-18

Math in Focus Paper Published in JREE

Chief Scientist Andrew Jaciw’s paper entitled Assessing Impacts of Math in Focus, a “Singapore Math” Program was accepted by the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness. The paper reports the results of an RCT conducted in Clark County (Las Vegas, NV) by a team that included Whitney Hegseth, Li Lin, Megan Toby, Denis Newman, Boya Ma, and Jenna Zacamy. From the abstract (available online here):

Twenty-two grade-level teams across twelve schools were randomized to the program or business as usual. Measures included indicators of fidelity to treatment, and student mathematics learning. Impacts on mathematics achievement ranged between .11 and .15 standard deviation units, with no differential impact based on level of pretest [or] minority status.

2016-03-30

Evaluation Concludes Aspire’s PD Tools Show Promise to Impact Classroom Practice

Empirical Education Inc. has completed an independent evaluation (read the report here) of a set of tools and professional development opportunities developed and implemented by Aspire Public Schools under an Investing in Innovation (i3) grant. Aspire was awarded the development grant in the 2011 funding cycle and put the system, Transforming Teacher Talent (t3), into operation in 2013 in their 35 California schools. The goal of t3 was to improve teacher practice as measured by the Aspire Instructional Rubric (AIR) and thereby improve student outcomes on the California Standards Test (CST), the state assessment. Some of the t3 components connected the AIR scores from classroom observations to individualized professional development materials building on tools from BloomBoard, Inc.

To evaluate t3, Empirical principal investigator, Andrew Jaciw and his team designed the strongest feasible evaluation. Since it was not possible to split the schools into two groups by having two versions of Aspire’s technology infrastructure supporting t3, a randomized experiment or other comparison group design was not feasible. Working with the National Evaluation of i3 (NEi3) team, Empirical developed a correlational design comparing two years of teacher AIR scores and student CST scores; that is, from the 2012-13 school year to the scores in the first year of implementation, 2013-14. Because the state was in a transition to new Common Core tests, the evaluation was unable to collect student outcomes systematically. The AIR scores, however, provided evidence of substantial overall improvement with an effect size of 0.581 standard deviations (p <.001). The evidence meets the standards for “evidence-based” as defined in the recently enacted Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which requires, at the least, that the test of the intervention “demonstrates a statistically significant effect on improving…relevant outcomes based on…promising evidence from at least 1 well designed and well-implemented correlational study with statistical controls for selection bias.” A demonstration of promise can assist in obtaining federal and other funding.

2016-03-07

SREE Spring 2016 Conference Presentations

We are excited to be presenting two topics at the annual Spring Conference of The Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE) next week. Our first presentation addresses the problem of using multiple pieces of evidence to support decisions. Our second presentation compares the context of an RCT with schools implementing the same program without those constraints. If you’re at SREE, we hope to run into you, either at one of these presentations (details below) or at one of yours.

Friday, March 4, 2016 from 3:30 - 5PM
Roosevelt (“TR”) - Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Ballroom Level

6E. Evaluating Educational Policies and Programs
Evidence-Based Decision-Making and Continuous Improvement

Chair: Robin Wisniewski, RTI International

Does “What Works”, Work for Me?: Translating Causal Impact Findings from Multiple RCTs of a Program to Support Decision-Making
Andrew P. Jaciw, Denis Newman, Val Lazarev, & Boya Ma, Empirical Education



Saturday, March 5, 2016 from 10AM - 12PM
Culpeper - Fairmont Hotel, Ballroom Level

Session 8F: Evaluating Educational Policies and Programs & International Perspectives on Educational Effectiveness
The Challenge of Scale: Evidence from Charters, Vouchers, and i3

Chair: Ash Vasudeva, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Comparing a Program Implemented under the Constraints of an RCT and in the Wild
Denis Newman, Valeriy Lazarev, & Jenna Zacamy, Empirical Education

2016-02-26

Empirical's Chief Scientist co-authored a recently released NCEE Reference Report

Together with researchers from Abt Associates, Andrew Jaciw, Chief Scientist of Empirical Education, co–authored a recently released report entitled, “Estimating the Impacts of Educational Interventions Using State Tests or Study-Administered Tests”. The full report released by the The National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE) can be found on the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) website.The NCEE Reference Report examines and identifies factors that could affect the precision of program evaluations when they are based on state assessments instead of study-administered tests. The authors found that using the same test for both the pre- and post-test yielded more precise impact estimates; using two pre-test covariates, one from each type of test (state assessment and study- administered standardized test), yielded more precise impact estimates; using as the dependent variable the simple average of the post-test scores from the two types of tests yielded more precise impact estimates and smaller sample size requirements than using post-test scores from only one of the two types of tests.

2011-11-02

Empirical Education Appoints Chief Scientist

We are pleased to announce the appointment of Andrew Jaciw, Ph.D. as Empirical Education’s Chief Scientist. Since joining the company more than five years ago, Dr. Jaciw has guided and shaped our analytical and research design practices, infusing our experimental methodologies with the intellectual traditions of both Cronbach and Campbell. As Chief Scientist, he will continue to lead Empirical’s team of scientists setting direction for our MeasureResults evaluation and analysis processes, as well as basic research into widely applicable methodologies. Andrew received his Ph.D in Education from Stanford University.

2010-02-05
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