Grants Support Diverse Faculty Research

Winter, 2008, Volume 30, Number 1

IPR Administrator Michael  Weis meets with Michelle Reininger on her grant.

Several recently funded projects showcase the diversity and breadth of IPR faculty research on important social policy issues including adolescent stress, neighborhood effects, teacher training, research methods for education, and the economics of adoption.

Recruiting Teachers that Thrive in Chicago Schools
As the nation’s third largest urban school district, the Chicago Public School (CPS) system struggles each year to fill its classrooms with high-quality teachers, especially in hard-to-staff subjects such as math, science, and bilingual education.

“Although CPS has implemented a very successful student teacher program that recruits as many as 1,500 student teachers each year, it faces a tremendous challenge in devising a dynamic selection process to identify those student teachers who will not just survive, but thrive in the urban environment of Chicago Public Schools,” said IPR Faculty Fellow Michelle Reininger, assistant professor of human development, social policy, and learning sciences.

This is why Reininger is launching a two-year project, thanks to funding from the Joyce Foundation, to develop a comprehensive district-level process that will allow CPS to identify and target promising student teachers. She noted that by retaining high-quality individuals after their student teaching, the Chicago Public School system hopes to close the achievement gap.

“And what works for Chicago might also work for the rest of the nation,” she said.

Methodological Training for Educational Researchers
In the current K-12 educational climate dominated by No Child Left Behind, the stakes for educational testing and evaluating student outcomes have never been higher.

	Larry Hedges makes a point about training researchers in education.

“Yet a national shortfall of qualified researchers limits America’s capacity to carry out high-quality educational research,” said research methodologist Larry V. Hedges. Recently, the Institute of Education Sciences awarded Northwestern University grants for postdoctoral training and summer workshops on randomized field trials.

Long-term, the postdoctoral fellowships will produce scholars with the necessary knowledge and training to carry out a wide range of quality educational research, but this will take years—as it should, Hedges noted. “The summer workshops will address the immediate need of training educational researchers already in the field.”

The workshops will focus on the design, implementation, and analysis of randomized experiments and will run for two weeks each summer for the next three years. Each session will train 30 researchers who are already planning to conduct randomized trials and have some experience already with them.  Two of the three workshops will be held at Northwestern and one at Vanderbilt, a co-sponsor of the workshops.

Hedges is Board of Trustees Professor of Statistics and Social Policy and co-director of IPR’s Center for Improving Methods for Quantitative Policy Research or Q-Center. He will organize the workshops with Mark Lipsey and David Cordray of  Vanderbilt University.

Improving Better Quasi-Experimental Practices in Education
Social psychologist Thomas D. Cook received a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences to investigate how to improve quasi-experimental designs and analyses for educational experiments. Quasi-experimentation can be used when a randomized experiment is not possible or has broken down.

“Generally, the causal designs used in educational research are of poor quality,” Cook said. “Our aim is to show how quasi-experimental designs can work in a wide variety of situations to help educational researchers achieve superior empirical results.”

Cook and his collaborators, including William Shadish of the University of California, Merced, will seek to improve the four strongest quasi-experimental designs used in education: regression-discontinuity, some specific kinds of case matching, short-interrupted time series, and pattern matching.

The plan is to test the validity of the knowledge gained through reanalyzing data sets comparing quasi-experimental results to those from randomized experiments sharing the same treatment group.

“This would serve as a valid causal benchmark for estimating how much bias reduction is achieved by one way of improving a quasi-experimental design versus another,” Cook said.

Cook and Shadish have run six workshops on quasi-experimentation, with funding from the Spencer Foundation, for educational researchers from around the country and abroad. They will be combining their research with their experiences in running these workshops into a book.

Cook is Joan and Sarepta Harrison Chair in Ethics and Justice at Northwestern and co-director of IPR’s Center for Improving Methods for Quantitative Policy Research or Q-Center.

Measuring Adolescent Stress with Biomarkers
A team of IPR researchers has been selected to investigate the impact of socioeconomic status, social relationships, and neighborhood quality on biomarkers of health collected as part of the fourth wave of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, also known as Add Health.

“This is an unprecedented opportunity to integrate sophisticated biological measures with detailed information on the contextual factors that shape human development and health,” said Thomas McDade, an IPR faculty fellow.

McDade, who is associate director of IPR’s Cells to Society (C2S): The Center on Social Disparities and Health, helped design the biomarker protocols for the Add Health study, which includes a nationally representative sample of approximately 20,000 adolescents from across the United States.

“This project will be the most comprehensive investigation to date of how social stressors influence adolescent physical and mental health,” McDade said. It will also examine how stress can lead to health disparities and affect later adult health outcomes, he continued. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has provided funding for the project.

McDade is collaborating with IPR faculty fellows Emma Adam, associate professor of human development and social policy; P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, professor of human development and social policy and director of C2S; Christopher Kuzawa, assistant professor of anthropology; Greg Duncan, Edwina S. Tarry Professor of Education and Social Policy; and Thomas D. Cook, Joan and Sarepta Harrison Chair in Ethics and Justice. McDade is associate professor of anthropology and Weinberg College Board of  Visitors Research and Teaching Professor.

Economics of Adoption
Americans adopt more children domestically and internationally than any other nationality in the world, with 2.5 percent—or two million—of all American children being adopted. IPR Faculty Fellow Éva Nagypál and her colleagues will conduct the first econometric analysis of the “adoption market,” with funding from the National Science Foundation.

Nagypál, assistant professor of economics, and her colleagues will create a new data set from the National Survey of Family Growth and the Survey of Income and Program Participation to trace historical U.S. adoption trends.

“We aim to show how different elements such as adoption law reform, marriage-market dynamics, and labor market policy changes affect decision making about constituting families in the United States,” Nagypál said. “Eventually, we hope to show how different policy interventions influence decisions about adoption and fertility.”

Nagypál is working with Chiaki Moriguchi, assistant professor of economics at Northwestern; Luojia Hu, a senior economist at the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank; and Raquel Bernal, assistant professor of economics at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia.

Neighborhood Effects on Low-Income Youth
Three prominent foundations, Bill and Melinda Gates, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, and Smith Richardson, have awarded grants to a major new study on neighborhood effects led by IPR Faculty Fellow Greg Duncan, an economist and Edwina S. Tarry Professor of Education and Social Policy. The project has also received funding from the Institute of Education Sciences and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

To date, no study has ever pinned down the exact magnitude of neighborhood effects on people’s life chances because of a lack of randomized design. The researchers aim to provide the first rigorous measures of the long-term causal effects of neighborhoods on children and parents.

The study will interview families from the randomized mobility experiment, Moving to Opportunity, or MTO, implemented by HUD. From 1994 to 1998, more than 4,600 low-income families in five major U.S. cities enrolled in the MTO study. Each family was assigned to one of three groups, a low-poverty voucher group, a traditional Section 8 voucher group, or a control group.

Duncan and his four colleagues, Lawrence Katz and Ronald Kessler of Harvard University, Jeffrey Kling of the Brookings Institution, and Jens Ludwig of the University of Chicago, will examine the links between outcomes and housing mobility and neighborhoods 10 years after their original MTO random assignment. In particular, they will study children’s schooling and educational outcomes, household learning and developmental environments, family income and jobs, and financial behavior and outcomes. This study is part of the congressionally mandated evaluation of MTO.