Keystone Scholars: A State-wide Pennsylvania Child Savings Accounts Initiative

In 2019 the Pennsylvania Treasury launched a state-wide children’s savings account (CSA) initiative, Keystone Scholars. Keystone Scholars provides $100 in college savings to eligible families - all children born or adopted in Pennsylvania after January 1, 2019. In this introductory research brief, we describe how CSAs are an important tool for families to increase educational expectations and asset accumulation, particularly for college savings, offer a preliminary look into college savings accounts in Pennsylvania, and explore how the Pennsylvania Treasury is using data-driven insights to encourage college savings of Pennsylvanian households

The Impact of OGAP on Elementary Math Teacher Knowledge and Student Achievement

The Ongoing Assessment Project (OGAP) is a learning trajectory-oriented formative assessment program that develops teachers’ abilities to understand and apply research-based developmental trajectories in math content areas to deepen their thinking about their students. In OGAP, teachers learn to use a learning progression framework to continually assess and adapt their instruction to students’ developing understanding, aiming to move them towards more sophisticated strategies in a range of multiplicative contexts. For this reason, OGAP puts a premium on students’ precision of answer (including correctness and unit labeling) and sophistication of solution response. In this study we examine the multi-year impacts of OGAP on grades 3-5 student correctness and solution sophistication in multiplication on an open-ended assessment created by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) as part of a randomized experimental study of OGAP in Philadelphia schools. In order to assess the intervention’s impact on student learning in both correctness and sophistication, the research team developed an assessment measure with three vertically-equated grade-specific forms composed of open-ended items. The assessment asked students to show their work to allow for analysis of their correctness, strategies, and errors. The results show strong and consistent first year effects on student correctness and solution sophistication multiplication outcomes in all three grades that were assessed. However, these results did not persist during the second year of OGAP treatment, which focused on fraction, when controlling for end of first year results. When examining the second-year multiplication results using the baseline measure, the treatment impacts were present, reinforcing the strength of the first year effects. The next step is to examine year 2 effects in fractions, which was the focus of the second year of OGAP professional development. Additionally, since student and teacher turnover are manifest in Philadelphia, and consequently both students and teachers had different levels of exposure to OGAP, additional analyses are needed to incorporate student and teacher levels of exposure and implementation of OGAP into the models, to disentangle results by level of treatment

A SIMULATION APPROACH TO OPTIMIZING SELECTION OF THE STANDARD ERROR SPECIFICATION IN COUNT DATA MODELING

Quantitative social scientists assume their model fit is appropriate to the data, especially the theoretical distribution of choice. However, researchers spend less time justifying the standard error specification. This step is critical as a misspecification of the standard error can lead to an incorrect interpretation of the independent variables, or parameters, of the model. Because researchers derive further research agendas and policy implications directly from the significance of their results, a misspecification of the standard error has large real world ramifications. This research, therefore, examines the validity of typically applied standard error techniques in Poisson and Negative Binomial regression in a case study framework, such as the observed information matrix, outer product of the gradient, clustering, nonparametric bootstrapping, and the jackknife procedure. A dataset of 2005 to 2011 state-based pro-/neutral and anti-immigration legislation is employed. In order to assess the validity of these standard error techniques I sample from the fitted conditional Poisson or Negative Binomial model to create a Monte Carlo (MC) simulation, which yields an estimate of the ‘true’ standard error. A relative error calculation then compares the commonly utilized standard error techniques to the MC ‘true’ standard error. The results indicate that the observed information matrix performs particularly well for small sample sizes. The jackknife procedure also performs quite well. Results for the nonparametric bootstrap, however, vary tremendously across iterations. Though the conclusions of this research are unlikely to generalize to other datasets, the approach taken may easily be adapted to other situations and other model formulations in which researchers are concerned with which standard error method to use. I include sample Stata code to illustrate the approach

Experimental Impacts of the Ongoing Assessment Project on Teachers and Students

In this report, we describe the results of a rigorous two-year study of the impacts of a mathematics initiative called Ongoing Assessment Project (OGAP) on teacher and student learning in grades 3-5 in two Philadelphia area school districts. OGAP is a mathematics program which combines teacher formative assessment practices with knowledge of student developmental progressions to build deeper student understanding of mathematics content. OGAP includes teacher professional development, classroom resources, school-based routines for regular practice, and ongoing school-based supports. The study was conducted in 61 schools during the 2014-15 and 2015-16 school years, with OGAP randomly assigned to 31 schools and the remaining 30 serving as comparison sites. The results of this study showed that OGAP produced meaningful impacts on both teacher knowledge and student learning

How Did Rural Residents Fare on the Health Insurance Marketplaces?

