The last two decades have been a period of experimentation in education policy in the United States, aimed at achieving the twin goals of boosting achievement and closing achievement gaps between disadvantaged and other students. Nearly all evaluations have focused on estimating the average impacts of these policies on student outcomes;some have also examined how these average impacts vary across subgroups of students defined by such characteristics as ethnicity and family socioeconomic status. As argued at length in Projects l-ll, developmental theory suggests that good and bad matches between student circumstances and intervention program design will produce heterogeneous program impacts, and that understanding the nature of this heterogeneity is essential for optimizing program design. Projects l-ll propose tests of child/policy fit hypotheses with interaction models allowing for differential program impacts across population subgroups that are defined by baseline characteristics. The current project develops and implements complementary approaches to testing child/policy fit hypotheses: quantile treatment effect estimation and other distributional estimators. It applies these techniques to data from four different education settings that range from pre-kindergarten to high school. In the case ofthe Head Start Impact Study and a voucher program to enable poor children to attend private schools in New York City, we test hypotheses suggesting ways in which modest overall effects mask systematic impact differences for children with different academic skills and behavioral characteristics. A third analysis will test hypotheses regarding the effects of policies encouraging middle schoolers to enroll in Algebra on the distribution of student motivation and achievement. Our final tests are of the distribution of impacts on effort and achievement of high-stakes exit exams as well as low-stakes (to students) accountability tests. The fifth year of our project would involve outreach activities designed to promote the use of these techniques more broadly in education evaluations.

Public Health Relevance

We propose to apply and extend new methods to the analysis of effects of four educational interventions across the full distribution of children's outcomes. Our research will make these techniques more accessible for applied researchers while testing theoretical predictions from achievement goal and developmental theory. Our research has implications for the use of overall and subgroup specific mean-based impacts as ways of targeting interventions.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD)
Type
Research Program Projects (P01)
Project #
1P01HD065704-01A1
Application #
8223360
Study Section
Special Emphasis Panel (ZHD1-DSR-W (DG))
Project Start
Project End
Budget Start
2011-09-24
Budget End
2012-05-31
Support Year
1
Fiscal Year
2011
Total Cost
$172,509
Indirect Cost
Name
University of California Irvine
Department
Type
DUNS #
046705849
City
Irvine
State
CA
Country
United States
Zip Code
92697
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Penner, Emily K (2018) Early Parenting and the Reduction of Educational Inequality in Childhood and Adolescence. J Educ Res 111:213-231
Watts, Tyler W; Duncan, Greg J; Quan, Haonan (2018) Revisiting the Marshmallow Test: A Conceptual Replication Investigating Links Between Early Delay of Gratification and Later Outcomes. Psychol Sci 29:1159-1177
Bailey, Drew H; Duncan, Greg J; Watts, Tyler et al. (2018) Risky business: Correlation and causation in longitudinal studies of skill development. Am Psychol 73:81-94
Watts, Tyler W; Duncan, Greg J; Clements, Douglas H et al. (2018) What Is the Long-Run Impact of Learning Mathematics During Preschool? Child Dev 89:539-555
Jenkins, Jade M; Watts, Tyler W; Magnuson, Katherine et al. (2018) Do High-Quality Kindergarten and First-Grade Classrooms Mitigate Preschool Fadeout? J Res Educ Eff 11:339-374
Jenkins, Jade M; Duncan, Greg J; Auger, Anamarie et al. (2018) Boosting School Readiness: Should Preschool Teachers Target Skills or the Whole Child? Econ Educ Rev 65:107-125
Watts, Tyler W; Clements, Douglas H; Sarama, Julie et al. (2017) Does Early Mathematics Intervention Change the Processes Underlying Children's Learning? J Res Educ Eff 10:96-115
Miller, Elizabeth B (2017) Spanish Instruction in Head Start and Dual Language Learners' Academic Achievement. J Appl Dev Psychol 52:159-169
Schenke, Katerina; Nguyen, Tutrang; Watts, Tyler W et al. (2017) Differential effects of the classroom on African American and non-African American's mathematics achievement. J Educ Psychol 109:794-811

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