Examining the Power of Place—Housing, Desegregation, and Opportunity Monday, April 30, 2012 • 12:00-1:30 p.m. (registration required) |
| Faculty Awards & Honors | |
Lincoln Quiliian has been named a Russell Sage Foundation Fellow for the 2012-13 academic year. The award gives visiting scholars the opportunity to pursue their research at the foundation in New York City. MORE |
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and IPR associate Barton Hirsch with Nancy Deutsch and David DuBois, won the 2012 Society for Research on Adolescence book award for best multi-authored volume. MORE |
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| Faculty in the Media | |
| MSNBC | |
The science behind political thinking IPR social psychologist Jennifer Richeson appeared on Melissa Harris-Perry to discuss the science behind how the human brain weighs decisions and forms political beliefs, particularly in relation to race. |
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| Louisiana Public Radio | |
In Florida, vouchers bring modest improvement to public education IPR education economist David Figlio discussed his research on Florida's tax credit school voucher program, which Louisiana used in part as a model for its own program. |
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| Minnesota Public Radio | |
Women and the economy The notion of the “glass ceiling” can be misleading, according to IPR psychologist Alice Eagly, who suggested that the term “labyrinth” more accurately describes the challenges women face as they advance in their careers. |
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| Daily Mail | |
Why the British are free-thinking and the Chinese love conformity Research by neuroscientist and IPR associate Joan Chiao and her colleagues finds that common traits like British individualism and Chinese conformity could be attributed to genetic differences between races. |
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| Slate | |
ADHD diagnoses increase in an age of distraction New research by pediatrician and IPR associate Craig Garfield shows that the number of U.S. children and teens diagnosed with ADHD has increased by 66 percent in the last decade. |
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| Find these and other clips HERE. |
| News & Research |
Putting More Science into Political Science In many scientific disciplines, most breakthroughs and advances come through experiments, but using experimental methods in political science research is relatively new. In a recent Science article and a volume published by Cambridge University Press, IPR political scientist James Druckman and his colleagues document and show the rise of experiments in political science and show how they are helping to transform the field. MORE |
Redefining Race
At a February 29 lecture sponsored by IPR and the YWCA Evanston/North Shore, IPR law professor Dorothy Roberts discussed her most recent book, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century. She underscored key points from her research, including how race is being used in reproductive science, DNA-based criminal databases, and drug marketing. MORE |
College-Prep Programs Improve Long-Term Outcomes In a new working paper covered by Education Week, IPR labor economist Kirabo Jackson examines the Advanced Placement Incentive Program (APIP), a college-preparatory program for disadvantaged students that includes payments for passing scores. He looks at its impact on students' educational attainment, employment status, and wage earnings. Among his findings, he shows that students enrolled in APIP were more likely to persist in college, earn bachelor's degrees, and to be employed, earning higher wages. MORE |
Attend the 2012 Chicago Area Behavior Workshop
The sixth annual Chicago Area Political and Social Behavior Workshop (CAB) will be held on Friday, May 11 at Northwestern University. The workshop aims to bring together Chicago-area social scientists who share an interest in political and social behavior. Presentations will include “DNA and Criminal Justice: Public Opinion on a New Policy,” by Jennifer Hochschild of Harvard and “Interviewing Wealthy Americans,” by IPR associate Benjamin Page, followed by a roundtable discussion on race and politics. The workshop is organized by IPR political scientist James Druckman. MORE |
| New IPR Working Papers |
| “Studying Discrimination: Fundamental Challenges and Recent Progress” (WP-12-08) Kerwin Kofi Charles and Jonathan Guryan Since the civil rights era, some gaps in black/white outcomes have closed or narrowed. But others remain stubbornly persistent, such as the gap in wages and employment. In their paper, IPR economist Jonathan Guryan and his colleague Kerwin Charles review a portion of the literature on labor market discrimination, highlighting some fundamental challenges that it faces. They discuss the difficulty of measuring workplace discrimination due to omitted-variables bias and other conceptual concerns, such as the conceptual problem with defining race and estimating the causal effect of race. After pointing to an encouraging rise in the use of experimental methods and some promising recent work that tests discrimination models directly, they end by suggesting that economists might find inspiration for new methods by examining how social psychologists study prejudice. |
| “Do High School Teachers Really Matter?” (WP-12-09) Kirabo Jackson Research has shown that elementary school teachers matter, but what about high school teachers? Some have just extrapolated the findings from studies of elementary school teachers and applied them to those in high school, but IPR labor economist Kirabo Jackson advises against this. In a new paper, he argues that in high school settings, even with random assignment of students to teachers, there will be bias due to “track treatment effects.” This happens when different teachers teach in different tracks and students in different tracks are exposed to different treatments. These “track treatment effects” might arise due to other teachers, the content of other courses, or explicit track-level treatments, such as honors courses or college-prep courses. To counter this, Jackson outlines a new method for identifying teacher quality effects in high schools, testing it with data on all North Carolina ninth graders from 2005 to 2010. He finds that high school Algebra I teachers have modest effects on student math scores. However, contrary to previous studies, he finds no effects for English I teachers on students’ English scores. |
| Find the complete list of 2012 IPR working papers HERE. |
| Upcoming Events |
| 4/18/12 - “Challenges to Regulatory Decentralization: Lessons from State Health Technology Regulation” by Jill Horwitz (University of Michigan) |
| 4/19/12 - “The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood” by Jonah Rockoff (Columbia University) |
| 4/23/12 - “Educational 'Goodwill': Measuring the Intangible Assets at Highly Selective Private Colleges and Universities” by Morton Schapiro (President and Professor of Northwestern University and IPR Fellow) |
| 4/24/12 - “Empirical Testing of Excess Significance Bias” by John Ioannidis (Stanford University) |
| 4/25/12 - “Restoring Fiscal Democracy: Can the Budget Squeeze Give Us Another Shot at Greatness?” by Eugene Steuerle (The Urban Institute) |
Find the complete calendar HERE. |
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Institute for Policy Research • 2040 Sheridan Rd. Evanston, IL 60208 • Phone: 847.491.3395 • Fax: 847.491.9916 |
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