Empirical Education Partners with NWEA to Research Virtual Control Groups
Northwest Evaluation Association, the leading provider of computer adaptive testing for schools, is partnering with Empirical Education to analyze the properties of its virtual control group (VCG) technologies. Empirical has already conducted a large number of randomized experiments in which NWEA’s “Measures of Academic Progress” (MAP) served both as pretest and posttest. The characteristics of a randomly assigned control group provide a yardstick in evaluating the characteristics of the VCG. The proposed research builds on extensive theoretical work on approaches to forming comparison groups for obtaining unbiased impact estimates from quasi-experiments.
In parallel to this theoretical analysis, NWEA and Empirical Education are cooperating in a nationwide comparison group (“quasi-”) experiment to estimate the impact of a basal reading program in wide use nationally. Taking advantage of the fact that MAP is in use in thousands of schools, Empirical will identify a group of schools currently using this reading program and testing their students’ reading using MAP and then select a well matched comparison group from non-users who also test with MAP. Characteristics of the schools such as SES, percent English learner, urbanicity, ethnicity, and geographic region, as well as prior reading achievement, will be used in identifying the comparison group.