To Randomize Or Not to Randomize? That is the Question

Women Affirming Motherhood (WAM) recently received substantial support from the Empire Foundation for WAM’s work in assisting pregnant young women. As part of the grant, Empire required WAM to elicit bids for an independent evaluation of WAM’s performance. In what follows, the focus is on evaluating WAM’s effects. In particular, the concern is whether and how a randomized controlled trial (RCT) might be deployed so as to produce a fair estimate WAM’s effects. The approach to addressing the concern is interrogatory, as the title suggests. The topic’s handling here is more Socratic than it is Shakespearian, however

The Appearance of Statistical Ideas in Prose, Poetry, and Drama: A Dictionary of Quotations, Aphorisms, Apothegms, Excerpts and Epigrams

It is not always easy to understand ideas that are statistical or probabilistic in character. It is even less easy to explain those ideas well. The quotations in this collection were assembled partly to understand how to understand, at least insofar as words (rather than statistical models) permit, and how writers think and explain. One of the motives here is also to assure that readers know from where the quotations come. Anybody nowadays can do a Google search and get what is alleged to a quote by someone famous. But the Googler might never know from where the thing came. Here, the intent is to assure that the right sources, properly cited, and the page numbers etc. are identified. The final motive is amusement. If these quotations amuse and entice others’ interest, that would be lovely

Teacher Churn in Missouri’s Five Biggest Cities, 2005-2014: A Briefing

This policy brief: (1) contrasts the proportion of math and science teachers who leave STEM fields within one year, three years, five years, and ten years with the proportion of English or Social Studies teachers who turnover during these intervals (2) examines stability of the year-to-year turnover from STEM fields (3) describes how teachers who leave math or science teaching assignments move into other STEM assignments, to non-STEM assignments, or leave the public schools of Missouri entirely, and (4) describes the rates at which teachers who are still teaching in STEM fields remain in the same school and district, shift to a different school in the same district, and shift to a different school and district. 5) contrasts the instability of STEM teachers in the five largest cities of Missouri with the instability of STEM teachers in the rest of the state

Ambient Positional Instability Among Ohio Math and Science Teachers: 2008 to 2014

This briefing is on teacher retention and Ambient Positional Instability (API) rates from 2008-09 to 2013-14 for math and science teachers in the state of Ohio. API is investigated in two ways; first, the cohort of math and science teachers teaching in the 2008-09 school year are followed over five years and, second, the population of math and science teachers are tracked from one year to the next over the same time period. Data analyses are presented with key findings identified. Instability rates tend to be stable year-to-year. Teachers in non-charter public schools in the five largest cities in Ohio have roughly 50% higher API than those teaching in non-charter high schools outside those cities. Charter schools have the highest level of API of any of the subpopulations of schools investigated. Implications for schools and research projects targeting secondary schools in Ohio are discussed

To Flop Is Human: Inventing Better Scientific Approaches to Anticipating Failure

Postmortems and autopsies, at the individual and hospital unit levels, are disciplined approaches to learning from medical failures. “Safety factors” that engineers use in designing structures and systems are based on past failures or trials and experiments to find points of failure. The applied social sciences, including education sciences, labor economics, and criminology, have less clarity about failure. While a bridge collapse is usually plain and spectacular, failures of education innovations or attempts at crime control are often quieter, not spectacular, and often occur for no transparent reasons. The applied social sciences lack disciplined, well-developed, and explicit approaches to anticipating the failure to meet expectations in testing the effectiveness of programs, analyzing the failures, and building a cumulative knowledge base on the phenomenon. Our fields can, for instance, identify “what works” pretty well from randomized controlled trials. However, little serious attention has been dedicated to understanding “why” and “how” a particular intervention failed to meet expectations in well-executed randomized controlled trials. This essay discusses a variety of research initiatives that are designed to better understand failure, especially in controlled trials

Washington State Public Teachers\u27 Ambient Positional Instability From A Statistical Approach of Retrospective Study & Prospective Study

The purpose of this research is to study the movements of teachers’ churn rate in the state of Washington over the past 14 years. The research of teachers’ churn rate is an integrative study, with retrospective part and prospective part. Retrospective study includes the analysis of descriptive statistics (level I), statistical inference (level II) and causal inference (level III) (Berk, R.A. (2016) Statistical Learning from a Regression Perspective. Philadelphia, PA: Springer). Prospective study is mainly about forecasting and statistical inference that generated from the predictions. In this research, we are using longitudinal data analysis. The good point of longitudinal data analysis is that it provides us with the data in the past fifteen years with keeping track of the status of all K-12 teachers in the State of Washington. A Comprehensive meta-analysis research on teacher career trajectories conducted by Borman and Dowling shows that very a few previous studies used long-term longitudinal data to properly track the movement of teachers (Borman & Dowling, 2008). From statistical respect, longitudinal studies always provide better results than other approaches when time is a factor in the analysis. Our research is the holistic contribution from the whole project panel, especially under the advising of Professor Robert Boruch, who is also the director of the whole research project series. Bowen Cai takes the responsibility of retention & churn rate calculating, statistical modeling (including machine learning algorithms and time series forecasting) and statistical analysis from the respects of survey methods and design

Ambient Positional Instability Among Illinois Teachers, AY 2007-2012: A Briefing

This briefing concerns two measures of Ambient Positional Instability (API) among teachers in the state of Illinois: cohort retention and churn. The teacher population includes full time public school teachers in the base year of AY2007-2008 and who were followed longitudinally through AY2011-2012. The state, district, and school level cohort retention for elementary, middle and high school teachers over the five years are provided here, as are the cohort retention rates in the five largest school districts in Illinois. Population churn rates, which include both leavers and newcomers to the Illinois system, are reported within the state over the years covered. A rationale for the work is that high instability and regional differences in the instability rates can have serious implications for designing school level interventions, especially for those designed to be implemented over the course of multiple years, and for controlled trials on such interventions. Challenges and techniques used to mitigate problems encountered using publicly available datasets are also discussed