New Grants, New Ideas
$10 million will support
research projects on
education and housing
Since March, three IPR faculty have been awarded five highly competitive, multi-year grants, totaling $10 million, from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences.
The grants will help shape our understanding of how housing and developmental contexts affect child outcomes, improve quasi-experimental methods in education research, train a cadre of education researchers around the nation, and examine how school leadership affects student achievement.
“These awards underscore the high caliber of IPR faculty research and the Institute’s policy-relevant, interdisciplinary approach,” said Fay Lomax Cook, IPR’s director and professor of human development and social policy.
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Members of the newly formed MacArthur Network meet to discuss plans
for their study on housing and families with children. |
New MacArthur Network
For the past 18 months, an interdisciplinary group of prominent social scientists has been working out the details of a major new longitudinal study on “How Housing Matters
for Families with Children.” Based on their proposal, they have just received a three-year, $3.9-million, renewable grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to establish a research network to conduct the study.
MacArthur calls these interdisciplinary networks “research institutions without walls” as some of the nation’s most talented researchers come together to seek major improvements in policy and practice on specific social issues.
The new housing and families network will be based at IPR and led by social psychologist Thomas D. Cook, who is Joan and Sarepta Harrison Chair in Ethics and Justice at Northwestern. It will bring together 11 social scientists, including Harold Washington Professor Mary Pattillo, a professor of sociology and African American studies and an IPR faculty associate.
Over three years, the social scientists will conduct a random-assignment study of 4,000 voucher-eligible families in three to four U.S. cities with Section-8 lotteries. In particular,
they will observe housing effects on children from birth until age 8 and try to understand questions left unanswered in previous housing studies. For example, why do some families who receive vouchers use them to resettle in blighted neighborhoods that mirror those they left? Why is racial composition more important than income distribution when
selecting a neighborhood to live in?
Pulling together theoretical perspectives from a variety of disciplines—including statistics, sociology, economics, urban studies, education, and child development—the
researchers will use quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate how the combined effects of family, schools, race, ethnicity, and neighborhoods affect children’s development and outcomes.
“By the time the study is finished, we hope to have made a quantum leap in what we know about these contextual effects—and that these, in turn, will lead to better policies
for our nation’s poorest children and families,” Cook said.
Quasi-Experimental Research and Workshops
In the world of education research, studies using random assignment reign supreme. Yet in real-world education settings, use of random assignment is not always feasible.
Thus, Thomas D. Cook and his colleagues are continuing and extending work to improve four quasi-experimental methods—with demonstrated, internally valid, causal
estimates—for use when random assignment is not possible.
“The current quality of most quasi-experimental research in education is woeful,” Cook said, “but practices could be easily improved with marginal improvements to existing
quasi-experimental tools.”
These tools include: regression-discontinuity, interrupted time-series, case-matching methods, and pattern matching.
To this end, Cook has received two IES grants, totaling $2 million. One will focus on improving these four methods, which allow researchers to test a causal proposition absent an experiment. The second will support a series of six workshops held over three years to train more than 360 education faculty, researchers, and government employees in the use of these little-known methodological tools.
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Larry Hedges |
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IES Postdoctoral Fellowships
IPR education researcher and statistician Larry Hedges will direct a new $650,000 fellowship
program, with support from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) in the U.S. Department of Education, to train recent PhDs in education research methods.
Aided by faculty at Northwestern and the University of Chicago, Hedges will oversee interdisciplinary training in measurement, research design, and statistics for four fellows over five years. He is Board of Trustees Professor of Statistics and Social Policy at Northwestern.
Hedges noted that in the United States, education funding—in particular for large-scale randomized experiments—has increased, yet the pool of researchers equipped to adequately construct and analyze such studies has not. “Monumental improvements in the American education system are needed to reduce inequities and improve outcomes,” Hedges continued. “Only high-quality education research can help narrow such wide achievement gaps.”
School Leadership and Student Achievement
IES is also funding a four-year, $3.3-million study led by James Spillane, school leadership expert and IPR faculty associate, to investigate whether and how best practices by school leaders raise student achievement.
Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy will administer the grant “Learning Leadership: Kernel Routines for Instructional Improvement.” Spillane, who is Olin Professor in Learning and Organizational Change, is principal investigator on the project.
Spillane and his colleagues will use the funds to evaluate Learning Walk®, a structured school-leadership “walk-through” routine developed by the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute for Learning. It involves brief, regular visits to classrooms by school leaders to observe instruction. Focused on 80 Philadelphia elementary schools, the study will measure the effects of these Learning Walks on reading, writing, and math scores—in addition to areas such as collaboration, staff interactions, and academic rigor—in urban school settings.
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