Arkansas Department of Education

About: Arkansas Department of Education is a government organization based out in Little Rock, Arkansas, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: School choice & Voucher. The organization has 37 authors who have published 112 publications receiving 1325 citations. The organization is also known as: ADE.

Measures of Student Non-cognitive Skills and Political Tolerance after Two Years of the Louisiana Scholarship Program

Abstract: This report examines the short-term effects of the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) on students’ non-cognitive skills and civic values. While a growing number of studies have evaluated K-12 school voucher programs along academic dimensions, few have focused on the development of non-cognitive skills and civic values. This study aims to address that gap by providing the first analysis of differences in self-reported measures of grit, locus of control, self esteem, and political tolerance associated with the LSP. Using results from a phone survey of applicants to the program, we find little evidence of differences between LSP scholarship recipients and non-recipients. Nevertheless, diagnostics assessing the precision of our instruments to detect differences between subjects indicate that several of the scales measuring non-cognitive skills performed poorly in our sample. Moreover, our relatively low survey response rate of 11 percent raises concerns about the representativeness of our sample. Given these issues, we caution that our results are best understood as descriptive and not necessarily conclusive: they do not represent reliable estimates of the causal impact of the LSP on student non-cognitive skills and political tolerance.

Can Parents’ Growth Mindset and Role Modelling Address STEM Gender Gaps?

Abstract: Despite widespread interest and value in introducing and better-preparing students to enter the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, a gender gap persists as women are underrepresented among STEM jobs and degree completion. Although some work has evaluated whether interventions and certain pedagogical practices improve growth mindset, little is known about the mediating role of parents and whether those effects are more pronounced for females. In this study, we explore the extent to which the mindsets of a student’s parents regarding math ability influence the student’s mindset in math ability and longer-term STEM-related outcomes. We pay particular attention to differences between male and female students. We also explore if student outcomes can be attributable to a role modeling effect through parental occupation type (i.e., whether the parent has a job in the STEM field or not) or if there is a remaining direct inheritance from parent growth mindset after controlling for parental occupation. We test these hypotheses in the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS), a nationally-representative data set where data for high school students are linked to data from their parents and followed throughout secondary and postsecondary school. Estimating regression models while controlling for a rich set of covariates, we first show that students who exhibit greater levels of growth mindset, self-efficacy, and effort, particularly when it comes to their math coursework, demonstrate higher math achievement, complete more advanced math courses, are more likely to earn a college degree in a STEM field, and are more interested in and likely to actually enter the STEM fields. We then show that parent growth mindset is positively associated with these student non-cognitive skills and outcomes, though the effect seems to fade away over time. On the other hand, although parental occupation type does not consistently explain short- and medium-term STEM outcomes, it does explain longer-term outcomes in early adulthood like graduating with a STEM degree and working in the STEM field. Thus, parent growth mindset and any role modelling effect channeled through parental occupation appear to independently influence student outcomes.

The Impact of Ohio's EdChoice on Traditional Public School Performance

Abstract: In this article, I evaluate the effects of the EdChoice voucher program on the academic performance of traditional public schools. Specifically, I investigate how exposure to the threat of losing students to the voucher program affected standardized test performance in traditional public schools. This measure does not take into account whether or not students participated in the EdChoice program, only whether schools faced the threat of potentially losing students. The study provides the opportunity to make two important contributions to the literature. First, it provides an analysis of a voucher program that has not yet been rigorously studied for its competitive effects on traditional public schools. Second, a novel approach is introduced to deal with the potential confounding effects of stigma, or the motivation for schools to improve that may come with the receipt of a low grade publicly reported by the state.

When Students Don't Care: Reexamining International Differences in Achievement and Non-Cognitive Skills

Abstract: Policy debates in education are often framed by using international test scores, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) The obvious presumption is that observed differences in test scores within and across countries reflect differences in cognitive skills and general content knowledge, the things which achievement tests are designed to measure We challenge this presumption, by studying how much of the within-country and between-country variation in PISA test scores is associated with student effort, rather than true academic content knowledge Drawing heavily on recent literature, we posit that our measures of student effort are actually proxy measures of relevant non-cognitive skills related to conscientiousness Completing surveys and tests takes effort and students may actually reveal something about their conscientiousness by the amount of effort they show during these tasks Our previous work, and that of others validates this claim (eg Boe, May and Boruch, 2002; Borghans and Schils, 2012; Hitt, Trivitt and Cheng, 2016; Hitt, 2016; Zamarro et al, 2016) Using parametrizations of measures of survey and test effort we find that these measures help explain between 32 and 38 percent of the observed variation in test scores across countries, while explaining only a minor share of the observed variation within countries