1,720,955 research outputs found
Leveraging Lotteries for School Value-Added: Testing and Estimation
No full textConventional value-added models (VAMs) compare average test scores across schools after regression-adjusting for students' demographic characteristics and previous scores. This article tests for VAM bias using a procedure that asks whether VAM estimates accurately predict the achievement consequences of random assignment to specific schools. Test results from admissions lotteries in Boston suggest conventional VAM estimates are biased, a finding that motivates the development of a hierarchical model describing the joint distribution of school valueadded, bias, and lottery compliance. We use this model to assess the substantive importance of bias in conventional VAM estimates and to construct hybrid valueadded estimates that optimally combine ordinary least squares and lottery-based estimates of VAM parameters. The hybrid estimation strategy provides a general recipe for combining nonexperimental and quasi-experimental estimates. While still biased, hybrid school value-added estimates have lower mean squared error than conventional VAMestimates. Simulations calibrated to the Boston data show that, bias notwithstanding, policy decisions based on conventional VAMs that control for lagged achievement are likely to generate substantial achievement gains. Hybrid estimates that incorporate lotteries yield further gains
Inputs and Impacts in Charter Schools: KIPP Lynn
No full textThe charter school landscape includes a variety
of organizational models and a few national
franchises. The nation’s largest network of charter
schools is the Knowledge is Power Program
(KIPP), with 80 schools operating or slated to open
soon. KIPP schools target low income and minority
students and subscribe to an approach some
have called No Excuses (Abigail Thernstrom and
Stephen Thernstrom 2003). No Excuses schools
feature a long school day and year, selective
teacher hiring, strict behavior norms, and encourage
a strong student work ethic.
KIPP schools have often been central in the
debate over whether schools alone can substantially
reduce racial achievement gaps.
Descriptive accounts of KIPP suggest positive
achievement effects (see, e.g., Jay Mathews
2009), but critics argue that the apparent KIPP
advantage reflects differences between students
who attend traditional public schools and
students that choose to attend KIPP schools
(see, e.g., Martin Carnoy, Rebecca Jacobsen,
Lawrence Mishel, and Richard Rothstein 2005).
There are few well-controlled studies of KIPP
schools that might help sort out these competing
claims, and none that focus on KIPP.1
This paper reports on a quasi-experimental
evaluation of the only KIPP school in New
England, KIPP Academy Lynn. KIPP Lynn
opened in the fall of 2004 and is the only charter
school in Lynn, Mass., a low income city north of Boston. KIPP Lynn is a middle school that serves
about 300 students in grades 5–8. Like most other
Massachusetts charter schools, KIPP Lynn is
funded primarily through tuition paid by students’
home districts. Tuition is typically set to match
sending districts’ average per pupil expenditure,
though this is offset by state subsidies to the sending
district when a student first transfers
Who Benefits from KIPP?
Full text linkThe nation's largest charter management organization is the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP). KIPP schools are emblematic of the No Excuses approach to public education, a highly standardized and widely replicated charter model that features a long school day, an extended school year, selective teacher hiring, strict behavior norms, and emphasizes traditional reading and math skills. No Excuses charter schools are sometimes said to target relatively motivated high achievers at the expense of students who are more difficult to teach, including limited English proficiency (LEP) and special education (SPED) students, as well as students with low baseline achievement levels. We use applicant lotteries to evaluate the impact of KIPP Academy Lynn, a KIPP school in Lynn, Massachusetts that typifies the KIPP approach. Our analysis focuses on special needs students that may be underserved. The results show average achievement gains of 0.36 standard deviations in math and 0.12 standard deviations in reading for each year spent at KIPP Lynn, with the largest gains coming from the LEP, SPED, and low-achievement groups. Average reading gains are driven almost entirely by SPED and LEP students, whose reading scores rise by roughly 0.35 standard deviations for each year spent at KIPP Lynn
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
- …
