Highlights of 2011 - Institute for Policy Research - Northwestern ...

Education Policy
they are working closely with both Chicago Public Schools and
the Consortium for Chicago School Research to analyze the
principals’ routes to preparation, recruitment, and retention, in
addition to tracking their career paths. The two investigators
hope the study will shore up a significant lack of data and
contribute to better school policies, given the principal’s
importance in shepherding school improvements. In addition
to these analyses, they plan to carry out a broader program of
research that could include similar studies in other U.S. cities
and a longitudinal analysis of a national survey database of
school principals.
Social Ties for Advice and Information
In schools and school districts, social relations can be a source
of various resources including trust, opportunities for joint
learning, and incentives for improvement through peer pressure
or sense of obligation. In ongoing work supported by the
National Science Foundation in collaboration with colleagues at
the University of Nebraska, Spillane is working to understand
the fundamentals of social capital development in schools.
In an IPR working paper, Spillane and his colleagues use data
from 30 elementary schools in a midsized, urban U.S. school
district to investigate social tie formation for advice and seeking
information in language arts and math classes. Their results
suggest that while individuals’ personal characteristics, such as
race and gender, are significantly associated with how social
ties are formed, the formal organization in terms of grade-level
assignment and formal position is also significant, having a larger
effect than personal characteristics.
Improving Generalizability in Research
If an education intervention proves to be successful in the study
sample, will it actually work in schools outside of the study too?
The results of a well-designed experiment can also apply to the
relevant population. With the support of the National Science
Foundation and the Institute of Education Sciences, Hedges is
investigating new methods to improve the generalizability of
findings from education research so that results from one study
can be used to make statistical claims in another population
or place. His work builds on propensity score methods
and a database of national covariates to create a statistical
approach that uses study samples to estimate parameters of
the distribution of treatment effects in an inference population.
Hedges will conduct training workshops on using new methods
at four national education conferences for other researchers.
Assessing Spatial Learning
aims to achieve a better understanding of spatial relationships,
which serve as a basis for many of these skills. Hedges is part
of the team leading the SILC project. Researchers within
SILC recently reviewed more than 200 research studies on
education interventions to improve spatial thinking. The metaanalysis
is the first all-encompassing study of how and how
much training influences spatial thinking. It considers gender
and age differences in relation to spatial thinking. In males
and females, adults and children alike, even a small amount of
training can improve spatial reasoning and have long-lasting
impact, showing that the skills are malleable and that spatial
training transfers to other fields. The research team was led by
Northwestern psychologist David Uttal and included former
IPR graduate research assistant Elizabeth Tipton, now on the
faculty at Columbia University. The article was published in
Psychological Bulletin.
School Finance Reform
In a working paper, public finance economist and IPR associate
Therese McGuire and Nathan Anderson of the University of
Illinois at Chicago examine the important episode of school
finance reform in the 1970s and 1980s to shed light on subnational
government revenue-setting behavior and the prevailing
theories of subnational government behavior. The early wave
of court-ordered school finance reforms of these decades is
noteworthy because state spending became perceptibly more
progressive in those states subject to the court orders. Existing
analyses of this period in state and local public finance have
not focused on the implications for state revenues. In their
paper, McGuire and Anderson examine how states respond on
the revenue side to an arguably exogenous progressive shock
on the spending side, finding that the individual income tax
became more progressive in states subject to court-ordered
school finance reform.
Leading Economists Speak at Seminars
IPR continued its joint Applied Microeconomics and Labor
& Education Policy Seminar Series with the economics
department at Northwestern. Economists speaking in 2011
included Jennifer Hunt of Rutgers University, who spoke on how
immigration affects the completed schooling of Americans, and
Abhijit Banerjee, director of the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty
Action Lab, who demonstrated how microfinance program
participation diffuses through social networks. Marianne Page
from the University of California, Davis explored how higher
education levels for returning World War II veterans led
them to marry women with comparable levels of education,
suggesting a method for passing on socioeconomic status to
the next generation.
Workers in a high-tech, global economy need adequate
scientific, technical, engineering, and mathematical skills.
Northwestern’s Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC)
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