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

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 (Workshop C) 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

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
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