DHB: Exploring Educational Policy and Change from a Complex Systems Perspective

这项研究涉及到创建新的工具来理解和描述学校改革倡议。对改革举措的传统描述和结果衡量主要集中在学生的总体结果上，但在帮助研究人员了解这些结果是如何产生的方面有限。特别是，我们今天使用的政策分析工具无法洞察大多数教育改革政策的基本目标--如何让人们共同行动起来，带来改进和改变。此外，为什么尽管有如此多的个人层面的努力和活动，系统层面的改变却如此难以实现？即将开发的工具将使研究人员能够在个人层面上对学校进行建模，并了解从个人的选择和行为以及他们的互动中产生的结果。这些工具将利用由强大的计算实现的两种建模和分析技术：基于代理的建模和社会网络分析。通过将个人建模为生活在旨在类似于学校改革政策的模拟世界中的软件“代理”，基于代理的建模使研究人员能够看到个人行动如何在改革的时间过程中导致聚合结果。社交网络分析可以创建丰富的图片，展示现实生活中的人们在改革过程中的互动，以及这些互动带来的可用资源。当这些形式的分析结合在一起，并与改革努力的实际行为数据相结合时，这项研究可以提供关于如何以能够产生实际结果的方式制定改革政策的洞察力。具体地说，在这一努力中，研究人员将在三个改革举措的背景下建模和分析理解系统层面变化出现的问题：择校、小学校改革和通过跟踪进行个性化教学。这项工作的目标是向研究人员、从业者和政策制定者提供信息，使他们能够更准确地判断这样的改革对改善教育的影响。预计这将使政策制定者能够更快、更准确地审查替代政策--最终导致制定更好的教育政策，更快地在儿童和成年人的生活中获得吸引力。

This research concerns the creation of new kinds of tools for understanding and characterizing school reform initiatives. Traditional descriptions and outcome measures of reform initiatives have focused largely on aggregated student outcomes but are limited in helping researchers capture how these outcomes have come about. In particular, the policy analysis tools at our disposal today cannot provide insight into the fundamental aim of most educational reform policies -- how to get people to act together to bring about improvement and change. Moreover, why is it that despite so much individual level effort and activity, system-level change is so difficult to achieve?The tools to be developed will enable researchers to model schools at the level of individuals and to understand the outcomes that emerge from the choices and behaviors of individuals and their interactions. These tools will make use of two modeling and analysis technologies that have been enabled by powerful computation: agent-based modeling and social network analysis. By modeling individuals as software "agents" who live in a simulated world designed to resemble a school reform policy, agent-based modeling enables researchers to see how individual action leads to aggregate outcomes over the time course of a reform. Social network analysis allows the creation of rich pictures of the interactions of real people as they live reforms, and the resources available to them as a consequence of those interactions. When these forms of analysis are joined together and with data on real behavior from reform efforts, this research can provide insight on how reform policy might be enacted in a way that can produce real results. Specifically, in this effort the researchers will model and analyze the problem of understanding the emergence of system-level change in the context of three cases of reform initiatives: school choice, small schools reform, and individualized instruction through tracking. The goal in this work is to provide information to researchers, practitioners and policymakers,enabling them to judge more precisely the impact of reforms like these on improvement of schooling. It is expected that this will enable policymakers to examine alternative policies more quickly and accurately -- and, ultimately, lead to the design of better educational policies that more rapidly gain traction in the lives of children and adults.