University of California, Berkeley

The purpose of this project is to develop, revise, and validate online science assessments focusing on scientific argumentation in the domains of Structure of Matter and Ecology. Although student facility with science practices has been studied, there is limited research on how these practices may be supported within a classroom environment, and, in particular, how to readily assess students' ability to engage in scientific practice in an online environment. When it comes to engaging in scie...

Formative assessments, when used correctly and consistently, can improve student learning. Furthermore, computerized formative assessments can provide teachers with rich diagnostic information about students' learning in a timely manner which allows for instructional planning. Many online assessment products currently exist but these products do not typically take into consideration students' learning progressions, incorporate complex item formats that evaluate constructed responses, or incl...

The primary purpose is to improve school readiness and subsequent achievement in math of students from low-income families. Low-income children enter kindergarten behind their middle-class peers in math knowledge. This gap in knowledge persists through high school. To work on addressing this issue, the investigators plan to examine the effectiveness of a pre-kindergarten mathematics intervention implemented at scale across two types of public preschool programs serving low-income children...

This project will examine the extent to which college students access existing basic needs safety net benefits they are eligible for, and how those benefits affect their educational outcomes. Across the country, many college students struggle to meet their basic needs while attending school. Public higher education institutions are well-situated to facilitate student access to safety net benefits, but data limitations have hampered previous efforts to assess eligibility and encourage take-up...

When a randomized control trial is infeasible in an education setting, researchers can use quasi-experimental research designs. A commonly used approach is to use repeated observations of aggregate data, known as group panel data, before and after a new policy or intervention is put in place. To estimate the effects, researchers typically rely on either a comparative interrupted time series (CITS) or, increasingly, the synthetic control method (SCM), but there is not a clear set of best prac...

Student achievement in mathematics in the United States continues to lag behind other developed countries. This relative underperformance in mathematics might be due to teachers' and students' view of mathematics as a collection of rules to be followed and their limited conceptions of mathematically important concepts. To understand this potential relationship between student mathematics knowledge and math meaning-making, this research team has developed the Mathematical Meanings for Teachin...