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

本研究涉及创造新的工具来理解和描述学校改革倡议。改革举措的传统描述和结果衡量主要集中在学生的总体成绩上，但在帮助研究人员了解这些结果是如何产生的方面是有限的。特别是，我们目前掌握的政策分析工具无法洞察大多数教育改革政策的根本目标——如何让人们共同行动，实现改善和变革。此外，为什么尽管有如此多的个人层面的努力和活动，系统层面的变化却如此难以实现？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及其相互作用中产生的结果。这些工具将利用两种建模和分析技术，这些技术已经被强大的计算所支持：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模拟世界中的软件“代理人”，这些模拟世界被设计成类似于学校改革政策，基于代理人的建模使研究人员能够看到个人行为如何在改革的时间过程中导致总体结果。社会网络分析允许创建丰富的画面，真实的人的互动，因为他们的生活改革，并为他们提供的资源作为这些互动的结果。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结合在一起时，这项研究可以提供关于如何制定改革政策以产生实际结果的见解。具体地说，研究者将通过跟踪，在三个改革举措的背景下，建模和分析理解系统级变化出现的问题：学校选择、小型学校改革和个性化教学。这项工作的目标是为研究人员、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些改革对改善学校教育的影响。预计这将使政策制定者能够更快、更准确地审查备选政策，并最终导致设计出更好的教育政策，从而更快地在儿童和成人的生活中获得牵引力。

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.