University of Notre Dame

The purpose of this grant is to combine structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques and data science methods to model network and text data. Network and text data are increasingly collected in many fields of research, business, and government. For example, to study student behaviors, it is important to understand the context of behaviors because students are not independent entities but are typically connected with one another, which naturally leads to the collection and analysis of networ...

Most school choice research to date has examined impacts on K-8 students' test scores and non-cognitive outcomes, with comparatively little research on longer-term attainment outcomes such as high school graduation and college enrollment. This project will examine how school choice in different sectors (charter, Catholic, other private, and public schools) is related to student outcomes in high school and postsecondary education. The project will also explore whether attending different type...

In this project, researchers will develop an online formative assessment product for non-advanced placement (non-AP) statistics courses that provides real-time feedback to high school students and teachers, and adjusts in difficulty to meet the level of individual students. There is a growing demand for quality statistics education in high school, and for technologies that personalize learning opportunities for students at different skill levels.

The increasing complexity of education research poses great challenges on existing techniques used to estimate statistical power. For example, education research often involves longitudinal and multilevel designs as well as advanced techniques such as structural equation and multilevel models. Furthermore, practical data in education are often not normally distributed and are incomplete. Without careful consideration of the complexity of study designs and the impact of non-normal data and mi...

This project will create ICUE Online, an online version of the Improving Children's Understanding of Equivalence (ICUE) intervention, which was developed and tested for efficacy with prior IES funding. ICUE Online will consist of activities with just-in-time feedback designed to improve student understanding of mathematical equivalence. Though understanding equivalence is a critical precursor to many math concepts and algebraic thinking, the majority of elementary students fail to develop co...

The ability to meet benchmark standards in core academic subjects such as reading and math is limited by a student's working memory (WM) capacity. This research seeks to explore the effects of a novel training regimen that can target and enhance both the attention and memory components of WM capacity on student education outcomes. According to the dual-component theory of WM, there are two critical components of WM capacity—an attention component and a memory component—that account for t...