Title Information
Title
Effect Sizes for Measuring Student and School Growth in Achievement: In Search of Practical Significance
Name
Name Part
James Soland
Role
Role Term (marcrelator) (authorityURI="http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/relators", valueURI="http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/relators/aut")
author
Name
Name Part
Yeow Meng Thum
Role
Role Term (marcrelator) (authorityURI="http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/relators", valueURI="http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/relators/aut")
author
Subject
Topic
effect sizes
Subject
Topic
norms
Subject
Topic
student achievement
Subject
Topic
student growth
Subject
Topic
standardization
Subject
Topic
achievement gaps
Subject (edworkp)
Topic
K-12 Education
Subject (edworkp)
Topic
Methodology, measurement and data
Subject (edworkp)
Topic
Program and policy effects
Subject (edworkp)
Topic
Race, ethnicity and culture
Origin Information
Date Created
2019
Publisher
Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University
Abstract
Effect sizes in the Cohen’s d family are often used in education to compare estimates across studies, measures, and sample sizes.  For example, effect sizes are used to compare gains in achievement students make over time, either in pre- and post-treatment studies or in the absence of intervention, such as when estimating achievement gaps.  However, despite extensive research dating back to the paired t-test literature showing that such growth effect sizes should account for within-person correlations of scores over time, such achievement gains are often standardized relative to the standard deviation from a single timepoint or two timepoints pooled.  Such a tendency likely occurs in part because there are not many large datasets from which a distribution of student- or school-level gains can be derived.  In this study, we present a novel model for estimating student growth in conjunction with a national dataset to show that effect size estimates for student and school growth are often quite different when standardized relative to a distribution of gains rather than static achievement.  In particular, we provide nationally representative empirical benchmarks for student achievement and gains, including for male-female gaps in those gains, and examine the sensitivity of those effect sizes to how they are standardized.  Our results suggest that effect sizes scaled relative to a distribution of gains are less likely to understate the effects of interventions over time, and that resultant effect sizes often more closely match the estimand of interest for most practice, policy, and evaluation questions.
Language
Language Term: Code (ISO639-2B)
eng
Type of Resource
text
Genre (aat)
grey literature
Related Item: series
Title Information
Title
edworkingpapers.com
Related Item
Identifier: DOI
10.26300/b5as-wr12
Access Condition: use and reproduction (href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/")
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