PROJECT 3:Unequal Effects? The Distributional Consequences of Edul. Interventions

过去20年是美国教育政策的试验期，旨在实现提高成绩和缩小弱势学生与其他学生之间的成绩差距这两个目标。几乎所有的评估都侧重于估计这些政策对学生结果的平均影响；一些评估还研究了这些平均影响在按族裔和家庭社会经济地位等特征界定的学生亚群中的差异。正如《项目L-II》中详细论述的那样，发展理论认为，学生环境和干预项目设计之间的良好和不良匹配将产生异质性的项目影响，了解这种异质性的本质对于优化项目设计是至关重要的。项目L-将使用交互模型对儿童/政策适合性假设进行测试，该模型允许由基线特征定义的不同人口子组的不同项目影响。当前项目的开发和实施 检验儿童/政策适合性假设的补充方法：分位数处理效果估计和其他分布估计。它将这些技术应用于从学前班到高中的四个不同教育环境的数据。在Head Start Impact研究和一个让贫困儿童进入纽约市私立学校的代金券项目中，我们测试了一些假设，这些假设表明，适度的整体影响掩盖了不同学习技能和行为特征的儿童的系统性影响差异。第三项分析将检验关于鼓励中学生学习代数的政策对学生动机和成绩分布的影响的假设。 我们的期末考试是关于高风险的毕业考试和低风险的(对学生的)责任测试对努力和成绩的影响分布。我们项目的第五年将包括旨在促进在教育评价中更广泛地使用这些技术的外联活动。

The last two decades have been a period of experimentation in education policy in the United States, aimed at achieving the twin goals of boosting achievement and closing achievement gaps between disadvantaged and other students. Nearly all evaluations have focused on estimating the average impacts of these policies on student outcomes; some have also examined how these average impacts vary across subgroups of students defined by such characteristics as ethnicity and family socioeconomic status. As argued at length in Projects l-ll, developmental theory suggests that good and bad matches between student circumstances and intervention program design will produce heterogeneous program impacts, and that understanding the nature of this heterogeneity is essential for optimizing program design. Projects l-ll propose tests of child/policy fit hypotheses with interaction models allowing for differential program impacts across population subgroups that are defined by baseline characteristics. The current project develops and implements complementary approaches to testing child/policy fit hypotheses: quantile treatment effect estimation and other distributional estimators. It applies these techniques to data from four different education settings that range from pre-kindergarten to high school. In the case ofthe Head Start Impact Study and a voucher program to enable poor children to attend private schools in New York City, we test hypotheses suggesting ways in which modest overall effects mask systematic impact differences for children with different academic skills and behavioral characteristics. A third analysis will test hypotheses regarding the effects of policies encouraging middle schoolers to enroll in Algebra on the distribution of student motivation and achievement. Our final tests are of the distribution of impacts on effort and achievement of high-stakes exit exams as well as low-stakes (to students) accountability tests. The fifth year of our project would involve outreach activities designed to promote the use of these techniques more broadly in education evaluations.