Kevin Stange

U.S. school districts invest billions of dollars to upgrade school facilities on the assumption that this will improve student outcomes. Empirical evidence about the allocation of facilities spending and its effect on student performance is necessary to enable financially constrained school districts to judiciously invest their resources. The purpose of this project is to inform policies regarding capital investments in school facilities. Researchers will examine the following questions: (1)...

Research-ready (de-identified, standardized, documented) data on the courses students take and what they learn while attending college has, historically, been challenging to obtain on a large scale. Research on student course-taking has been hampered by inconsistent course titles and numbers across multiple institutions, as well as the sheer amount of human intervention required to manually classify thousands of unique courses within an institution. The 'big data revolution,' however, brings...