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Conference Season 2011

Empirical researchers will again be on the road this conference season, and we’ve included a few new conference stops. Come meet our researchers as we discuss our work at the following events. If you will be present at any of these, please get in touch so we can schedule a time to speak with you, or come by to see us at our presentations.

NCES-MIS

This year, the NCES-MIS “Deep in the Heart of Data” Conference will offer more than 80 presentations, demonstrations, and workshops conducted by information system practitioners from federal, state, and local K-12 agencies.

Come by and say hello to one of our research managers, Joseph Townsend, who will be running Empirical Education’s table display at the Hilton Hotel in Austin, Texas from February 23-25th. Joe will be presenting interactive demonstrations of MeasureResults, which allows school district staff to conduct complete program evaluations online.

SREE

Attendees of this spring’s Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE) Conference, held in Washington, DC March 3-5, will have the opportunity to discuss questions of generalizability with Empirical Education’s Chief Scientist, Andrew Jaciw and President, Denis Newman at two poster sessions. The first poster, entitled External Validity in the Context of RCTs: Lessons from the Causal Explanatory Tradition applies insights from Lee Cronbach to current RCT practices. In the second poster, The Use of Moderator Effects for Drawing Generalized Causal Inferences, Jaciw addresses issues in multi-site experiments. They look forward to discussing these posters both online at the conference website and in person.

AEFP

We are pleased to announce that we will have our first showing this year at the Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP) Annual Conference. Join us in the afternoon on Friday, March 25th at the Grand Hyatt in Seattle, WA as Empirical’s research scientist, Valeriy Lazarev, presents a poster on Cost-benefit analysis of educational innovation using growth measures of student achievement.

AERA

We will again have a strong showing at the 2011 American Educational Research Association (AERA) Conference. Join us in festive New Orleans, April 8-12 for the final results on the efficacy of the PCI Reading Program, our qualitative findings from the first year of formative research on our MeasureResults online program evaluation tool, and more.

View our AERA presentation schedule for more details and a complete list of our participants.

SIIA

This year’s SIIA Ed Tech Industry Summit will take place in gorgeous San Francisco, just 45 minutes north of Empirical Education’s headquarters in the Silicon Valley. We invite you to schedule a meeting with us at the Palace Hotel from May 22-24.

Conference Season has Arrived

Springtime marks the start of “conference season” and Empirical Education has been busy attending and preparing for the various meetings and events. We are participating in five conferences (CoSN, SIIA, SREE, NCES-MIS, and AERA) and we hope to see some familiar faces in our travels. If you will be attending any of the following meetings, please give us a call. We’d love to schedule a time to speak with you.

CoSN

The Empirical team headed to the 2010 Consortium of School Networking conference in Washington, DC at the Omni Shoreham Hotel from February 28—March 3, 2010. We were joined by Eric Lehew, Executive Director of Learning Support Services at Poway Unified School District, who co-presented with us a poster titled, “Turning Existing Data into Research” (Monday, March 1 from 1:00pm to 2:00pm). As exhibitors, Empirical Education also hosted a 15-minute vendor demonstration entitled Building Local Capacity: Using Your Own Data Systems to Easily Measure Program Effectiveness, to launch our MeasureResults tool.

SIIA

The Software & Information Industry Association held their 2010 Ed Tech Government Forum in Washington, DC on March 3–4. The focus this year was on Education Funding & Programs in a (Post) Stimulus World and included speakers, such as Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan and West Virginia Superintendent of Schools, Steven Paine.

SREE

Just as the SIIA Forum came to a close, the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness held their annual conference—Research Into Practice—March 4-6 where our chief scientist, Andrew Jaciw, and research scientist, Xiaohui Zheng, presented their poster on estimating long-term program impacts when the control group joins treatment in the short-term. Dr. Jaciw was also named on a paper presentation with Rob Olsen of Abt Associates.

Thursday March 4, 2010
3:30pm–5:00pm: Session 2
2E. Research Methodology
Examining State Assessments
Forum
Chair: Jane Hannaway, The Urban Institute
Using State Or Study-Administered Achievement Tests in Impact Evaluations
Rob Olsen and Fatih Unlu, Abt Associates and Andrew Jaciw, Empirical Education

Friday March 5, 2010
5:00pm–7:00pm: Poster Session
Poster Session: Research Methodology
Estimating Long-Term Program Impacts When the Control Group Joins Treatment in the Short-Term: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of the Tradeoffs Between Extra- and Quasi-Experimental Estimates
Andrew Jaciw, Boya Ma, and Qingfeng Zhao, Empirical Education

NCES-MIS

The 23rd Annual Management Information Systems (MIS) Conference was held in Phoenix, Arizona March 3-5. Co-sponsored by the Arizona Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the MIS Conference brings together the people who work with information collection, management, transmittal, and reporting in school districts and state education agencies. The majority of the sessions focused on data use, data standards, statewide data systems, and data quality. For more information, refer to the program highlights.

AERA

We will have a strong showing at the American Educational Research Association annual conference in Denver, Colorado from Friday, April 30 through Tuesday, May 4. Please come talk to us at our poster and paper sessions. View our AERA presentation schedule to find out which of our presentations you would like to attend. And we hope to see you at our customary stylish reception Sunday evening, May 2 from 6 to 8:30—mark your calendars!

IES

We will be presenting at the IES Research Conference in National Harbor, MD from June 28-30. View our poster here.

At NCES Conference, Empirical Education Explains a Difficulty in Linking Student and Teacher Records

The San Francisco Bay Area, our “home town”, was the site for the 2008 National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) conference. From February 25 to 29, educators and researchers from all over the country came to discuss data collection and analysis. Laurel Sterling and Robert Smith of Empirical Education presented “Tracking Teachers of Instruction for Data Accuracy and Improving Educational Outcomes”. Their topic was the need to differentiate between, the teachers who actually perform instruction for students and the teachers with whom those students are officially registered. They explained that in our research we keep track of the “teacher of instruction” vs. “teacher of registration”. Without this distinction we are unable to properly identify the student clusters or associate student growth with the right teacher. Sharing instructional responsibilities within a grade-level team is common enough to be of concern. In a large experiment involving teachers in grades 4 through 8, 17% reported teaching students who were not assigned to them on the official class roster. The audience was very lively and in the question period contributed to the topic. One district IT manager indicated that there is movement in this direction even at the state level. For a copy of the presentation, send an email to Robin Means.