IES Blog

By Lauren Musu-Gillette

Have you ever read one of our reports and wondered where the data came from? Are you familiar with NAEP, but have never heard of IPEDS? Are you curious about the history of NCES? If so, our new video is perfect for you!

The full scope of NCES activities can be daunting for those not familiar with the Center. Our data collections include samples from early childhood to postsecondary education, and cover such diverse topics as math and reading achievement, the experiences of teachers and principals, and school crime. In addition, the Center has a rich history both within the Department of Education and as a federal statistical agency. To make our data, reports, and tools more accessible to the public, we’ve created a new video to help introduce you to who we are and what we do.

To learn more about the Center’s work, watch the video below and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

EDITOR'S NOTE:The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), a program of the Institute of Education Sciences, is a trusted source of scientific evidence on education programs, products, practices, and policies. The WWC also has many tools and resources for education researchers and students.  In this guest blog post, Jessaca Spybrook (pictured, below right), Associate Professor of Evaluation, Measurement and Research at Western Michigan University, discusses how she uses WWC procedures and standards as a teaching tool.

By Jessaca Spybrook, Western Michigan University

Training the next generation of researchers so they are prepared to enter the world of education research is a critical part of my role as a faculty member in the Evaluation, Measurement, and Research program. I want to ensure that my students have important technical skills in a host of subject areas including, but not limited to, research design, statistics, and measurement. At the same time, I want to be sure they know how to apply the skills to design and analyze real-world studies. I often struggle to find resources for my classes that help me meet both goals.

One resource that has emerged as an important tool in meeting both goals is the What Works Clearinghouse website. I frequently integrate materials from the WWC into the graduate research design and statistics courses I teach.

For example, in a recent class I taught, Design of Experiments and Quasi-Experiments, I used the WWC Procedures and Standards Handbook Version 3.0 throughout (an image from the publication is pictured below). The Handbook met four important criteria as I was selecting resources for my class:

1. Inclusion of important technical detail on design and analysis;
2. Up-to-date and current thinking and “best practice” in design and analysis;
3. Clear writing that is accessible for graduate students; and
4. It was free (always a bonus when searching for class materials).

By no means did the Handbook replace classic and well-regarded textbooks in the class. Rather, it helped connect classic texts on design to both recent advances related to design, as well as real-life considerations and standards that designs are judged against.

At the end of my class, students may have been tired of hearing the question, “what is the highest potential rating for this study?” But I feel confident that using the WWC Handbook helped me not only prepare graduates with the technical know-how they need to design a rigorous experiment or quasi-experiment, but also raised awareness of current best practice and how to design a study that meets important standards set for the field.

Over the years, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) has funded over 300 studies across its research programs that evaluate the efficacy of specific programs, policies, or practices. This work has contributed significantly to our understanding of the interventions that improve outcomes for students under tightly controlled or ideal conditions. But is this information enough to inform policymakers’ and practitioners’ decisions about whether to adopt an intervention? If not, what should come after an efficacy study?

By Jill Carlivati McCarroll and Tom Snyder

Each Federal agency is responsible for collecting and disseminating different types of data on topics of interest and importance to the American public. In order to look across data sources to get a more complete picture of any one topic, it is important that those datasets are comparable.

Federal agencies that collect and report race and ethnicity data use the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity to promote uniformity and comparability.  The standards guide information collected and presented for the decennial census, household surveys, administrative forms (e.g., school registration and mortgage lending applications), and numerous other statistical collections, as well as for civil rights enforcement and program administrative reporting.

Periodically, these standards are reviewed. The Federal Interagency Working Group for Research on Race and Ethnicity has been tasked with reviewing the standards on race and ethnicity. A March 1st Federal Register Notice and associated interim report by the Working Group communicates the current status of this work and requests public feedback on the following four areas:

1. The use of separate questions versus a combined question to measure race and Hispanic origin, and question phrasing as a solution to race/ethnicity question nonresponse;
2. The classification of a Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) group and distinct reporting category;
3. The description of the intended use of minimum reporting categories (e.g., requiring or encouraging more detailed reporting within each minimum reporting category); and
4. The terminology used for race and ethnicity classifications and other language in the standard.

Additional details on each of these four areas are available in the full notice, posted on the regulations.gov website. All members of the public are encouraged to provide feedback on these topics.  OMB will use all the public comments, along with recommendations from the Federal Interagency Working Group, to determine if any proposed revisions to the standards are warranted. According to established practice, OMB plans to notify the public of its final decision, along with its rationale.

Comments on the Federal Register Notice are due by April 30, 2017 and can be submitted electronically to Race-Ethnicity@omb.eop.gov or via the Federal E-Government website. Comments may also be sent by mail to U.S. Chief Statistician, Office of Management and Budget, 1800 G St., 9th Floor, Washington, DC 20503. All public feedback will be considered by the Federal Interagency Working Group as they write their final report, which will be used by OMB as they decide on any possible revisions to the standards.  

Additional information on how federal agenices use race and ethnicity data as well as more a more detailed description of the potential changes to the current standards are available in this webinar:

ERIC has made recent improvements to help searchers find the education research they are looking for. One major enhancement relates to the ERIC identifiers, which have been improved to increase their usefulness as search tools. It is now easier than ever to refine searches to obtain specific resources in ERIC.

The identifier filters can be found on the search results page in three separate categories: (1) laws, policies, and programs, (2) assessments and surveys, and (3) location. After running a search on an education topic, users can scroll to the category on the left of the results page, select the desired identifier limiter within a category, and limit the results to only those materials tagged with that identifier.

We recently released a video that describes the enhanced identifiers, and walks through how to best use them to find materials in the ERIC collection. (We've embedded the video below.) 

Using the improved identifiers, searchers are now able to find materials related to specific locations, laws, or assessments no matter how the author referred to them in the article.

In other words, identifiers can now be used as an effective controlled vocabulary for ERIC, but this has not always been the case. While they have been part of ERIC since 1966, identifiers were not rigorously standardized, and they were often created "on the fly" by indexers. Also, the previous identifiers field had a character limit, meaning that some terms needed to be truncated to fit into the space allowed by the available technology. Therefore, over time, the identifiers proliferated with different spellings, abbreviations, and other variations, making them less useful as search aids.

To solve these issues, we launched a project in 2016 to review the lists of identifiers, and devise an approach for making them more user-friendly. Our solution was to streamline and standardize them, which eliminated redundancy and reduced their number from more than 7,800 to a more manageable 1,200. We also added the updated identifiers to the website’s search limiters to make them easier to use.

In addition to our new video, which demonstrates the best ways to use identifiers in your search, we also have a new infographic (pictured above) that depicts what identifiers are. You can use these companion pieces to learn more about identifiers, and begin putting them to work in your research.