How are rural areas faring with the Affordable Care Act? Has the law fostered competition among plans or have one or two insurers dominated? This Data Brief examines 2014 premiums and finds that residents of rural counties, as a whole, did not face higher premiums than residents of urban counties. However, states with largely rural populations do face fewer choices and higher premiums. These are the states to watch as new issuers enter the marketplaces and 2015 premiums are filed

CHILDREN OF MEXICAN IMMIGRANTS’ COGNITIVE AND NONCOGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN TRADITIONAL AND NON-TRADITIONAL U.S. DESTINATIONS

Over the last twenty-five years Mexican communities have spread throughout the United States beyond the traditional southwest (‘traditional destinations’) to ‘non-traditional’ destinations west and east of the Mississippi. Little is understood about the consequences of this movement for Mexican immigrant children. This dissertation brings the migration, education, and child development literatures together by (1) conceptualizing living in each destination type as exposure to distinct environmental contexts that are consequential for child development and (2) comparing the cognitive and noncognitive development outcomes of these children between the two destination types. A difference-in-difference approach is used to isolate the influence of living in a non-traditional destination on the Mexican-white development gap. The overall environmental context is further disaggregated into family, school, neighborhood, and state policy components. Data from the 1990 and 2000 censes are employed to construct the destination types and the Educational Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class (1998-2007) is used to examine the impact of destination types on child development. Mixed effects modeling of ten multiply imputed datasets and propensity-score matching are employed. The results indicate that living in a non-traditional destination benefits the noncognitive development of Mexican immigrant children, who exhibit greater self-control, fewer externalizing problem behaviors, and stronger interpersonal skills. Because these behaviors involve engaging with peers, the findings suggest a positive influence of living in non-traditional destinations on the interactive behaviors of Mexican immigrant children. One mechanism that helps explain this influence is school segregation. Mexican immigrant children attend predominantly Hispanic schools in traditional destinations but they attend schools that are more racial/ethnically and socio-economically diverse in non-traditional destinations. Attending a school that is predominantly Hispanic is negatively associated with cognitive and noncognitive development. Another mechanism stems from differences in the neighborhood setting of Mexican immigrants between the destination types, with lower poverty rates and higher college education attainment in non-traditional destinations

Surgical resection for recurrent retroperitoneal leiomyosarcoma and liposarcoma

Abstract Background Retroperitoneal soft tissue sarcomas (STS) include a number of histologies but are rare, with approximately 3000 cases in the USA per year. Retroperitoneal STS have a high incidence of local and distant recurrence. The purpose of this study was to review the University of Maryland Medical Center’s (UMMC) treatment experience of retroperitoneal STS, where the patient population served represents a diverse socioeconomic and ethnic catchment. Methods IRB approval was obtained. We constructed a de-identified database of patients diagnosed with retroperitoneal liposarcomas (LPS) or leiomyosarcomas (LMS) treated at UMMC between 2000 and 2013. A total of 49 patients (Pts) with retroperitoneal STS met our eligibility criteria. Kaplan-Meier plots were used to graphically portray progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS). The log-rank test was used to compare time-to-event distributions. Results The median OS for all patients (Pts) was 6.3 years, and the 2-year OS rate was 81%. The median PFS for all Pts was 1.8 years, and the 2-year PFS rate was 45%. There was no difference in OS and PFS among LMS and LPS patients; the median OS for LMS was 3.8 years vs. LPS 6.4 years (p = 0.33), and the median PFS for LMS was 1.2 years vs. LPS 2.5 years (p = 0.28). There was a significant difference between histology and race (p = 0.001). LPS were primarily Caucasian 86% vs. 14% black, whereas LMS were primarily black 52% vs. 33% Caucasian. OS was influenced by functional status, gender, American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) stage, grade, histology, tumor size, and extent of resection. PFS was influenced by AJCC stage, grade, and extent of resection. Neither adjuvant chemotherapy (1 Pt) nor neoadjuvant/adjuvant radiation therapy (18 Pts) influenced OS or PFS. There was a non-significant difference that Pts who could undergo resection of local recurrence had improved 2-year OS, with 100% LMS and LPS compared to 2-year OS of 71% (LMS) and 78% (LPS) not undergoing resection of local recurrence. Conclusions This study suggests a higher incidence of leiomyosarcoma in the African-American population. This study confirms the prognostic importance of grade, tumor size, AJCC stage, histology, and extent of resection in patient outcomes, at a large substantially diverse academic medical center. Future research into the biological features of liposarcoma and leiomyosarcoma Pts imparting these characteristics will be important to define