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

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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.